MIT Technology Review

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. I watched a humanoid robot clean my apartment. It felt like a taste of the future. -Grace Huckins When I saw an X post about a new humanoid-robot cleaning service in...

I'm not the sort of person who typically pays for a house cleaner. I'm too frugal, and I kind of enjoy putting on a podcast and going to town on my tub with a Magic Eraser. But when I saw an X post about a new humanoid-robot cleaning service in San Francisco, I immediately signed...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Texas was the new epicenter of the AI data center buildout. That might be kaput. Texas is the fastest-growing data center market in the US and ground zero for Big Tech's...

A sweeping bit of legislation designed to cut red tape could speed up the buildout of energy infrastructure in the US. With the dust barely settled on this week's momentous midterms, the Senate is set to vote on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) on November 9. It's a plan that could finally...

Texas is the fastest-growing data center market in the US and ground zero for Big Tech's largest AI buildouts. But the blue wave that swept the Lone Star State may jeopardize that position. Democrat James Talarico won the US Senate seat against Ken Paxton. Gina Hinojosa won the race for governor against the Republican incumbent,...

Tuesday, November 17, 2026 In an effort to reach an elusive continuity of the self, some far-thinking technologists are working on ways to keep your brain going-even beyond death. Join science editor Mary Beth Griggs and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado for a conversation exploring possible paths to keep your mind going, including gradual...

I've been locked in to my various screens since results from midterm elections started to roll in last night. And it didn't take long to see the beginning of the blue wave: Democrats took control of both the US House of Representatives and the Senate, a dramatic swing from Donald Trump's victory two years ago....

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. These startups hope blended" food will cut our appetite for red meat In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge served hungry students steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. The students loved them:...

A sales representative asks an AI agent for customer pricing, and the agent pulls data from multiple sources: restricted pricing systems, internal communications, and archived quotes. The output looks accurate to the agent, so a second agent uses the data to draft the proposal for the sales rep. No human checks either handoff. When it's...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How reverse game theory" could keep AI agents in check A new approach known as reverse game theory" aims to control powerful AI models by designing systems that incentivize them to...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. At the end of September, President Trump signed an executive order that contained just one directive, ordering government agencies to rebrand what they had been calling artificial intelligence as Super Intelligence." That...

In just a few years, generative AI has changed the face of enterprise analytics, notably by making analytics accessible to users across the organization. Agentic AI promises to do even more, by automating entire workflows and taking actions based on agent insights. But there is a problem: The quality of insights that agents currently generate...

When a developer gives an AI agent a coding task, the agent does more than answer once. It plans, generates code, runs tests, and repeats the process to correct errors. A single task can use 10 to 50 times more tokens than a basic chat prompt. The more useful the agent becomes, the more calls...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The agentic web is here In 2001, a decade after inventing the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision: an internet navigated by autonomous software agents that address our...

GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are one of the biggest biotech breakthroughs of the last decade. But to some clinical psychologists, they can represent something more sinister-a potential trigger for eating disorders. A new report suggests that the global incidence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa shot up between 1990 and 2023-by a whopping 71%. By 2023,...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Opinion: We urgently need to monitor AI agents' actions in real time -Madhulika Srikumar and Claire Leibowicz from the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit advancing best practices in AI governance. AI...

This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they'd be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website. It's a problem...

Climate change itself is increasingly fueling climate change. Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases are driving up global temperatures, setting off dangerous feedback loops that we have not fully accounted for in our climate models-or our emissions-reduction goals. Scientists have long warned that warming would propel further warming in various ways, but a growing number of...

Across a business, any number of AI platforms, systems, and tools may be at work simultaneously-for example, AI-powered customer platforms, conversational assistants, and workflow and process automation tools. Each one is sophisticated, advanced, and quick to respond. But, when set to work, the outcomes and actions that emerge may be wrong, confused, or lacking a...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup, he didn't think its data was worth much. But he's...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Will the real Anthropic please stand up? After weeks of frenzied speculation, Anthropic has filed its IPO prospectus. The 335-page document (100 pages or so are focused on risks) lays out...

Every manufacturer has its own industrial intelligence. Some is documented, and some resides in the knowledge of experienced workers. Consider an experienced operator preparing to restart a line after a changeover. The machine settings matter, but so does knowing how a particular material behaves, what happened during the previous shift, and when an apparently minor...

Transformers are a crucial but nearly invisible part of our grid. The devices help efficiently move power across long distances, but they're complicated and in short supply. And given that their basic design hasn't changed much for about a century, they could use an upgrade. As the world races to meet rising electricity demand from...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. After weeks of frenzied speculation, Anthropic has filed its IPO prospectus. The 335-page document (100 pages or so are focused on risks) lays out the company's unique view of the technology it...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Opinion: The focus on AI safety disasters ignores everyday harms -Sam Hiner, cofounder of the Young People's Alliance, and Emma Leiken, executive director of the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund at...

Consider what passes for success in technology policy. An AI company promises that its chatbot will not encourage suicide. A social media platform makes it more difficult for children to buy fentanyl. These are important protections, and they should have existed all along. But companies can clear these low bars while continuing to make products...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Are we there yet? A reality check on six big tech promises Some seemingly impossible feats are too good to give up on. Decoding a pet's yowls and yips? Absolutely. Scrubbing...

