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. Introducing: 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch The urgency of addressing climate change has never been clearer. Emissions of planet-warming gases are at record highs, as are global temperatures. All that extra heat...

Pivot Bio is using genetically edited microbes to deliver just the right amount of nitrogen to crops, cutting climate emissions without reducing agricultural yields. The development of synthetic fertilizer was one of the great achievements of the last century, providing an abundant source of nitrogen that boosted crop yields and helped feed a growing global...

LanzaJet is making next-generation aviation fuel without fossil fuels. The company recently opened the world's first commercial-scale production facility that turns alcohol into jet fuel and plans to produce up to 9 million gallons each year. LanzaJet wants to cut aviation's climate impact by rethinking where jet fuel comes from. Today, hopping on a plane...

Electric vehicles can take a long time to charge up, and places to do so can be hard to find. Gogoro's innovative technology offers a quick and easy way to swap drained batteries for charged ones at a growing number of stations worldwide. When a magnitude 7.4 earthquake rolled through Taiwan in April, it was...

Pano AI is helping communities spot fires faster, enabling firefighters to put out small blazes before they grow into infernos. The four-year-old startup installs networks of rotating cameras in high vantage points throughout forests, grasslands, and other areas with high fire risk. Each station can capture ultra-high-definition video within a 10-mile radius, as well as...

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 coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It's the AI. In case you missed the memo, we are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. At its...

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 AI research, everyone seems to think that bigger is better. The idea is that more data, more computing power, and more parameters will lead to models that are more powerful....

This article is from The Debrief with Mat Honan, MIT Technology Reviews weekly newsletter from its editor in chief. To receive it every Friday, sign up here. In case you missed the memo, we arebarrelingtoward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. At its developer conference last week, Meta (nee Facebook)introduced a positively mind-blowing...

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 UK is done with coal. How's the rest of the world doing? The UK is shutting down its final coal-fired power plant today, marking the end of an era for the country's...

The UK is shutting down its final coal-fired power plant today, marking the end of an era for the country's energy system. Once the backbone of the grid, coal has been steadily replaced with other, less polluting energy sources. Coal is the most emissions-intensive fuel powering the grid today, and moving away from it, even...

In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic Intelligence Age," unleashing unimaginable" prosperity and astounding triumphs" like fixing the climate." It's a promise that no one is in a position to make-and one that, when it comes to the topic...

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. Space travel is dangerous. Could genetic testing and gene editing make it safer? Long-distance space travel can wreak havoc on human health. There's radiation and microgravity to contend with, as well as the...

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. Recently, global news has been pretty bleak. So this week, I've decided to focus my thoughts beyond Earth's stratosphere and well into space. A couple of weeks ago,...

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. Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super-tool for modifying DNA, it's been common for lawyers to try to...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Nuclear power is coming back to Three Mile Island. That nuclear power plant is typically associated with a very specific event. One of its reactors, Unit 2, suffered a partial meltdown in...

Humane Intelligence, an organization focused on evaluating AI systems, is launching a competition that challenges developers to create a computer vision model that can track hateful image-based propaganda online. Organized in partnership with the Nordic counterterrorism group Revontulet, the bounty program opens September 26. It is open to anyone, 18 or older, who wants to...

Recorded on September 25, 2024 Putting AI's Climate Impact Into Perspective Speakers: David Rotman, Editor-at-large, Melissa Heikkila, Senior AI Reporter, and James Temple, Sr Editor for Energy The rise of AI comes with a growing carbon footprint and an increased demand for electricity.Analysts projectthat AI could drive up data centers' energy consumption by 160% this...

In the decade-long fight to control CRISPR, the super-tool for modifying DNA, it's been common for lawyers to try to overturn patents held by competitors by pointing out errors or inconsistencies. But now, in a surprise twist, the team that earned the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing CRISPR is asking to cancel two of...

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a research nonprofit, is releasing a family of open-source multimodal language models, called Molmo, that it says perform as well as top proprietary models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The organization claims that its biggest Molmo model, which has 72 billion parameters, outperforms OpenAI's GPT-4o, which is estimated...

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 one developer won't quit fighting to connect the US's grids Michael Skelly hasn't learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the energy entrepreneur has worked...

Michael Skelly hasn't learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the Houston-based energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest, delivering clean electricity to cities like Albuquerque, Chicago, and Memphis. But so far, he has little...

OpenAI is broadening access to Advanced Voice Mode, a feature of ChatGPT that allows you to speak more naturally with the AI model. It allows you to interrupt its responses midsentence, and it can sense and interpret your emotions from your tone of voice and adjust its responses accordingly. These features were teased back in...

Every day across Hollywood, scores of film school graduates and production assistants work as script readers. Their job is to find the diamonds in the rough from the 50,000 or so screenplays pitched each year and flag any worth pursuing further. Each script runs anywhere from 100 to 150 pages, and it can take half...

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. What the US can learn from the role of AI in other elections When the generative AI boom kicked off, one of the biggest concerns was that hyperrealistic deepfakes could be used to...

MIT Technology Review set out last year to recognize 15 companies from around the world that demonstrated they have a real shot at meaningfully driving down greenhouse-gas emissions and safeguarding society from the worst impacts of climate change. We're excited to announce that we took up the task again this year and will publish our...

