MIT Technology Review

Social media platforms are often urged to fight the spread of misinformation through content moderation, but two MIT-affiliated researchers are proposing an alternative: empowering users themselves to identify which information sources are trustworthy. The Trustnet browser extension, built by EECS professor David Karger and Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, SM '21, PhD '23, an assistant professor at the...

Take a beautiful spring weekend, add brass rats and Tim the Beaver swag, mix in technology talks and outdoor activities, fuse it all together with a lot of socializing, and what do you get? MIT Tech Reunions, which this year drew more than 3,300 alumni, family, and friends to campus. The long weekend, May 30-June...

In 1976, Tom Scholz '69, SM '70, was a 29-year-old product design engineer working at Polaroid on audio electronics and tape-recording technology, with 11 patents under his belt. But few colleagues knew what Scholz did after hours, why he often came in late, or why he was, in his own words, a horrible employee." For...

A butterfly's wing is covered in hundreds of thousands of tiny scales, like miniature shingles on a paper-thin roof. A single scale is as small as a speck of dust yet surprisingly complex, with a corrugated surface that helps wick away water, manage heat, and reflect light to give a butterfly its signature shimmer. MIT...

MIT people often find their greatest moments of inspiration in each other's company. And two big, beautiful additions to West Campus now underway will open up new spaces for connection, collaboration, rigorous exploration, and joyful play. Stretching along Mass. Ave. and Vassar Street, the familiar brick face of the historic Metropolitan Storage Warehouse may evoke...

One Tuesday morning this past January, So Young Lee walked into a lab on the fourth floor of Building 18 and discovered that her equipment had exploded. It was a minor explosion-thankfully, no one was hurt-but the chemical she had painstakingly made had splattered all over the walls, the ceiling, and the broken shards of...

While AI is accelerating cloud adoption, organizations' reasons for migrating their systems and applications to the cloud remain relatively consistent: a desire to lower capital expenditures, increase agility in a fast-paced business environment, and improve availability of business-critical resources. Flexera's 2024 State of the Cloud Report underscores organizations' consistent desire to make the most 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. Maybe you will be able to live past 122 How long can humans live? This is a good time to ask the question. The longevity scene is having a moment, thanks to a...

Around 2012, at a bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Skylar Tibbits noticed someone wearing a shirt with the logo of a 3D-printing company. Tibbits, a designer and computer scientist, approached her and posed a question: Why can't I print something that walks off the machine?" The idea kicked off a multiyear collaboration between the industrial 3D-printing...

By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Digital scientists will have perfect memory of every research paper ever published and think a million times faster than we can. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics...

Prominent AI researchers expect the arrival of artificial general intelligence anywhere between the next couple of years" and possibly never." At the same time, leading economists disagree about the potential impact of AI: Some anticipate a future of perpetually accelerating productivity, while others project more modest gains. But most experts agree that technological advancement, however...

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first,sign up here. We are living in humanoid summer" right now, if you didn't know. Or at least it feels that way to Ken Goldberg, a roboticist extraordinaire who leads research in the field at the University of...

Rapid advancements in AI technology offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance business operations, customer and employee engagement, and decision-making. Executives are eager to see the potential of AI realized. Among 100 c-suite respondents polled in WNS Analytics' The Future of Enterprise Data & AI" report, 76% say they are already implementing or planning to implement generative...

Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French-people usually...

The UK's Office of National Statistics has an online life expectancy calculator. Enter your age and sex, and the website will, using national averages, spit out the age at which you can expect to pop your clogs. For me, that figure is coming out at 88 years old. That's not too bad, I figure, given...

The other day I idly opened TikTok to find a video of a young woman refinishing an old hollow-bodied electric guitar. It was a montage of close-up shots-looking over her shoulder as she sanded and scraped the wood, peeled away the frets, expertly patched the cracks with filler, and then spray-painted it a radiant purple....

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. Andrew Ng's new model lets you play around with solar geoengineering to see what would happen AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the...

As a lifelong disabled person who constantly copes with multiple conditions, I have a natural tendency to view emerging technologies with skepticism. Most new things are built for the majority of people-in this case, people without disabilities-and the truth of the matter is there's no guarantee I'll have access to them. There are certainly exceptions...

AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the dials of a solar geoengineering model, exploring what might happen if nations attempt to counteract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere. The concept of solar geoengineering was born from the realization that the planet has...

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, we're acknowledging a special birthday. It's 100 years since EEG (electroencephalography) was first used to measure electrical activity in a person's brain. The finding was revolutionary....

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. Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world-and making an edited baby is fully illegal in most countries surveyed by...

