MIT Technology Review

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. I used generative AI to turn my story into a comic-and you can too -Will Douglas Heaven Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. So far, electric vehicles have mostly been discussed in the US through a scientific, economic, or environmental lens. But all of a sudden, they have become highly political. Last Thursday, the Biden...

Thirteen years ago, as an assignment for a journalism class, I wrote a stupid short story about a man who eats luxury cat food. This morning, I sat and watched as a generative AI platform called Lore Machine brought my words to life. I fed my story into a text box and got this message:...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The robots are coming. And that's a good thing. -This is an excerpt from a new book, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, by MIT CSAIL director Daniela Rus...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I've been experimenting with using AI assistants in my day-to-day work. The biggest obstacle to their being useful is they often get things blatantly wrong. In one case, I used an...

In this excerpt from the new book, The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, CSAIL Director Daniela Rus explores how robots can extend the reach of human capabilities. Years ago, I befriended the biologist Roger Payne at a meeting of MacArthur Foundation fellows. Roger, who died in 2023, was best known for...

Recorded on August 10, 2023 The AI Economy Speakers: Mat Honan, Editor in chief and David Rotman, Editor at large There's no doubt that generative AI will impact the economy-but how, exactly, remains an open question. Despite fears that these AI tools will upend workers and exacerbate wealth inequality, early evidence suggests the technology could...

Recorded on September 12, 2023 How should we regulate AI? Speakers: Melissa Heikkila, Senior reporter for AI and Charlotte Jee, News editor There's little doubt that artificial intelligence will be subject to more regulation in the years ahead. Major tech companies have requested it, and multiple countries and regions are now moving forward with plans...

Recorded on October 11, 2023 How does AI work? Speakers: Mary Beth Griggs, Science editor and Will Douglas Heaven, Sr Editor for AI Everyone's talking about large language models and image generators built on artificial intelligence. Many people have tested out tools like ChatGPT or DALL-E 2 and been amazed at the results, or disturbed...

Recorded on November 28, 2023 Future of Families: How reproductive technology can reverse population decline Speakers: Antonio Regalado, Sr Editor of biomedicine and special guest Martin Varsavsky, Founder of Prelude Fertility Birth rates have been plummeting in wealthy countries, well below the replacement" rate. Even in China, a dramatic downturn in the number of babies...

As a fetus grows in the womb, it sheds cells into the amniotic fluid surrounding and protecting it. Now researchers have demonstrated that they can use those cells to grow organoids, three-dimensional structures that have some of the properties of human organs-in this case kidneys, small intestines, and lungs. These organoids could give doctors even...

AI is helping organizations in nearly every industry increase productivity, engage customers, realize operational efficiencies, and gain a competitive edge. Advances in supercomputing in the cloud and the ability to achieve processing at an exascale level are major catalysts for this new era of AI innovation. Common AI use cases today include personalized healthcare and...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why. Two years ago, Yuri Burda and Harri Edwards, researchers at OpenAI, were trying to find out what it would take to...

Two years ago, Yuri Burda and Harri Edwards, researchers at the San Francisco-based firm OpenAI, were trying to find out what it would take to get a large language model to do basic arithmetic. They wanted to know how many examples of adding up two numbers the model needed to see before it was able...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Why shiny, high-tech solutions won't solve one of Africa's worst crises Herding- one of humanity's most foundational ways of life-is a pillar of survival in West Africa's Sahel. Migratory herders usher cattle between...

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. The diabetes medication metformin has been touted as a miracle drug. Not only does it keep diabetes in check, but it can reduce inflammation, curb cancer,...

Hainikoye hits Accept and a young woman greets him in Hausa, a gravelly language spoken across West Africa's Sahel region. She has three new cows and wants to know: Does he have advice on getting them through the lean season? Hainikoye-a twentysomething agronomist who has followed animals," as Sahelians refer to herding, since he first...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How scientists are using quantum squeezing to push the limits of their sensors When two black holes spiral inward and collide, they shake the very fabric of space, producing ripples in space-time that...