The reality of climate change has spurred enormous public and private investment worldwide, funding initiatives to mitigate its effects and to adapt to its impacts. That investment has spawned entire industries and countless new businesses, resulting in the creation of new green jobs and contributions to economic growth. In the United States, this includes the...

Sales of new electric vehicles in Germany have plummeted, dropping nearly 37% in July 2024 from the same month one year ago. One of the main reasons traces back to mid-December 2023, when the German government gave less than one week's notice before ending its subsidy program for electric vehicles. The program had given drivers...

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 models let robots carry out tasks in unfamiliar environments What's new: It's tricky to get robots to do things in environments they've never seen before. Typically, researchers need to train them on...

It's tricky to get robots to do things in environments they've never seen before. Typically, researchers need to train them on new data for every new place they encounter, which can become very time-consuming and expensive. Now researchers have developed a series of AI models that teach robots to complete basic tasks in new surroundings...

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. September will soon be drawing to a close. The kids are back to school, and those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are experiencing the joys the end...

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 virologists are getting increasingly nervous about bird flu Bird flu has been spreading in dairy cows in the US-and the scale is likely to be far worse than it looks. In addition,...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. In February 2024, a broken utility pole brought down power lines near the small town of Stinnett, Texas. In the following weeks, the fire reportedly sparked by that equipment grew to burn...

Bird flu has been spreading in dairy cows in the US-and the scale of the spread is likely to be far worse than it looks. In addition, 14 human cases have been reported in the US since March. Both are worrying developments, say virologists, who fear that the country's meager response to the virus is...

AI-generated falsehoods and deepfakes seem to have had no effect on election results in the UK, France, and the European Parliament this year, according to new research. Since the beginning of the generative-AI boom, there has been widespread fear that AI tools could boost bad actors' ability to spread fake content with the potential to...

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. There are more than 120 AI bills in Congress right now More than 120 bills related to regulating artificial intelligence are currently floating around the US Congress. This flood of bills is indicative...

More than 120 bills related to regulating artificial intelligence are currently floating around the US Congress. They're pretty varied. One aims to improve knowledge of AI in public schools, while another is pushing for model developers to disclose what copyrighted material they use in their training. Three deal with mitigating AI robocalls, while two address...

Before I get to Snap's new Spectacles, a confession: I have a long history of putting goofy new things on my face and liking it. Back in 2011, I tried on Sony's head-mounted 3D glasses and, apparently, enjoyed them. Sort of. At the beginning of 2013, I was enamored with a Kickstarter project I saw...

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 OpenAI's new model is such a big deal Last week OpenAI released a new model called o1 (previously referred to under the code name Strawberry" and, before that, Q*) that blows GPT-4o...

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first,sign up here. Last weekend, I got married at a summer camp, and during the day our guests competed in a series of games inspired by the show Survivor that my now-wife and I orchestrated. When we were...

Early next year, Google and its partners plan to launch the first in a series of satellites that together would provide close-up, frequently refreshed images of wildfires around the world, offering data that could help firefighters battle blazes more rapidly, effectively, and safely. The online search giant's nonprofit and research arms have collaborated with the...

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 we need an AI safety hotline -Kevin Frazier is an assistant professor at St. Thomas University College of Law and senior research fellow in the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of...

In the past couple of years, regulators have been caught off guard again and again as tech companies compete to launch ever more advanced AI models. It's only a matter of time before labs release another round of models that pose new regulatory challenges. We're likely just weeks away, for example, from OpenAI's release of...

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. Chatbots can persuade people to stop believing in conspiracy theories The internet has made it easier than ever before to encounter and spread conspiracy theories. And while some are harmless, others can be...

Have you ever found yourself lost in a building that felt impossible to navigate? Thoughtful building design should center on the people who will be using those buildings. But that's no mean feat. It's not just about navigation, either. Just think of an office that left you feeling sleepy or unproductive, or perhaps a health...

The internet has made it easier than ever before to encounter and spread conspiracy theories. And while some are harmless, others can be deeply damaging, sowing discord and even leading to unnecessary deaths. Now, researchers believe they've uncovered a new tool for combating false conspiracy theories: AI chatbots. Researchers from MIT Sloan and Cornell University...

As long as chatbots have been around, they have made things up. Such hallucinations" are an inherent part of how AI models work. However, they're a big problem for companies betting big on AI, like Google, because they make the responses it generates unreliable. Google is releasing a tool today to address the issue. Called...

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. Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine's drone defense Drones have come to define the brutal conflict in Ukraine that has now dragged on for more than two and a half years. And most...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. One way to know where a field is going? Take a look at what the sharpest new innovators are working on. Good news for all of us: MIT Technology Review's list of...

Serhii Flash" Beskrestnov hates going to the front line. The risks terrify him. I'm really not happy to do it at all," he says. But to perform his particular self-appointed role in the Russia-Ukraine war, he believes it's critical to exchange the relative safety of his suburban home north of the capital for places where...

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 says it's made a quantum computing breakthrough that reduces errors The news: Google researchers claim to have made a breakthrough in quantum error correction, one that could pave the way for quantum...