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. A senior State Department official demanded records of communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort...

Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS. A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene...

A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between the staff of a small government office focused on online disinformation and a lengthy list of public and private figures-many of whom are longtime targets of the political right. The document, originally shared...

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. A long-abandoned US nuclear technology is making a comeback in China China has once again beat everyone else to a clean energy milestone-its new nuclear reactor is reportedly one of the first to...

China has once again beat everyone else to a clean energy milestone-its new nuclear reactor is reportedly one of the first to use thorium instead of uranium as a fuel and the first of its kind that can be refueled while it's running. It's an interesting (if decidedly experimental) development out of a country that's...

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. This data set helps researchers spot harmful stereotypes in LLMs What's new? AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the...

AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the problem by spotting harmful stereotypes and other kinds of discrimination that emerge in AI chatbot responses across a wide range of languages. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, led 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. The AI Hype Index: AI agent cyberattacks, racing robots, and musical models 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...

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. AI agents are the AI industry's hypiest new product-intelligent assistants capable of completing tasks without human supervision. But while they can be theoretically...

Right now, despite its ubiquity, AI is seen as anything but a normal technology. There is talk of AI systems that will soon merit the term superintelligence," and the former CEO of Google recently suggested we control AI models the way we control uranium and other nuclear weapons materials. Anthropic is dedicating time and money...

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 Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside...

Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: Let's expose luxury's biggest secret." He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermes Birkin bag, one...

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. Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound Despite the geopolitical chaos and market collapses triggered by President Trump's announcement of broad tariffs on international goods, some supporters still hope the strategy will...

Despite the geopolitical chaos and market collapses triggered by President Trump's announcement of broad tariffs on international goods, some supporters still hope the strategy will produce a golden age" of American industry. Trump himself insists, Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country." While it's possible that very targeted tariffs could help protect...

Organizations are deepening their cloud investments at an unprecedented pace, recognizing its fundamental role in driving business agility and innovation. Synergy Research Group reports that companies spent $84 billion worldwide on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of 2024, a 23% rise over the third quarter of 2023 and the fourth consecutive quarter 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. Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple's carbon neutral goal We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge...

The past few years have been an almost nonstop parade of good news for climate tech in the US. Headlines about billion-dollar grants from the government, massive private funding rounds, and labs churning out advance after advance have been routine. Now, though, things are starting to shift. About $8 billion worth of US climate tech...

We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest. The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a...

Recorded onApril 23, 2025 Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 byMIT Technology Reviews readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist...

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 Creativity issue The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist's studio or writers' workshop. But...

A new play about OpenAI I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in...

Ariel Aberg-Riger is the author of America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History.

The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago. I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things...

It all began with a simple origami model. As an undergrad at Harvard, Danna Freedman went to a professor's office hours for her general chemistry class and came across an elegant paper model that depicted the fullerene molecule. The intricately folded representation of chemical bonds and atomic arrangements sparked her interest, igniting a profound curiosity...

After decades of working as a biologist at a Southern school with a Division1 football team, coming to MIT was a bit of a culture shock-in the best possible way. I've heard from MIT alumni all about late-night psetting, when to catch MITHenge, and the best way to celebrate Pi Day (with pie, of course)....

Tiny flying robots could perform such useful tasks as pollinating crops inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture's harmful impacts on the environment. The latest robo-bug from an MIT lab, inspired by the anatomy of the bee, comes closer to matching nature's performance than ever before. Led by Kevin Chen, an associate...

Scientists have known for decades that certain neurons in the hippocampus are dedicated to remembering specific locations where an animal has been. More useful, though, is remembering where places are relative to each other, and it hasn't been clear how those mental maps are formed. A study by MIT neuroscientist Matthew Wilson and colleagues sheds...

In 2018 astronomers at MIT and elsewhere observed previously unseen behavior from a black hole known as 1ES 1927+654, which is about as massive as a million suns and sits in a galaxy 270 million light-years away. Its corona-a cloud of whirling, white-hot plasma-suddenly disappeared before reassembling months later. Now members of the team have...

One costly and time-consuming step in constructing a concrete building is creating the formwork," the wooden mold into which the concrete is poured. Now MIT researchers have developed a way to replace the wood with lightly treated mud. What we've demonstrated is that we can essentially take the ground we're standing on, or waste soil...

Soon after MIT's 18th president, Sally Kornbluth, was inaugurated in May 2023, she made it a priority to expand her early on-campus listening tour to alumni living and working around the world. She wanted to learn more about their priorities and their connections with MIT, while also engaging them in her expansive vision for its...

A new type of glue developed by researchers from MIT and Germany combines sticky polymers inspired by the mussel with the germ-fighting properties of another natural material: mucus. To stick to a rock or a ship, mussels secrete a fluid full of proteins connected by chemical cross-links. As it happens, similar cross-linking features are found...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging in everyday use cases, thanks to advances in foundational models, more powerful chip technology, and abundant data. To become truly embedded and seamless, AI computation must now be distributed-and much of it will take place on device and at the edge. To support this evolution, computation for running AI workloads...

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. $8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025 This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale...

My mind is still sharp and my hands work just fine, so I have no interest in getting help from AI to draw or write stories," says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist best known for his seminal series A Daunting Team, a 1983 manhwa about the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball players. Still,...

Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as paper architecture"). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted...

In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They're the products of living processes-places where coral has grown toward...

This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report. That's far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a...

A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for willfully turning a blind eye" to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will provide humanitarian assistance to persons...

At first glance, the Bathhouse spa in Brooklyn looks not so different from other high-end spas. What sets it apart is out of sight: a closet full of cryptocurrency-mining computers that not only generate bitcoins but also heat the spa's pools, marble hammams, and showers. When cofounder Jason Goodman opened Bathhouse's first location in Williamsburg...

Americans don't agree on much these days. Yet even at a time when consensus reality seems to be on the verge of collapse, there remains at least one quintessentially modern value we can all still get behind: creativity. We teach it, measure it, envy it, cultivate it, and endlessly worry about its death. And why...

The quest for long, healthy life-and even immortality-is probably almost as old as humans are, but it's never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer. A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should...

Google DeepMind's latest update to a top Gemini AI model includes a dial to control how much the system thinks" through a response. The new feature is ostensibly designed to save money for developers, but it also concedes a problem: Reasoning models, the tech world's new obsession, are prone to overthinking, burning money and energy...

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. US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio,...

As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While my dad was locating capacitors and resistors, I was in the toy section. It was there, in 1984, that I discovered the best toy of my childhood: the Armatron robotic arm. Described as...

While it's rare to look at the news without finding some headline related to AI and energy, a lot of us are stuck waving our hands when it comes to what it all means. Sure, you've probably read that AI will drive an increase in electricity demand. But how that fits into the context of...

President Trump and his appointees have repeatedly stressed the need to establish American energy dominance." But the White House's profusion of executive orders and aggressive tariffs, along with its determined effort to roll back clean-energy policies, are moving the industry in the wrong direction, creating market chaos and economic uncertainty that are making it harder...

On Thanksgiving weekend of 2013, Jeff Bezos, then Amazon's CEO, took to 60 Minutes to make a stunning announcement: Amazon was a few years away from deploying drones that would deliver packages to homes in less than 30 minutes. It lent urgency to a problem that Parimal Kopardekar, director of the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute,...

The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirming reporting by MIT Technology Review. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters...

Anyone who crammed for exams in college knows that an impressive ability to regurgitate information is not synonymous with critical thinking. The large language models (LLMs) first publicly released in 2022 were impressive but limited-like talented students who excel at multiple-choice exams but stumble when asked to defend their logic. Today's advanced reasoning models are...