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. Introducing: the Nature issue When we talk about nature," we usually mean something untouched by humans. But little of that world exists today. From microplastics in rainforest wildlife to artificial light...

Fusion power could provide a steady, zero-emissions source of electricity in the future-if companies can get plants built and running. But a new study suggests that even if that future arrives, it might not come cheap. Technologies tend to get less expensive over time. Lithium-ion batteries are now about 90% cheaper than they were 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. Introducing: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now What actually matters in AI right now? It's getting harder to tell amid the constant launches, hype, and warnings. To cut through...

Artificial intelligence is moving quickly in the enterprise, from experimentation to everyday use. Organizations are deploying copilots, agents, and predictive systems across finance, supply chains, human resources, and customer operations. By the end of 2025, half of companies used AI in at least three business functions, according to a recent survey. But as AI becomes...

Isegye Idol If you thought K-pop was weird, virtual idols-humans who perform as anime-style digital characters via motion capture-will blow your mind. My favorite is a girl group called Isegye Idol, created by Woowakgood, a Korean VTuber (a streamer who likewise performs as a digital persona). Isegye Idol's six members are anonymous, which seems to...

Pull over!" I order my brother one sunny February afternoon. Our target is in sight: a gaggle of Canada geese, pecking at grass near the dog park. As I approach, tiptoeing over their grayish-white poop, I notice that one bird wears a white cuff around its slender black neck. It's a GPS tracker-part of a...

When people talk about nature," they're generally talking about things that aren't made by human beings. Rocks. Reefs. Red wolves. But while there is plenty of God's creation to go around, it is hard to think of anything on Earth that human hands haven't affected. In the Brazilian rainforest, scientists have found microplastics in the...

Los Angeles deserves its reputation as the quintessential car city-the rhythms of its 2,200 square miles are dictated by wide boulevards and concrete arcs of freeways. But it once had a world-class rail transit system, and for the last three decades, the city has been rebuilding a network of trolleys and subways. In May, a...

Listen to the session or watch below Subscribers saw a special edition of Roundtables simulcast live from EmTech AI, MIT Technology Review's signature conference for AI leadership. Subscribers got an exclusive first look at a new list capturing 10 key technologies, emerging trends, bold ideas, and powerful movements in AI that you need to know...

How does the physical matter in our brains translate into thoughts, sensations, and emotions? It's hard to explore that question without neurosurgery. But in a recent paper, MIT philosopher Matthias Michel, Lincoln Lab researcher Daniel Freeman, and colleagues outline a strategy for doing so with an emerging tool called transcranial focused ultrasound. This noninvasive technology...

Around 2.3 billion years ago, a pivotal period known as the Great Oxidation Event set the evolutionary course for oxygen-breathing life on Earth. But MIT geobiologists and colleagues have found evidence that some early forms of life evolved the ability to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years before that. By mapping enzyme sequences from...

Heat generated by electronic devices is usually a problem, but a team led by Giuseppe Romano, a research scientist at MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, has found a way to use it for data processing that doesn't rely on electricity. In this analog computing method, input data is encoded not as binary 1s and 0s...

A long stretch of humid heat followed by a powerful thunderstorm is a familiar weather pattern in the tropics, but it's also becoming more common in midlatitude regions such as the US Midwest. A recent study by two MIT scientists identifies a key atmospheric condition that determines how hot, humid, and stormy such a region...

Priority Technologies: Ensuring US Security and Shared ProsperityEdited by Elisabeth B. Reynolds, professor of the practice of urban studies and planning and former executive director of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the FutureMIT PRESS, 2026, $24.95 The Shape of Wonder: How Scientists Think, Work, and LiveBy Alan Lightman, professor of the practice...

AtMIT, AI has become so pervasive that you can almost find your way into it without meaning to. Take Sili Deng, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. Deng says she still doesn't know whether she'd have gone all in on artificial intelligence had it not been for the covid pandemic. She had joined the faculty...

If you've been to an eye doctor and had an image taken of the inside of your eye, chances are good it was done with optical coherence tomography (OCT)-a technology invented by clinician-scientist David Huang '85, SM '89, PhD '93, and now used in 40 million procedures per year. OCT is a noninvasive technique used...

When ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022, it opened people's eyes to how easily generative AI could churn out vast amounts of human-seeming text from simple prompts. This quickly caught the attention of criminals, who soon began using large language models to produce malicious emails-both the untargeted spam kind and more sophisticated,...

AI systems have already gained impressive mastery over the digital world, but the physical world is still humanity's domain. As it turns out, building an AI system that can compose a novel or code an app is far easier than developing one that can fold laundry or navigate a city street. To get there, many...

For years, experts have warned that deepfakes-AI-generated videos, images, or audio recordings of people doing or saying things they haven't actually done in real life-could be deployed in malicious ways. These dangers are now here. Improvements in deepfake technology, and the widespread availability of easy-to-use and cheap (or free) generative models, have made it easier...

I was recently invited to join an app that would pay me cryptocurrency to film myself doing tasks like putting food into a bowl, microwaving it, and then taking it out. Another website suggested I try a new game in which I'd remotely control a robotic arm in Shenzhen, China, as it completed puzzles and...

When people say AI will speed up drug development or fear that it will bring about mass layoffs, what they have in mind-whether they know it or not-are AI agents. ChatGPT made large language models a mass consumer product. But to change the world, AI needs to do more than just talk back: It needs...

