MIT Technology Review

Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn't even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself-he's her only child. But mostly,...

Fixing our collective meat problem is one of the trickiest challenges in addressing climate change-and for some baffling reason, the world seems intent on making the task even harder. The latest example occurred last week, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning the production, sale, and transportation of cultured meat across the Sunshine...

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. Scientists are trying to get cows pregnant with synthetic embryos About a decade ago, biologists started to observe that stem cells, left alone in a walled plastic container, will spontaneously self-assemble and try...

It was a cool morning at the beef teaching unit in Gainesville, Florida, and cow number #307 was bucking in her metal cradle as the arm of a student perched on a stool disappeared into her cervix. The arm held a squirt bottle of water. Seven other animals stood nearby behind a railing; it would...

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. Cancer vaccines are having a renaissance Last week, Moderna and Merck launched a large clinical trial in the UK of a promising new cancer therapy: a personalized vaccine that targets a specific set...

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. Last week, Moderna and Merck launched a large clinical trial in the UK of a promising new cancer therapy: a personalized vaccine that targets a specific set 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. Sam Altman says helpful agents are poised to become AI's killer function Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has a vision for how AI tools will become enmeshed in our daily lives. During a...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Batteries are on my mind this week. (Aren't they always?) But I've got two extra reasons to be thinking about them today. First, there's a new special report from the International Energy...

Eliminating carbon pollution from aviation is one of the most challenging parts of the climate puzzle, simply because large commercial airlines are too heavy and need too much power during takeoff for today's batteries to do the job. But one way that companies and governments are striving to make some progress is through the use...

A number of moments from my brief sit-down with Sam Altman brought the OpenAI CEO's worldview into clearer focus. The first was when he pointed to my iPhone SE (the one with the home button that's mostly hated) and said, That's the best iPhone." More revealing, though, was the vision he sketched for how AI...

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 quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Allow me to indulge in a little reflection this week. Last week, the divest-or-ban TikTok bill was passed in Congress and signed into law. Four years ago, when I was just starting...

When our universe was less than half as old as it is today, a burst of energy that could cook a sun's worth of popcorn shot out from somewhere amid a compact group of galaxies. Some 8 billion years later, radio waves from that burst reached Earth and were captured by a sophisticated low-frequency radio...

Recorded on April 30, 2024 Inside the Next Era of AI and Hardware Speakers: James O'Donnell, AI reporter, and Charlotte Jee, News editor Hear first-hand from our AI reporter, James O'Donnell, as he walks our news editor Charlotte Jee through the latest goings-on in his beat, from rapid advances in robotics to autonomous military drones,...

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 robot race is fueling a fight for training data We're interacting with AI tools more directly-and regularly-than ever before. Interacting with robots, by way of contrast, is still a rarity for most....

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Deepfakes are getting good. Like, really good. Earlier this month I went to a studio in East London to get myself digitally cloned by the AI video startup Synthesia. They made...

Since ChatGPT was released, we now interact with AI tools more directly-and regularly-than ever before. But interacting with robots, by way of contrast, is still a rarity for most. If you don't undergo complex surgery or work in logistics, the most advanced robot you encounter in your daily life might still be a vacuum cleaner...

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. Here's the defense tech at the center of US aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President...

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. After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President Joe Biden signed a $95.3 billion aid package into...

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. Six weeks ago, I pre-ordered the Firefly Petunia," a houseplant engineered with genes from bioluminescent fungi so that it glows in the dark. After years of writing about...

Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up-in fact, it's what they're best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth the risk. A new tool created by Cleanlab, an AI startup spun out of a quantum computing lab at...

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. An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that's so good it's scary Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make...

Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies. But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to a new...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. From toaster ovens that work as air fryers to hair dryers that can also curl your hair, single tools that do multiple jobs have an undeniable appeal. In the climate world, hydrogen...

I'm stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity? This makes it sound like I'm dying, but it's the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today...

A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from New Jersey, has become the second. Her new kidney has just a single genetic modification-an approach that researchers hope...

Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals 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. Introducing: the Build issue Building is a popular tech industry motif-especially in Silicon Valley, where Time to build" has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. I've wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was...