OpenAI's recent reveal of its stunning generative model Sora pushed the envelope of what's possible with text-to-video. Now Google DeepMind brings us text-to-video games. The new model, called Genie, can take a short description, a hand-drawn sketch, or a photo and turn it into a playable video game in the style of classic 2D platformers...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. There's a looming problem in the carbon removal space. By one count, nearly 800 companies around the world are exploring a wide variety of methods for drawing planet-warming greenhouse gas out of...

Generative AI, though still an emergent technology, has been in the headlines since OpenAI's ChatGPT sparked a global frenzy in 2023. The technology has rapidly advanced far beyond its early, human-like capacity to enhance chat functions. It shows extensive promise across a range of use cases, including content creation, translation, image processing, and code writing....

When two black holes spiral inward and collide, they shake the very fabric of space, producing ripples in space-time that can travel for hundreds of millions of light-years. Since 2015, scientists have been observing these so-called gravitational waves to help them study fundamental questions about the cosmos, including the origin of heavy elements such as...

Recorded on January 16, 2024 SKIP TO 2:00 FOR START OF SESSION An Inside Look at the 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 Speakers: Amy Nordrum, Executive editor of operations, Rachel Courtland, Commissioning editor, and Abby Ivory-Ganja, Senior engagement editor Every year for the past 20+ years, MIT Technology Review has selected a list of the breakthrough...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Hidden Worlds issue A hidden world is fundamentally different from the undiscovered. We know the hidden world is there. We just can't see it or reach it. Hidden worlds exist in...

For more than 20 million years, beavers have been, well, busy. They've been felling trees for that long, and building dams and lodges for at least the last few million years, earning a well-deserved reputation for industriousness and ingenuity. It seemed only fitting, then, that MIT saw fit to claim the beaver as its mascot...

Allison V. Thompkins, PhD '11, used to spend her days steeped in statistical analysis, digging into economic data to understand how the world works. These days, you're more likely to find her writing about how to modify prayer or meditation practices to make them more accessible for people with disabilities. From the outside, the shift...

As our alumni and friends know better than anyone, the intellectual excellence and bold ingenuity of the people of MIT are the Institute's greatest strength. While IAP supplied its welcome respite, the first part of the year also offered inspiring reminders of MIT's ability to make a powerful, positive difference in the world. Here are...

We had just sat down to lunch with Dona Dada, an Indigenous Brazilian artisan, at her family farm in Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira. It was April of 2022, and my research colleagues and I were visiting to learn how she collects and processes plant fibers for use in her crafts. Before us were traditional foods...

William Warin Bainbridge Jr., Class of 1922, and Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, Class of 1926, grew up on Manhattan's Riverside Drive, the eldest of three sons of an upwardly mobile stationer who dabbled in real estate. Both went to MIT. And both would play important roles in World War II-one on the front lines at Normandy...

Friends and colleagues of Paul Tompkins remember him as a person who never did anything halfway. Mountain climbing and scuba diving took him all over the world, and he constructed his own chain mail while taking medieval history courses at MIT. Space, though, was a lifelong passion: he was lead flight director for NASA's LunarCraterObservation...

When Fine Woodworking magazine printed its first issue in the winter of 1975, a bowl made by Irving Fischman, SM '72, PhD '75, was on the cover. Though he had started woodworking in the MIT Hobby Shop only a few years before, he had already become highly skilled at the craft and found a lifelong...

Living cells are bombarded with molecular signals that influence their behavior. Being able to measure those signals and the response to them could help scientists learn much more about how cells work, including what happens as they age or become diseased. Labeling molecules inside cells with fluorescent proteins that glow in different colors has been...

