MIT Technology Review

Here’s a life-or-death question: Do apps that notify people of potential exposure to the coronavirus help save lives, or are they a waste of precious time and money? A new study from Oxford University and Google says contact tracing apps reduce infections, hospitalizations, and deaths at almost any level of adoption, showing that the technology…

The astronomy community is on edge. The growing number of satellites streaming through low Earth orbit is making it almost impossible to get a clear view of the sky. The true threat these mega-constellations pose to the astronomy community is only just beginning to be understood. A report released last week by the American Astronomical Society…

The world’s most populous democracy is now also the world leader in internet shutdowns. India has imposed hundreds of internet blackouts in different parts of the country over the past few years, including cutting off connectivity throughout the disputed state of Kashmir for six months. Home to over 12 million people, the region has suffered…

The news: Apple and Google have announced they’re expanding their coronavirus exposure warning system so health agencies can take part without needing to create a customized app. It’s a significant upgrade to the system, which uses Bluetooth to work out if people have spent extended periods of time near each other and then notifies the…

As record-breaking heat waves baked Californians last month, the collective strain of millions of air conditioners forced the state’s grid operators to plunge hundreds of thousands of households into darkness. The rolling blackouts offered just a small hint of what’s likely to come in California and far beyond. Growing populations, rising incomes, increasing urbanization, and…

Remember all those articles you read in January with headlines like “2020 trends to watch in your industry?” You tossed those predictions out long ago. But while everyone knows that the coronavirus pandemic changed everything, none of us is sure how. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review.…

American citizens are inundated with political messages—on social networks, in their news feeds, through email, text messages, and phone calls. It’s not an accident that people get bombarded: political groups prefer a “multimodal” voter contact strategy, where they use many platforms and multiple attempts to persuade a citizen to engage with their cause or candidate.…

Rock-climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. See radar with superhuman vision. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness, and mental illness. Those are just a few of the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his four-year-old neuroscience company Neuralink believe electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about. None…

The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while working from home. How it works: The online lab platform allows scientists to log on through a web browser. On a blank…

Nobody knows what will happen in the future, but some guesses are a lot better than others. A kicked football will not reverse in midair and return to the kicker’s foot. A half-eaten cheeseburger will not become whole again. A broken arm will not heal overnight. By drawing on a fundamental description of cause and…

Grace Windheim had heard of deepfakes before. But she had never considered how to make one. It was a viral meme using the technology that led her to research the possibility—and discover that it was super easy and completely free. Within a day, she had created a step-by-step YouTube tutorial to walk others through the…

Hacking isn’t all 1s and 0s—more often than you’d think, it’s about people. A Tesla employee was offered a $1 million bribe in early August to install ransomware on the car company’s networks in Nevada, a scheme that could have netted a cybercrime gang many more millions in extortion, according to a newly unsealed US…

On Sunday evening, Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. By Tuesday, a 16-year-old Texan, Kel, had built a one-page website, Justice for Jacob Blake, that offered context, templates for contacting officials, mental-health resources, and donation links. To build it, Kel turned to Carrd, a simple tool that lets anyone…

What weird bugs did you pick up last time you rode a subway train? Just as the covid-19 pandemic was taking off, a global network of scientists began mapping the DNA of urban microbes and using AI to look for patterns. Join host Jennifer Strong as she rides along on a subway-swabbing mission and talks…

Quantum computing has the potential to handle complex problems at hyper-fast speeds. What makes this possible is the way it exploits qubits—typically subatomic particles such as electrons—that use quantum properties to represent numerous combinations beyond the 0 or 1 of conventional bits. When pairs of qubits are “entangled,” they can change each other’s state in predictable ways, even at very…

The first family to quit Pastor Clark Frailey’s church during the pandemic did it by text message. It felt to Frailey like a heartbreaking and incomplete way to end a years-long relationship. When a second young couple said they were doubting his leadership a week later, Frailey decided to risk seeing them in person, despite…

Human rights advocates filed a new court petition against the Israeli phone hacking company Cellebrite, urging Israel’s ministry of defense to halt the firm’s exports to Hong Kong, where security forces have been using the technology in crackdowns against dissidents as China takes greater control. In July, police court filings revealed that Cellebrite’s phone hacking…