Earlier this week, I attended a screening of You Can See Everything, the buzzy new documentary about the disgraced former biotech CEO Elizabeth Holmes. I went in not really knowing what to expect. I'd avoided spoilers (and won't be giving anything away here, either!). I was wondering what new information this film could reveal, given...

The next competitive advantage in enterprise AI has less to do with which model you choose than with what you build around it. That's an important shift. For the past several years, much of the AI conversation has centered on model capability: bigger models, better reasoning, larger context windows, higher benchmark scores. Those advances have...

A scalable AI system requires a strong foundation. Data, engineering, platforms, operating models, and governance must converge to work as one. This session from MIT Technology Review's EmTech Future conference explores what it takes to build that foundation in a highly regulated environment and how a responsible, trustworthy implementation can turn emerging capabilities, including agentic...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How far can we push computing? On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." There is no physical...

Enterprise AI can generate recommendations, automate tasks, and help organizations make decisions faster. But without an understanding of how a business actually operates, even powerful models can miss the constraints and relationships that determine whether a decision is the right one. As companies look to move AI from experimentation into everyday operations, the challenge ahead...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Impossible issue We wanted our last print edition of 2026 to include a slate of stories that check in on impossible ideas. Why? Because it's fun to dream about...

I'd wager everyone has a rehearsed response to what's absolutely one of the world's worst interview questions: What's your biggest weakness?" Whenever I've gotten it, I take a slow-even pensive-breath and rattle off my line: I say no to myself too much." I won't lie. It's a bit shameless-a definite humblebrag. I'm a systems thinker:...

Just before the Artemis II crew began its historic slingshot around the moon this past April, NASA announced plans to build Space Reactor-1 Freedom. SR-1, the first-ever nuclear-reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft, is meant to fly an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2028, arriving in 2029. A successful mission would herald a new era...

We all know exercise is good for us. It builds muscle, strengthens bones, lowers blood pressure, and boosts mood. By deciphering how movement benefits the body, researchers hope to develop medicines that can offer some of the same perks-without the workout. The idea isn't to replace exercise but to bring its upsides to people who...

Humans are far from the only species with a gift for gab, and our furry, feathered, and finned friends could have a lot to tell us. Decoding how animals communicate with one another could offer a window into the inner lives of other species and help humans realize that animals are sentient creatures who think,...

Scrubbing Earth of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances-a.k.a. PFAS or forever chemicals-could eliminate a list of woes for people and planet. Used for decades in everything from nonstick pans to firefighting foams, PFAS have been linked to increased risks of fertility challenges, developmental delays, cancer, and reduced immune response. They are known for a strong bond...

Every year, traffic crashes kill more than one million people, and they're the leading cause of death for children and young adults. In the US, 100 people a day lose their lives this way, in many cases not on highways but on rural and local streets. Traffic deaths are a leading cause of preventable death,...

The rise of the lithium-ion battery, which powers everything from the smallest personal electronics to gargantuan energy storage systems, has been nothing short of revolutionary. But as anyone who's boarded a plane in the last decade could tell you, storing and pumping out energy by moving charged lithium ions through a liquid electrolyte soup has...

The average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothing each year, and there are few options for recycling it. MIT engineers hope to cut down on that textile waste with a new type of yarn. The thermoplastic yarn mimics the properties of conventional elastic yarns, which typically combine spandex with polyester or nylon. Those...

A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can help some people lose weight, and some research has shown that it may protect against colon cancer. But a new study suggests that such a ketogenic diet may also increase the risk of cancer in the small intestine. This type of diet forces the body to burn fatty acids instead...

Strokes leave 5 million people with long-term impairments each year, and a growing shortage of physical therapists makes it hard for them to get the care they need. A new approach tries to solve that problem by combining artificial intelligence and human therapy. Johannes Lachner, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor...

These are images of quizzes I took in 3.091, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry, in the fall of 1980. One is my very first exam at MIT, and getting 49 out of 100 was a soul-crushing experience. I can still picture the TA, Leszek Pawlowicz, PhD '87, returning my paper. He had a big smile on...

In corporate America, Stanley Anderson '79 says, executives often assume that their peers grew up in privileged circumstances. He did not. I spent my early years trying not to get recruited into gangs, getting shot at, watching my friends get murdered, and thinking that if I don't leave, I will die," says Anderson, who was...

Alissa Totman '13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and socializing. That group was a great way to learn about the human experience of what people go through when they experience a brain injury," she says. And it laid...

Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue '85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library. Today, she is learning how the wider universe works by studying galaxy clusters. Donahue discovered her passion for physics in that library at age 12 and started her path into astronomy thanks...

Tomas Villalon Jr. '14 was raised in San Antonio, Texas, but vividly remembers smog hanging over the city his family came from-Monterrey, Mexico, a steel manufacturing and metal fabrication hub. Even as a child, he realized it was problematic to breathe that air. I'm motivated because I've seen what metal-making does," says Villalon, who majored...