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. Smart glasses are already causing havoc in India When Shubnam saw an Instagram video of a Delhi protest they had attended, they realized a content creator wearing Meta smart glasses had...

Shubnam was packing boxes for a move into a new home when their friend sent them an Instagram video. The footage had only been up for a few hours, but it was days old, recorded at a Delhi protest this spring against a bill that would have narrowed the legal recognition for transgender people in...

The US has spent billions building a virtual wall" of surveillance towers along its southern border over the past 25 years, promising they will help detect and apprehend border crossers and save lives. But a groundbreaking investigation by MIT Technology Review has documented over a thousand people who moved through areas watched by these towers...

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. Don't be fooled by this summer of AI hype -Timnit Gebru, executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), and Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of...

It's been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI-Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents involving their models. This was followed...

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 US spent billions on border surveillance. Why can't it catch people before they die? When Jose Morales Bernal crossed the border into the US in April 2024, the day before...

Our 15-month investigation into death and surveillance along the US-Mexico border began with a simple question: Why did so many people die near government surveillance towers meant to help track and apprehend them? This story is part ofDying on Camera, a collaboration betweenMIT Technology ReviewandTimes of San Diego. Journalists in both newsrooms spent the past...

MIT Technology Review today published our investigation into how many people have died near the virtual wall" of surveillance towers that the US government has installed along the US-Mexico border. We found cases of people who walked undetected through areas surveilled by advanced, AI-enabled towers and later died nearby, where their bodies remained unnoticed for...

When Jose Morales Bernal crossed the border into the United States on April 8, 2024, the day before his 32nd birthday, it should have triggered a chain of technological alerts and human responses. As he walked through the desert in southern New Mexico that morning, he was within range of three surveillance towers. Newly installed...

She had only walked for a couple of hours, and already she was lost. It was early afternoon on Sept. 14, 2025, when 30-year-old Graciela Gomez Hernandez crossed the border from the eastern edge of Tijuana into Southern California, sending voice messages to her mother and sister as she walked. This story is part ofDying...

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. Could AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event that asked the question many seem to be asking right now: could...

On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event for subscribers that asked the question everyone's asking right now: Could AI really kill us all? But attendees had so many more questions than we had time to answer in the 30 minute session. So we asked our senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven and...

In recent weeks, leaders of some of the biggest AI companies have warned that the very tech they are developing is dangerous. Last weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that AIcarries serious risk and that progress should be slowed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altmanresponded on X: I agree with Dario that we need to pace the...

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. Meet a mouse whose brain cortex is made up of human cells Multiple cameras tracked a mouse as it wandered around a small arena. A computer charted its position and speed,...

Each year, the editorial team at MIT Technology Review puts together a list of 35 innovators under 35-a group of researchers, inventors, and other young minds worth following. The team worked on the newest edition of the list for months, and the final slate includes nine individuals from all over the world in the climate...

Multiple cameras tracked a mouse as it wandered around a small arena. A computer charted its position and speed, leaving Pong-like traces on a monitor. The reason to watch this rodent so carefully? Nearly half its brain volume had been replaced with human cells. The effort to mix the brain tissues of distant species is...

The AI boom is becoming a materials challenge. As AI pushes computing into new territory, the materials behind that infrastructure are becoming just as crucial as the algorithms running on it. Semiconductors and data centers are approaching physical limits around performance, thermal management, electrical efficiency, and reliability, creating new demands for materials that can do...

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. What's at stake in AI's trillion-dollar gamble When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to assess AI's impact on the economy over the next few years,...

Listen to the session or watch below Employees at the world's leading AI labs are saying there's a real possibility that advanced AI could destroy humanity. Are they right? Or is this more scaremongering and hype? Watch a conversation unpacking AI extinction fears: where they come from, whether they hold any water, and, if so,...

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 AI industry has taken a doomer turn. What now? AI chiefs Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis are suddenly all in agreement: the latest generation of LLMs...

Last year Ruxandra Teslo, a policy analyst who focuses on clinical trials, posted an idea for supercharging medical AI systems: Use data from failed biotech companies. By bidding at their bankruptcy proceedings, she proposed, it might be possible to obtain detailed regulatory filings, manufacturing strategies, and safety data-types of information usually considered trade secrets. She...

When Jessica Wachter, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, wanted to assess AI's impact on the economy over the next few years, she faced a long list of business and technical uncertainties. So she started with what she calls a remarkable fact" that is not in question: A handful of so-called...

This story appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. This weekend, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, posted an essay calling for a brake on the pace of development of LLMs. Amodei cites the looming dangers he sees from the technology, from its...

Once an organ is removed from a donor's body, the clock starts ticking. Surgeons usually flush the organ with a preservative solution, bag it, and put it on ice-where it immediately starts to degrade. The team has a matter of hours to get it into a recipient's body. There's another option-one that has been growing...

A group of AI agents asked to solve a series of math problems split into rival factions-when some cheated, others tried to stop them. That whistleblowing behavior, seen for the first time in a recent experiment run by Google DeepMind, could have implications for alignment researchers trying to keep swarms of autonomous AI agents in...