NASA has released new photos of Comet Neowise taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, revealing a close-up view of the brightest comet observed in decades after it passed around the sun this summer. What happened: The new image, taken on August 8, centers on the comet’s coma, the outer shell of gas and dust expelled…

The AI community is finally waking up to the fact that machine learning can cause disproportionate harm to already oppressed and disadvantaged groups. We have activists and organizers to thank for that. Now, machine-learning researchers and scholars are looking for ways to make AI more fair, accountable, and transparent—but also, recently, more participatory. One of…

The 33-year-old-man arrived by plane in Hong Kong on August 15. After disembarking, he headed to one of the airport’s covid-19 testing stations. Someone swabbed his throat, and then he waited for the results. The man had come down with the coronavirus in March, suffered fever and headaches, and spent two weeks in a hospital.…

The US has approved wide emergency use of blood plasma from covid-19 survivors as a treatment for coronavirus infection, despite limited evidence it helps. Blood drug: The therapy, which the White House touted as a “breakthrough,” involves giving plasma from survivors to those battling the infection. It has been tried since early in the year…

Since OpenAI first described its new AI language-generating system called GPT-3 in May, hundreds of media outlets (including MIT Technology Review) have written about the system and its capabilities. Twitter has been abuzz about its power and potential. The New York Times published an op-ed about it. Later this year, OpenAI will begin charging companies…

In June 2019, Facebook’s AI lab, FAIR, released AI Habitat, a new simulation platform for training AI agents. It allowed agents to explore various realistic virtual environments, like a furnished apartment or cubicle-filled office. The AI could then be ported into a robot, which would gain the smarts to navigate through the real world without…

At the MIT community vigil held in June 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Corban Swain, a PhD student in biological engineering, read two of his poems on racism. Listen here.

Check out the virtual MIT campus on this guided tour by Amanda Shayna Ahteck ’23.

Companies of all sizes and maturity levels, from startups to multinational corporations, have at least this in common: they know that using data effectively is a key driver of innovation, competitive advantage, and growth. Now that expensive hardware and software are no longer prerequisites for innovation, thanks to the rise of cloud computing, startups can…

When the UK first set out to find an alternative to school leaving qualifications, the premise seemed perfectly reasonable. Covid-19 had derailed any opportunity for students to take the exams in person, but the government still wanted a way to assess them for university admission decisions. Chief among its concerns was an issue of fairness.…

Thousands of lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires across California in recent days, producing several major clusters burning around the San Francisco Bay Area. The blazes quickly ripped through hundreds of thousands of acres, forcing thousands to evacuate, filling the skies with smoke, and raining down ash across much of the region. The fires…

Countries that responded wisely to the pandemic run the gamut in terms of wealth, size, population, and style of government. What they shared was a swift, coordinated government response. Where that has been lacking, no amount of scientific expertise, technical knowhow, or wealth can prevent disaster, as the United States all too grimly shows. Krithika…

What’s new: Dozens of countries have rolled out automated contact tracing apps, but a new study confirms what experts already knew: they can’t beat the pandemic on their own. According to a new systematic review of 15 published studies, the technology still requires manual contact tracing, social distancing, and mass testing in order to be…

The narrative in the US that the Chinese don’t care about data privacy is simply misguided. It’s true that the Chinese government has built a sophisticated surveillance apparatus (with the help of Western companies), and continues to spy on its citizenry. But when it comes to what companies can do with people’s information, China is…

The news: Pages spreading health misinformation got an estimated 3.8 billion views on Facebook this year as of May, according to analysis by human rights group Avaaz. Views peaked at nearly half a billion in April 2020 alone, just as the pandemic was rapidly escalating globally, it found. Content from 10 websites spreading health misinformation…

Sweden’s controversial, less-stringent lockdown has made an unlikely star of its state epidemiologist. He told us why he still believes in the national strategy and why he thinks a classic second wave is unlikely. Proportionately, Sweden has suffered many more deaths than its neighbors. Norway has had 48 coronavirus deaths per million people, Finland 60,…