Open-source AI is everywhere right now. The problem is, no one agrees on what it actually is. Now we may finally have an answer. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the self-appointed arbiters of what it means to be open source, has released a new definition, which it hopes will help lawmakers develop regulations to protect...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. On a sunny morning in late spring, I found myself carefully examining an array of somewhat unassuming-looking rocks at the American Museum of Natural History. I've gotten to see some cutting-edge technologies...

In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because it was so easy to use. With its discovery, Doudna explained, humanity had achieved the...

Even the most capable robots aren't great at sensing human touch; you typically need a computer science degree or at least a tablet to interact with them effectively. That may change, thanks to robots that can now sense and interpret touch without being covered in high-tech artificial skin. It's a significant step toward robots that...

In 2019, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among...

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 rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet's resources For nearly as long as we've extracted materials from our planet, we've been trying to predict how long they will be...

Leaving aside meteorites that strike Earth's surface and spacecraft that get flung out of its orbit, the quantity of materials available on this planet isn't really changing all that much. That simple fact of our finite resources becomes clearer and more daunting as the pace of technological change advances and our society requires an ever...

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. How to fine-tune AI for prosperity Predictions abound on how the growing list of generative AI models will transform the way we work and organize our lives, providing instant advice on everything from...

When it comes to climate breakdown and the extinction crisis, the question I get most often is: How can we have hope? People ask me this in a range of contexts-in Q&A sessions, in emails, and on podcasts and radio shows, whether I'm doing outreach for my novels, like A Children's Bible or Dinosaurs, or...

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first,sign up here. If you follow drone news closely-and you're forgiven if you don't-you may have noticed over the last few months that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been quite busy. For decades, the agency had been...

When Chad Syverson loads the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website these days looking for the latest data on productivity, he does so with a sense of optimism that he hasn't felt in ages. The numbers for the last year or so have been generally strong for various financial and business reasons, rebounding from the...

Whether pursuing digital transformation, exploring the potential of AI, or simply looking to simplify and optimize existing IT infrastructure, today's organizations must do this in the context of increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. These complicated architectures are here to stay-2023 research by Enterprise Strategy Group, for example, found that 87% of organizations expect their applications 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. The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands...

There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands grabbing at the cool grass. It was taken in 2013, when she was almost one, on an aging Samsung digital camera. I originally stored it on a laptop before transferring it to a chunky...

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 future holds for those born today Happy birthday, baby. You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your...

Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to paranormal dark cabaret afternoon" and synth space," and streaming has become the default. Radio DJs have been replaced by artificial intelligence, and the ritual of discovering something new is neatly...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of themhere. Drones have been a mainstay technology among militaries, hobbyists, and first responders alike for more than a decade, and in that time the range available has skyrocketed....

A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death. His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain. Jean Hebert, a new hire with the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is expected to lead a major new initiative around functional...

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 came across research that suggests aging hits us in waves. You might feel like you're on a slow, gradual decline, but, at the molecular level,...

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. DHS plans to collect biometric data from migrant children down to the infant" The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to collect and analyze photos of the faces of migrant children at...

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. On August 8, at 16:42 local time, a magnitude-7.1 earthquake shook southern Japan. The temblor, originating off the shores of mainland island of Kysh, was felt...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Friday marks two years since the US signed the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law. Now, I'm not usually one to track legislation birthdays. But this particular law is the exception,...

Happy birthday, baby. You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your parents listen in on your tiny heartbeat, track your gestation on an app, and post your sonogram on social media. Well before you were born, you were known to the...

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking into ways it might use facial recognition technology to track the identities of migrant children, down to the infant," as they age, according to John Boyd, assistant director of the department's Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), where a key part of his role is 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. A new public database lists all the ways AI could go wrong What's new: Adopting AI can be fraught with danger. Systems could be biased, or parrot falsehoods, or even become addictive. And...

Adopting AI can be fraught with danger. Systems could be biased, or parrot falsehoods, or even become addictive. And that's before you consider the possibility AI could be used to create new biological or chemical weapons, or even one day somehow spin out of our control. To manage these potential risks, we first need 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. How the auto industry could steer the world toward green steel Steel scaffolds our world, undergirding buildings and machines. It also presents a major challenge for climate change, as steel production is currently...

Steel scaffolds our world, undergirding buildings and machines. It also presents a major challenge for climate change, since steel production largely relies on polluting fossil fuels. The automotive industry could be a key player in turning things around. Steel production is currently responsible for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. There's a growing array...

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 how people are actually using AI When the generative AI boom started with ChatGPT in late 2022, we were sold a vision of superintelligent AI tools that know everything, can replace the...