AI companies frequently invoke the possibility of AI-enabled scientific discovery as a justification for their existence: If the technology eventually cures cancer and solves climate change, then all the carbon emissions and slop videos will have been well worth it. Already, LLMs can assist scientists in all sorts of ways. They can point people to...

Silicon Valley AI companies follow a familiar playbook: Keep the secret sauce behind an API, and charge for every drop. China's leading AI labs are playing a different game: They ship models as downloadable open-weight" packages. This lets developers adapt the models and run them on their own hardware to build products without negotiating a...

Turns out not everyone wants to live in the future that AI companies are building. People from all walks of life are speaking out against rising electricity bills from data centers, disappearing jobs, chatbots' impact on teen mental health, the military's use of AI, and copyright infringement-among other concerns. This anti-AI movement is taking shape...

As AI agents increasingly work alongside humans across organizations, companies could be inadvertently opening a new attack surface. Insecure agents can be manipulated to access sensitive systems and proprietary data, increasing enterprise risk. In some modern enterprises, non-human identities (NHI) are outpacing human identities, and that trend will explode with agentic AI. Solid governance and...

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 noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up? As human society has expanded, animals have started struggling to hear one another. For many birds, the noise...

In the past, even with an icebreaker and during peak melt season, getting to the North Pole wasn't a sure bet. It took favorable winds to crack the frozen ocean surface, and ships had to fight through ice that had grown many meters thick over several winters. In the summer of 2025, though, Jochen Knies...

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. No one's sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all In February 2019, a group of scientists proposed a high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting idea that the National Science Foundation should...

If you want to capture something wolflike, it's best to embark before dawn. So on a morning this January, with the eastern horizon still pink-hued, I drove with two young scientists into a blanket of fog. Forty miles to the west, the industrial sprawl of Houston spawned a golden glow. Tanner Broussard's old Toyota Tacoma...

Tech workers in China are being instructed by their bosses to train AI agents to replace them-and it's prompting a wave of soul-searching among otherwise enthusiastic early adopters. Earlier this month a GitHub project called Colleague Skill, which claimed workers could use it to distill" their colleagues' skills and personality traits and replicate them with...

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 problem with thinking you're part Neanderthal There's a theory that many of us have an inner Neanderthal." The idea is that Homo sapiens and a cousin species once bred, leaving...

The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance." One of Brand's several biographers described him as a mainstay of both counterculture and cyberculture, and with Maintenance, Brand wants us...

Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They'd hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they'd spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba. The real ambition for many of these researchers was the robot of science fiction-one...

There's a fault line running through enterprise AI, and it's not the one getting the most attention. The public conversation still tracks foundation models and benchmarks-GPT versus Gemini, reasoning scores, and marginal capability gains. But in practice, the more durable advantage is structural: who owns the operating layer where intelligence is applied, governed, and improved....

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. Cyberscammersare bypassing banks' security with illicit tools sold on Telegram Inside a money-launderingcenterin Cambodia, an employee opens a banking app on his phone. It asks for a photo linked to the...

The availability of artificial intelligence for use in warfare is at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon. This debate has become urgent, with AI playing a bigger role than ever before in the current conflict with Iran. AI is no longer just helping humans analyze intelligence. It is now an...

When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people sheltered at home and shifted to remote work. Air travel collapsed. Cities-normally filled with the honking, screeching, engine-gunning riot of transportation-became as silent as...

As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so-we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to Indigenous burning practices to prevent wildfires. Biologists are realizing that flower-dotted meadows were...

Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell. The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-handedly purchased something like 80% of all contracted carbon removal. If you're looking for someone to pay you to suck carbon dioxide out of 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. NASA is building the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft. How will it work? Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, NASA revealed an even grander space travel...

From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone. The app asks him to upload a photo associated with the account, so he clicks on a picture of a 30-something Asian man. Next, the app requests to open the camera for a video liveness" check. The...

For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they'd landed on a compelling contender: making mirror" bacteria. Should they come to be,...

The practice of privacy-led user experience (UX) is a design philosophy that treats transparency around data collection and usage as an integral part of the customer relationship. An undertapped opportunity in digital marketing, privacy-led UX treats user consent not as a tick-box compliance exercise, but rather as the first overture in an ongoing customer relationship....

Software engineering has experienced two seismic shifts this century. First was the rise of the open source movement, which gradually made code accessible to developers and engineers everywhere. Second, the adoption of development operations (DevOps) and agile methodologies took software from siloed to collaborative development and from batch to continuous delivery. Now, a third such...

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. Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts. Ifyou'refollowing AI news,you'reprobably gettingwhiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AIcan'teven...

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next.You can read more from the series here. Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, Jared Isaacman, the recently confirmed NASA administrator, made a flurry of announcements from the agency's headquarters...

Each year we compile our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, featuring our educated predictions for which technologies will have the biggest impact on how we live and work. This year, however, we had a dilemma. While our final picks encompass all our core coverage areas (energy, AI, and biotech, plus a few more), our 2026 list...

You've probably heard some version of this idea before: that many of us have an inner Neanderthal." That is to say, around 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first arrived in Europe, they met members of a cousin species-the broad-browed, heavier-set Neanderthals-and, well, one thing led to another, which is why some people now carry...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. In an industry that doesn't stand still, Stanford's AI Index, an annual roundup of key results and trends, is a chance to take a breath. (It's a marathon, not a sprint, after...