Uruguay has been a rare bright spot in coronavirus-­ravaged South America, thanks to a highly developed research infrastructure, a tradition of at-home medical care, and a strong public health system. Two key advisors to the government’s pandemic response team explain how they scaled up their tests so fast and why they are now encouraging people…

Covid-19 was the second pandemic of the decade for Liberia, which was devastated by Ebola just five years ago. A US-trained public health officer who served in both emergencies explains how some institutional knowledge was carried over, as well as how the virus entered the country despite considerable precautions. The moment we heard that there…

For many years, Latin America’s largest democracy was a leader on data governance. In 1995, it created the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, a multi-stakeholder body to help the country set principles for internet governance. In 2014, impelled by Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance by the US National Security Agency of countries including Brazil, Dilma Rousseff’s…

The government-run Robert Koch Institute for public health research in Berlin has been at the forefront of the country’s robust pandemic response, leading the search for a vaccine and racing to push out vast stocks of tests. A career epidemiologist at the institute explains the challenges of reopening, communicating risk, and contact tracing in the…

China doesn’t only collect enormous amounts of data on its own citizens: it also sucks up data from around the world that might one day be useful for its national security, using both domestic and foreign companies as conduits. Samantha Hoffman of the Australian Strategy Policy Institute, one of the leading experts on the Chinese…

Maâti Monjib speaks slowly, like a man who knows he’s being listened to. It’s the day of his 58th birthday when we speak, but there’s little celebration in his voice. “The surveillance is hellish,” Monjib tells me. “It is really difficult. It controls everything I do in my life.” A history professor at the University…

Late in the summer of 2016, Xu Yuyu received a call that promised to change her life. Her college entrance examination scores, she was told, had won her admission to the English department of the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Xu lived in the city of Linyi in Shandong, a coastal province in China,…

Tom Malone refused to believe that watercooler conversations were dead just because so many people were suddenly working from home during the pandemic. He knew that random workplace chatter can help people build trust and form bonds. And as a researcher who studies technology and organizational design, he says, “it seemed obvious to me that…

With the launch of three missions to Mars this summer (including a new NASA rover, Perseverance, that will look for signs of life), our exploration of the Red Planet will soon leap to new heights. And there are good reasons we should be obsessed with it: Mars is the only extraterrestrial world besides the moon that…

When news broke that a mistaken match from a face recognition system had led Detroit police to arrest Robert Williams for a crime he didn’t commit, it was late June, and the country was already in upheaval over the death of George Floyd a month earlier. Soon after, it emerged that yet another Black man,…

In early March, as the coronavirus pandemic forced America to contemplate a nationwide shutdown, Dan St. Louis started to get nervous. St. Louis runs a facility in Conover, North Carolina, called the Manufacturing Solutions Center, which prototypes and tests new fabrics and other materials; most of its funding comes from contracts with what remains of…

At the start of the week, Liam Porr had only heard of GPT-3. By the end, the college student had used the AI model to produce an entirely fake blog under a fake name. It was meant as a fun experiment. But then one of his posts found its way to the number-one spot on…

The news: England’s revamped covid-19 contact tracing app has finally been launched for testing by the public, after its previous version was scrapped due to technical problems. The new program went live for residents of the Isle of Wight on Thursday, August 13, and will shortly become available for people living in the London borough…

The Chinese company Sinovac Biotech developed an experimental vaccine for SARS back in 2004. That disease went away after killing just 800 people, and the project was shelved. But it meant that when the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, exploded in China last January, the company had a road map for what to do next. Four months…

When Neguine Rezaii first moved to the United States a decade ago, she hesitated to tell people she was Iranian. Instead, she would use Persian. “I figured that people probably wouldn’t know what that was,” she says. The linguistic ambiguity was useful: she could conceal her embarrassment at the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while still…

In January, 1989, my 26-year-old father uprooted his life to move to the other side of the world. He had never been on a plane, let alone outside of China. But an American professor had offered him a postdoc, an opportunity he couldn’t refuse. When he landed, he made only one call at an airport…

In the first of a four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong explores the false arrest of Robert Williams by police in Detroit. The odd thing about Willliams’s ordeal wasn’t that police used face recognition to ID him—it’s that the cops told him about it. There’s no law saying they have to. The episode starts…