MIT Technology Review

Metabolic imaging is a valuable noninvasive method for studying living cells with laser light, but it's been constrained by the way light scatters when it shines into tissue, limiting the resolution and depth of penetration. MIT researchers have developed a new technique that more than doubles the usual depth limit while boosting imaging speeds, yielding...

Differential PrivacyBy Simson L. Garfinkel '87, PhD '05MIT PRESSS, 2025, $18.95 Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the US into a Manufacturing PowerhouseBy Colleen A. Dunlavy, PhD '88 POLITY BOOKS, 2024, $29.95 The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of NatureBy Alan Lightman, professor of the practice of the humanitiesPANTHEON, 2024, $36 The Path...

In 2019,Legena Henry,SM '10, and the students in her renewable energy course at the University of the West Indies in Barbados wondered how to help their island stop using fossil fuel by 2030. Their first thought was to emulate Brazil-home to the world's largest fleet of cars that run on sugar-based ethanol. But the small...

As an undergraduate, Michael Schoen'87 found that joining his fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha, and participating in team sports helped him make the most of his years at MIT. MIT changed my life," says Schoen, who played on rugby and varsity soccer teams. But without athletics and my fraternity, I'm not sure I'd have gotten through...

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. Are friends electric? Thankfully, the difference between humans and machines in the real world is easy to discern, at least for now. While machines tend to excel at things adults find difficult-playing world-champion-level...

To the best of my knowledge, I am not a robot. And yet, like other humans who spend too much time on the internet, I'm routinely asked to prove this fact by clicking on crosswalks and motorcycles in photos, deciphering distorted numbers and letters, and checking little white boxes that affirm my non-robot status. These...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Opaque algorithms meant to analyze worker productivity have been rapidly spreading through our workplaces, as detailed in a new must-read piece by Rebecca Ackermann, published Monday in MIT Technology Review. Since 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. Your boss is watching Working today-whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car-can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-ending consequences if your productivity flags. But what matters...

In the fall of 2024, a trucking company in Falls Township, Pennsylvania, temporarily stored a storm-damaged Tesla at its yard. A few weeks later, the car burst into flames that grew out of control within seconds, some shooting out 30 feet. A local fire company tried in vain to squelch the blaze, spraying more than...

A full day's work for Dora Manriquez, who drives for Uber and Lyft in the San Francisco Bay Area, includes waiting in her car for a two-digit number to appear. The apps keep sending her rides that are too cheap to pay for her time-$4 or $7 for a trip across San Francisco, $16 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. The foundations of America's prosperity are being dismantled Ever since World War II, the US has been the global leader in science and technology-and benefited immensely from it. Research fuels American innovation and...

Maggie Barnidge, 18, has been managing cystic fibrosis her whole life. But not long after she moved out of her home state to start college, she came down with pneumonia and went into liver failure. She desperately wanted to get in touch with her doctor back home, whom she'd been seeing since she was diagnosed...

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. Yesterday marks a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. And what a month it has been. The Trump administration wasted no time...

Ever since World War II, the US has been the global leader in science and technology-and benefited immensely from it. Research fuels American innovation and the economy in turn. Scientists around the world want to study in the US and collaborate with American scientists to produce more of that research. These international collaborations play a...

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 new Microsoft chip could lead to more stable quantum computers Microsoft has announced that it's made significant progress in its 20-year quest to make topological quantum bits, or qubits-a special approach 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. Electricity demand rose by 4.3% in 2024 and will continue to grow at close to 4% annually through 2027, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. If that sounds...

It probably hasn't been long since you last slipped into something stretchy. From yoga pants to socks, stretch fabrics are everywhere. And they're only getting more popular: The global spandex market, valued at almost $8 billion in December 2024, is projected to grow between 2% and 8% every year over the next decade. That might...

Microsoft announced today that it has made significant progress in its 20-year quest to make topological quantum bits, or qubits-a special approach to building quantum computers that could make them more stable and easier to scale up. Researchers and companies have been working for years to build quantum computers, which could unlock dramatic new abilities...

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. Your most important customer may be AI Imagine you run a meal prep company that teaches people how to make simple and delicious food. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation for meal...

At about the time when personal computers charged into cubicle farms, another machine muscled its way into human resources departments and became a staple of routine employment screenings. By the early 1980s, some 2 million Americans annually found themselves strapped to a polygraph-a metal box that, in many people's minds, detected deception. Most of those...

Imagine you run a meal prep company that teaches people how to make simple and delicious food. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation for meal prep companies, yours is described as complicated and confusing. Why? Because the AI saw that in one of your ads there were chopped chives on the top of a...

Recorded onFebruary 18, 2025 Generative AI Search and the Changing Internet Speakers: Mat Honan, editor in chief, and Niall Firth, executive editor. Generative AI search, one ofMIT Technology Review's10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025, is ushering a new era of the internet. Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways...

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. Nokia is putting the first cellular network on the moon Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second...

When the journalist and culture critic Amanda Hess got pregnant with her first child, in 2020, the internet was among the first to know. More brands knew about my pregnancy than people did," she writes of the torrent of targeted ads that came her way. They all called me mama." The internet held the promise...

Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near the lunar south pole that could harbor water ice,...

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. Adventures in the genetic time machine An ancient-DNA revolution is turning the high-speed equipment used to study the DNA of living things on to specimens from the past. The technology is being used...

Many artists worry about the encroachment of artificial intelligence on artistic creation. But Sougwen Chung, a nonbinary Canadian-Chinese artist, instead sees AI as an opportunity for artists to embrace uncertainty and challenge people to think about technology and creativity in unexpected ways. Chung's exhibitions are driven by technology; they're also live and kinetic, with the...

Eske Willerslev was on a tour of Montreal's Redpath Museum, a Victorian-era natural history collection of 700,000 objects, many displayed in wood and glass cabinets. The collection-very, very eclectic," a curator explained-reflects the taste in souvenirs of 19th-century travelers and geology buffs. A visitor can see a leg bone from an extinct Steller's sea cow,...

Gloria Zhu '26 and Lee Liu '26 set out to make a calligraphy machine during IAP 2024. They built its mechatronic parts in a month; then, fueled by Hershey's dark chocolates, they put in many late nights in the Metropolis makerspace's electronics mezzanine to finish the job. The resulting device can move its brush pen...

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. China's electric vehicle giants are betting big on humanoid robots As the electric-vehicle war in China calms down, leaving a few established players to dominate the field, Chinese EV giants are expanding into...

The near future. It's not a kiss, but it's not not a kiss. Her lips-full, soft, pliable-yield under mine, warm from the electric heating rod embedded in her throat. They taste of a faint chemical, like aspartame in Diet Pepsi. Her thermoplastic elastomer skin is sensitive to fabric dyes, so she wears white Agent Provocateur...

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. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been speaking to people who have lost their voices. Both Joyce Esser, who lives in the UK, and Jules Rodriguez, who...

At the 2025 CCTV New Year Gala last month, a televised spectacle watched by over a billion viewers in China, 16 humanoid robots took the stage. Clad in vibrant floral print jackets, they took part in a signature element of northeastern China's Yangko dance, twirling red handkerchiefs in unison with human dancers. But the robots...

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. Motor neuron diseases took their voices. AI is bringing them back. Jules Rodriguez lost his voice in October of last year. His speech had been deteriorating since a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis...

An entertainment revolution, powered by AI and other emerging technologies, is fundamentally changing how content is created and consumed today. Media and entertainment (M&E) brands are faced with unprecedented opportunities-to reimagine costly and complex production workloads, to predict the success of new scripts or outlines, and to deliver immersive entertainment in novel formats like virtual...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. A few weeks ago, a fire broke out at the Moss Landing Power Plant in California, the world's largest collection of batteries on the grid. Although the flames were extinguished in a...

Jules Rodriguez lost his voice in October of last year. His speech had been deteriorating since a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2020, as the muscles in his head and neck progressively weakened along with those in the rest of his body. By 2024, doctors were worried that he might not be able...

AI is everywhere, and it's starting to alter our relationships in new and unexpected ways-relationships with our spouses, kids, colleagues, friends, and even ourselves. Although the technology remains unpredictable and sometimes baffling, individuals from all across the world and from all walks of life are finding it useful, supportive, and comforting, too. People are using...

Organizations working toward ambitious sustainability targets are finding an ally in emerging technologies. In agriculture, for instance, AI can use satellite imagery and real-time weather data to optimize irrigationand reduce water usage. In urban areas, cloud-enabled AI can power intelligent traffic systems, rerouting vehicles to cut commute times and emissions. At an industrial level, advanced...

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. Robots are bringing new life to extinct species In the last few years, paleontologists have developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them....

Paleontologists aren't easily deterred by evolutionary dead ends or a sparse fossil record. But in the last few years, they've developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is...

We often take the internet for granted. It's an ocean of information at our fingertips-and it simply works. But this system relies on swarms of crawlers"-bots that roam the web, visit millions of websites every day, and report what they see. This is how Google powers its search engines, how Amazon sets competitive prices, and...

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 dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off Want to send something to space? Get in line. The demand for rides off Earth is skyrocketing, with launches more than doubling over...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. No tech leader before has played the role in a new presidential administration that Elon Musk is playing now. Under his leadership, DOGE has entered offices in a half-dozen agencies and counting,...

Want to send something to space? Get in line. The demand for rides off Earth is skyrocketing, pushing even the busiest spaceports, like Florida's Kennedy Space Center, to their operational limits. Orbital launches worldwide have more than doubled over the past four years, from about 100 to 250 annually. That number is projected to spiral...

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. These documents are influencing the DOGE-sphere's agenda Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be...

Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government. The payment reports have been...

Over the past three weeks, the new US presidential administration has taken down thousands of government web pages related to public health, environmental justice, and scientific research. The mass takedowns stem from the new administration's push to remove government information related to diversity and gender ideology," as well as scrutiny of various government agencies' practices....

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. Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper problem -Dan Hon is principal of Very Little Gravitas, where he helps turn around and modernize large and complex government services and products. In trying to...

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. This week I've been working on a piece about teeth. Well, sort of teeth. Specifically, lab-grown bioengineered teeth. Researchers have created these teeth with a mixture of human...