Imagine a car that doesn't emit any planet-warming gases-or any pollution at all, for that matter. Unlike the EVs on the roads today, it doesn't take an hour or more to charge-just fuel up and go. It sounds too good to be true, but it's the reality of vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells. And...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. TikTok has become an essential part of the digital landscape. Whether or not it's ultimately banned in the United States (my bet is it won't be), these short videos have transformed large...

In 1900, the recently completed Hotel Fitzpatrick in Washington, Georgia, stood out for its grand Queen Anne architecture, but even more for its technology-it offered electricity, an elevator, and a telephone. When Alfred E. Burton, MIT's first dean (1902-1921), chronicled his expedition to Washington to record a total solar eclipse for Technology Review, he noted...

Our world reflects a carbon divide, with the richest 10% of the population contributing half of net carbon emissions and the poorest 50% bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. So extreme is this climate inequality that marginalized communities are around five times more likely to be displaced by extreme disasters. This growing realization led...

As she walks across Foray's lab on the third floor of The Engine, Ashley Beckwith's eyes brighten. Then, from an incubator, she pulls out petri dishes of wood-like cells that she and her team grew in the lab from black cottonwood plants. They envision turning those cells into wood-based perfumes, cosmetics, oils, and-someday-entire beams and...

Tom Humberstone is a comic artist and illustrator based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

At a showroom in a Boston suburb, Patrick Elisha sat down and began to play the opening measures of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2 to demonstrate why Steinway & Sons grand pianos are celebrated in concert halls around the world. Steinways are meticulously crafted instruments: it takes around 250 workers a year to assemble each grand...

A hidden world is fundamentally different from the undiscovered. We know the hidden world is there. We just can't see it or reach it. Something about this tantalizing proximity has fascinated us throughout history. The blank spaces on the map that Joseph Conrad referred to in Heart of Darkness were, to Europeans, hidden worlds. The...

More than 9,000 metric tons of human-made metal and machinery are orbiting Earth, including satellites, shrapnel, and the International Space Station. But a significant bulk of that mass comes from one source: the nearly a thousand dead rockets that have been discarded in space since the space age began. Now, for the first time, a...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. China's next cultural export could be TikTok-style short soap operas Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they...

Like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I find that my personal feed tends to be hit or miss. Usually more miss. The movies and shows the algorithms recommend often seem less predicated on my viewing history and ratings, and more geared toward promoting whatever's newly available. Still, when a superhero movie starring one of the...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. There has been some really encouraging news in thefight against deepfakes. A couple of weeks ago the US Federal Trade Commissionannouncedit is finalizing rules banning the use of deepfakes that impersonate...

Over a decade ago, Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed, carefully timing his breathing. Around him, 20 wireless transceivers stood sentry. As Patwari's chest rose and fell, their electromagnetic waves rippled around him. Patwari, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, had just demonstrated that those ripples could reveal his breathing patterns....

Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they got a casting call for their first shot at live-action content: a Chinese series called Adored by the CEO, which was being remade for an American audience. Coker was hired to dub...

In the ever-evolving landscape of customer experiences, AI has become a beacon guiding businesses toward seamless interactions. While AI has been transforming businesses long before the latest wave of viral chatbots, the emergence of generative AI and large language models represents a paradigm shift in how enterprises engage with customers and manage internal workflows. We...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Trump wants to unravel Biden's landmark climate law. Here is what's most at risk. President Joe Biden's crowning legislative achievement was enacting the Inflation Reduction Act, easily the nation's largest investment into addressing...

Selena Deckelmann has never been afraid of people on the internet. With a TV repairman and CB radio enthusiast for a grandfather and a pipe fitter for a stepdad, Deckelmann grew up solving problems by talking and tinkering. So when she found her way to Linux, one of the earliest open-source operating systems, as a...

This is one of the least visited places on planet Earth and I got to open the door," Matty Jordan, a construction specialist at New Zealand's Scott Base in Antarctica, wrote in the caption to the video he posted to Instagram and TikTok in October 2023. In the video, he guides viewers through an empty,...