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. The biggest AI flops of 2024 The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel...

Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands-a chain of coral atolls in the center of the Pacific Ocean-rely on sea transportation for almost everything: moving people from one island to another, importing daily necessities from faraway nations, and exporting their local produce. For millennia they sailed largely in canoes, but much of their seafaring movement today involves...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. It looks as though 2025 will be a solid year for electric vehicles-at least outside the United States, where sales will depend on the incoming administration's...

High atop Chile's 2,700-meter Cerro Pachon, the air is clear and dry, leaving few clouds to block the beautiful view of the stars. It's here that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon use a car-size 3,200-megapixel digital camera-the largest ever built-to produce a new map of the entire night sky every three days. Generating...

The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel Prizes. But it hasn't always been smooth sailing. AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in...

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn't always easy. That's why we've created the AI Hype Index-a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. More than 70 countries went to the polls in 2024. The good news is that this year of global elections turned out to...

A short ferry ride from the port city of Yantai, on the northeast coast of China, sits Genghai No.1, a 12,000-metric-ton ring of oil-rig-style steel platforms, advertised as a hotel and entertainment complex. On arrival, visitors step onto docks and climb up to reach a strange offshore facility-half cruise ship, half high-tech laboratory, all laid...

As of 2023, nearly 2 billion metric tons of it were being produced annually, enough to cover Manhattan in a layer more than 13 feet thick. Making this metal produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide. Overall, steelmaking accounts for around 8% of the world's carbon emissions-one of the largest industrial emitters and far more...

When Dave Hodson walked through wheat fields in Ethiopia in 2010, it seemed as if everything had been painted yellow. A rust fungus was in the process of infecting about one-third of the country's wheat, and winds had carried its spores far and wide, coating everything in their path. The fields were completely yellow. You'd...

The worst technologies of 2024. The future of mixed reality. AI's impact on the climate. These are just a few of the topics we covered this year in MIT Technology Review's monthly event series, Roundtables. The series offers a unique opportunity to hear straight from our reporters and editors about what's next for emerging technologies....

As we run, drive, bike, and fly, we leave behind telltale marks of our movements on Earth-if you know where to look. Physical tracks, thermal signatures, and chemical traces can reveal where we've been. But another type of trail we leave comes from the radio signals emitted by the cars, planes, trains, and boats we...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Here's a question. Imagine that, for $15,000, you could purchase a robot to pitch in with all the mundane tasks in your household. The catch (aside from the price tag) is...

Another year is coming to a close, so let's look back at the MIT Technology Review stories that resonated most with you, our readers. We published hundreds of stories in 2024, about AI, climate tech, biotech, robotics, space, and more. There were six new issues of our magazine, on themes including food, play, and hidden...

We meet in the name of Osiris." With these words, solemnly intoned, members of the MIT Osiris Society began their clandestine meetings for nearly 70 years. Created in 1903 as a senior society" and modeled on both the fraternities of Cornell and the mythology of ancient Egypt, Osiris gave MIT's senior leadership an opportunity to...

Brackish groundwater is a major potential source of drinking water in underserved areas of the world, but desalinating it affordably is a challenge. A new system developed by mechanical engineering professor Amos Winter, Jon Bessette, SM '22, and staff engineer Shane Pratt manages to do the job entirely on solar energy, with no need for...

Two MIT professors, an alumnus, and a former postdoc are among the winners of 2024's Nobel Prizes. Professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, PhD '89, shared the prize in economics with political scientist James Robinson of the University of Chicago, with whom they have long collaborated. Using evidence from the last 500 years, their work...

Despite increasing evidence that water flowed on Mars billions of years ago, scientists have been mystified by what happened to the thick, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere that must have once kept that water from freezing. Now two MIT geologists think they know. Geology professor Oliver Jagoutz and Joshua Murray, PhD '24, propose that much of this...

I'm moving to Boston in three weeks!" At my high school graduation, I had just learned I'd been accepted into the Interphase EDGE program, an incredible opportunity to acclimate to life at MIT before the 2022 school year began. I was glad to have that chance, since I faced a big change from life at...

What if construction materials could be put together, taken apart, and reused as easily as Lego bricks? That's the vision a team of MIT engineers hopes to realize with a new kind of masonry it's developing from recycled glass. Using a custom 3D-printing technology provided by the MIT spinoff Evenline, the team has made strong,...

When I last wrote to you in this magazine, I told you a bit about the MIT Collaboratives, an effort to spark new ideas and modes of inquiry and help the people of MIT solve global problems. Since then, we've launched the first collaborative, grounding it in the human-centered fields represented by our School of...

THE CULT OF THE FOUNDER." THE CULT OF THE TECH GENIUS." Beware: Silicon Valley's cultists want to turn you into a disruptive deviant." Tech's cult of the founder bounces back." Silicon Valley's Strange, Apocalyptic Cults." How the cult of personality and tech-bro culture is killing technology." Company or cult?" Is your corporate culture cultish?" The...