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. Roundtables: could AI really kill us all? Employees at the world's leading AI labs are saying there's a real possibility that advanced AI could destroy humanity. Are they right? Or is...

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. Meet the under-35s shaping the future of biotech Every year, MIT Technology Review puts together our 35 Innovators Under 35, a list of some of the brightest and best young minds...

Every year, MIT Technology Review puts together a list of some of the brightest and best young minds working across science and technology. Our 35 Innovators Under 35 are the ones to watch-people whose research and technical work stands to shape the future of their fields. This year, the list includes nine people who are...

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. God told them to sell crypto. Their investors lost everything. When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. According to Eli and his wife,...

On July 22, 2026, a transmission line fault in Ashburn, Virginia-the heart of the world's largest data center cluster-knocked more than 3 gigawatts of load off the grid in seconds. And it wasn't the first time. Two years earlier, a single failed surge arrester dropped roughly 60 Virginia facilities and 1,500 megawatts at once. No...

A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, MIT Technology Review can reveal. Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing...

The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That'll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries,...

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations and with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. Now he likens the experience to having a thought that is not my thought." Divine words echo in his mind like a...

The entrance of major AI companies into healthcare is a meaningful and welcome development, accelerating the technical foundation available to the industry. Their models are increasingly capable of processing long clinical records, interpreting complex terminology, comparing documentation against evidence and generating coherent summaries from large volumes of information. For clinicians, operators, and administrative teams who...

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. What OpenAI's latest controversy tells us about the future of math OpenAI says its agents have solved one of the most important open problems in mathematics. Under normal circumstances, that would...

Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That's enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes. The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of...

Plug a phone into a modern charger and the first 10 minutes are impressive. The next 20 are not. This is not a defect. It's the connected device protecting itself. As temperature rises during charging, a smartphone's battery management system reduces the current it will accept, because heat accelerates the chemical degradation that permanently reduces...

OpenAI's latest mathematical milestone has quickly become mired in controversy. Today, the company announced that its agents have solved one of the Millennium Prize Problems, some of the most important open problems in mathematics. Under normal circumstances, that solution would be a huge feather in OpenAI's cap. But the announcement has been overshadowed by accusations...

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 our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2026 What will the next generation of science and technology look like? Our latest Innovators Under 35 list offers a glimpse. Every year,...

Throughout the history of the computer chip, engineers have treated waste heat as an inevitable cost of a calculation. Hannah Earley, however, thinks it's a design choice. Earley, 31, is cofounder and chief technology officer of Vaire Computing, a startup building chips that recycle energy usually thrown away as heat-a strategy known as reversible computing....

Danijar Hafner's office in San Francisco's SoMa district sits mostly empty. His brand-new startup is still in stealth mode and doesn't even have its name on the door. On the day I visit, there's only one other person there, and little in the way of furniture. But what it lacks in decor, it makes up...

The steel industry isn't exactly known for innovation. Very little has changed about purifying iron ore since the process was invented and commercialized in the 1850s. The majority of steelmakers melt solid iron ore at dizzyingly high temperatures inside blast furnaces, where the material reacts with gases to trigger chemical reactions that remove oxygen. It...

Yuancheng (Ryan) Lu is obsessed with aging. And with eyes. As he steps outside the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his aviator glasses darken automatically in the sun. Age-related blindness runs in his family. A great-aunt in China, the story goes, was killed crossing a road because she couldn't see oncoming traffic. And Lu's own...

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 much hydrogen awaits us underground? A flurry of exploration efforts is searching for underground stores of hydrogen gas, which could provide a valuable source of zero-carbon fuel. The hunt has...

The era of AI inference has arrived. Imagine a healthcare system analyzing millions of data points in real time to accelerate life-saving medical research, or an intelligent assistant instantly resolving thousands of complex customer needs at once. These real-world breakthroughs rely on advanced infrastructure acting as the engine of continuous intelligence, powering real-time services while...

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. Data from drones in Ukraine is fueling a new Wild West marketplace -Cory Alpert, a researcher at the University of Melbourne studying AI's impact on democracy, who previously served in the...

Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones, which are now firmly established as a critical weapon of modern warfare. But behind all that wreckage, there's a new gold mine for the defense sector. The data drones generate will far outlast the wars in which they are used to fight, increasingly becoming part...

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. Child-monitoring apps might need a reboot Digital harms have become the defining fear of American parents. In response, they're increasingly turning to content-monitoring apps that scan their children's texts, photos, emails,...

If you've had to fill up your vehicle's gas tank or buy a plane ticket lately, you've probably felt the effects of rising fossil-fuel prices. But farmers buying fertilizer for their crops are especially aware of just how far the ripple effects of the conflict in Iran have spread. Fertilizer prices have been on a...

As agentic AI moves from experimentation toward enterprise deployment, the challenge is figuring out how agents can work together, connect to the systems and data they need, and operate safely across the workflows that run a business. Although agentic AI has been adopted by some 80% of Fortune 500 companies, progress toward meaningful scale remains...