Today's climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity-which has discharged greenhouse-gas emissions into Earth's atmosphere for centuries-but reversing course and taming nature's growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. Yet the dream of human-powered flight-of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of mortal limbs-was...

As Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn serves up a plate of vegan brie, feta, and blue cheese in his offices in Emeryville, California, I'm keeping my expectations modest. Most vegan cheese falls into an edible uncanny valley full of discomforting not-quite-right versions of the real thing. But the brie I taste today is smooth, rich,...

The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. Companies define it in different ways, but its principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations. Danai Myrtzani of Sleed, a digital marketing agency in Greece, describes herself as more prompter than engineer....

In 1856, Napoleon III commissioned a baby rattle for his newborn son, to be made from one of the most precious metals known at the time: light, silvery, and corrosion-resistant aluminum. Despite its abundance-it's the third most common element in Earth's crust-the metal wasn't isolated until 1824, and the complexity and cost of the process...

Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard's hat near the northwestern corner of...

One of the formative memories of my youth took place on a camping trip at an Alabama state park. My dad's friend brought an at-the-time gee-whiz gadget, a portable television, and we used it to watch the very first space shuttle launch from under the loblolly pines. It was thrilling. And it was hard not...

For a harried wastewater manager, a commercial farmer, a factory owner, or anyone who might want to analyze dozens of water samples, and fast, it sounds almost miraculous. Light beamed from a central laser zips along fiber-optic cables and hits one of dozens of probes waiting at the edge of a field, or at the...

When I last wrote, the Institute had just announced MIT's Climate Project. Now that it's underway, I'd like to tell you a bit more about how we came to launch this ambitious new enterprise. In the fall of 2022, as soon as I accepted the president's job at MIT, several of my oldest friends spontaneously...

As an international student at MIT, I find that the privileges I've experienced in the States have made me even more conscious of my nation's struggles. Brief visits home remind me that in Jamaica, I can't always count on what I often take for granted in Massachusetts: water flowing through the faucet, timely public transportation,...

Alumni leave MIT armed with knowledge and a whole lot of memories. During Tech Reunions in 2023, the MIT Alumni Association asked returning alums what else they had held onto since leaving campus. Here are just a few of their responses. Check out the recent MIT alumni video about physical objects grads have kept-and why...

A county-by-county analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the US that stand to see the biggest economic changes from the switch to cleaner energy because their job markets are most closely linked to fossil fuels. While many of those places have intensive drilling and mining operations, the researchers find, areas that rely on...

One of the immune system's roles is to detect and kill cells that have acquired cancerous mutations. However, some early-stage cancer cells manage to survive. A new study on colon cancer from MIT and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified one reason why: they turn on a gene called SOX17, which renders them essentially invisible...

Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early-when any available treatments are likely...

Whenever you see a solar panel, most parts of it probably come from China. The US invented the technology and once dominated its production, but over the past two decades, government subsidies and low costs in China have led most of the solar manufacturing supply chain to be concentrated there. The country will soon be...

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 new proposals to restrict geoengineering are misguided -Daniele Visioni is a climate scientist and assistant professor at Cornell University The public debate over whether we should consider intentionally altering the climate system...

The public debate over whether we should consider intentionally altering the climate system is heating up, as the dangers of climate instability rise and more groups look to study technologies that could cool the planet. Such interventions, commonly known as solar geoengineering, may include releasing sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to cast away more sunlight,...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week,MIT Technology Reviewheld its inaugural EmTech Digital conference in London. It was a great success! I loved seeing so many of you there asking excellent questions, and it was a...

As a child, Emily Baker loved to make paper versions of things: cameras, a spaceship cockpit, buildings for a town in outer space. It was a habit that stuck. Years later, studying architecture in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, she was playing around with some paper and scissors. It was...

Nobel Prizes and other scientific honors are nearly routine at MIT, but a Grammy Award is something we don't see every year. That's what Miguel Zenon, an assistant professor of music and theater arts, has won: El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2, which he recorded with the pianist and composer Luis Perdomo, received the Grammy...