The world might seem to be on the brink of a humanoid-robot heyday. New breakthroughs in artificial intelligence promise the type of capable, general-purpose robots previously seen only in science fiction-robots that can do things like assemble cars, care for patients, or tidy our homes, all without being given specialized instructions. It's an idea that...

A live agent spends hours each week manually documenting routine interactions. Another combs through multiple knowledge bases to find the right solution, scrambling to piece it together while the customer waits on hold. A third types out the same response they've written dozens of times before. These repetitive tasks can be draining, leaving less time...

It's a stormy holiday weekend, and you've just received the last notification you want in the busiest travel week of the year: The first leg of your flight is significantly delayed. You might expect this means you'll be sitting on hold with airline customer service for half an hour. But this time, the process looks...

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the January/February Puzzle Corner, brought to you with a special Mystery Hunt twist by guest editor Dan Katz '03. This column includes solutions to three September/October 24 problems. Find solutions to the other three problems here.

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 next generation of neural networks could live in hardware Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin...

US doctors write billions of prescriptions each year. During 2024, though, one type of drug stood out-wonder drugs" known as GLP-1 agonists. As of September, one of every 20 prescriptions written for adults was for one of these drugs, according to the health data company Truveta. The drugs, which include Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Victoza, are...

Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin most modern AI systems. That's according to work presented at a leading machine learning conference in Vancouver last week. Neural networks, from GPT-4 to Stable Diffusion, are built by wiring together perceptrons,...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. Later today, around 10 minutes after this email lands in your inbox, I'll be holding my four-year-old daughter tight as she receives her booster dose of the MMR...

Business applications powered by AI are revolutionizing customer experiences, accelerating the speed of business, and driving employee productivity. In fact, according to research firm Frost & Sullivan's 2024 Global State of AI report, 89% of organizations believe AI and machine learning will help them grow revenue, boost operational efficiency, and improve customer experience. Take for...

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. Digital twins of human organs are here. They're set to transform medical treatment. Steven Niederer, a biomedical engineer at the Alan Turing Institute and Imperial College London, has a cardboard box filled with...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The vibes in the climate world this year have largely been ... less than great. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit a new high, reaching 37.4 billion metric tons in 2024. This year is...

A healthy heart beats at a steady rate, between 60 and 100 times a minute. That's not the case for all of us, I'm reminded, as I look inside a cardboard box containing around 20 plastic hearts-each a replica of a real human one. The hearts, which previously sat on a shelf in a lab...

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. AI is changing how we study bird migration In a warming world, migratory birds face many existential threats. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their...

AI is all about data. Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out. But here's the problem: AI developers and researchers don't really know much about the sources of the data they are using. AI's data collection...

A small songbird soars above Ithaca, New York, on a September night. He is one of 4 billion birds, a great annual river of feathered migration across North America. Midair, he lets out what ornithologists call a nocturnal flight call to communicate with his flock. It's the briefest of signals, barely 50 milliseconds long, emitted...

Recorded on December 17, 2024 The Worst Technology Failures of 2024 Speakers: Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine, and Niall Firth, executive editor. MIT Technology Review publishes an annual list of the worst technologies of the year. This year, The Worst Technology Failures of 2024 list was unveiled live by our editors. Hear fromMIT Technology...

Towana Looney, a 53-year-old woman from Alabama, has become the third living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Looney, who donated one of her kidneys to her mother back in 1999, developed kidney failure several years later following a pregnancy complication that caused high blood pressure. She started dialysis treatment in...

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 8 worst technology failures of 2024 They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review's annual roll call of the biggest...

They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review's annual roll call of the biggest flops, flimflams, and fiascos in all domains of technology. Some of the foul-ups were funny, like the woke" AI which got Google in trouble after it drew Black Nazis....

AI's emissions are about to skyrocket even further It's no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much. A new paper, from a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examined 78% of all data centers in the...

Last week, this space was all about OpenAI's 12 days of shipmas. This week, the spotlight is on Google, which has been speeding toward the holiday by shipping or announcing its own flurry of products and updates. The combination of stuff here is pretty monumental, not just for a single company, but I think because...

It's no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much. A new paper, from teams at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, examined 2,132 data centers operating in the United States (78%...

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 Silicon Valley is disrupting democracy The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined...

The internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for the Economist, he warned of the coming techlash," a revolt against Silicon Valley's rich and powerful fueled by the public's...

The Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, was released in 1971. With 2,300 transistors packed into 12mm2, it heralded a revolution in computing. A little over 50 years later, Apple's M2 Ultra contains 134 billion transistors. The scale of progress is difficult to comprehend, but the evolution of semiconductors, driven for decades by Moore's Law,...

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. Google's new Project Astra could be generative AI's killer app Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in...

Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern. Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0-the latest iteration of Google DeepMind's family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the...