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. How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China's youth As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that...

In the glow of her laptop screen, 31-year-old Zhang Rui typed carefully, following a prompt she'd found on Chinese social media: You are a BaZi master. Analyze my fate-describe my physical traits, key life events, and financial fortune. I am a female, born June 17, 1993, at 4:42 a.m. in Hangzhou." DeepSeek R1, China's most...

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 companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that's backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots...

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 story about a brain of glass. About five years ago, archaeologists found shiny black glass fragments inside the skull of a...

Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that's backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer hot photos," and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as arbitrary" and meant to be broken." When MIT Technology...

OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model. The company claims it is its biggest and best model for all-round chat yet. It's really a step forward for us," says Mia Glaese, a research scientist at OpenAI. Since the releases of its so-called reasoning models o1 and o3, OpenAI...

They look like small pieces of obsidian, smooth and shiny. But a set of small black fragments found inside the skull of a man who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Southern Italy, in the year 79 CE, are thought to be pieces of his brain-turned to glass. The discovery, reported in 2020,...

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. Amazon's first quantum computing chip makes its debut The news: Amazon Web Services has announced Ocelot, its first-generation quantum computing chip. While the chip has only rudimentary computing capability, the company says it...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Flames erupted last Tuesday amid the burned wreckage of the battery storage facility at Moss Landing Power Plant. It happened after a major fire there burned for days and then went quiet...

Amazon Web Services today announced Ocelot, its first-generation quantum computing chip. While the chip has only rudimentary computing capability, the company says it is a proof-of-principle demonstration-a step on the path to creating a larger machine that can deliver on the industry's promised killer applications, such as fast and accurate simulations of new battery materials....

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 Relationships issue Relationships are the stories of people and systems working together. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes for practicality. Sometimes by force. Too often, for purely transactional reasons. That's why we're exploring...

Greetings from a cold winter day. As I write this letter, we are in the early stages of President Donald Trump's second term. The inauguration was exactly one week ago, and already an image from that day has become an indelible symbol of presidential power: a photo of the tech industry's great data barons seated...

Tourists to Odense, Denmark, come for the city's rich history and culture: It's where King Canute, Denmark's last Viking king, was murdered during the 11th century, and the renowned fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen was born there some 700 years later. But today, Odense (with a population just over 210,000) is also home to...

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. The past few months have demonstrated how AI can bring us together. Meta released a model that can translate speech from more than...

A trip to Walmart. An aging German shepherd. A cheap disposable camera. These are just a few of the seemingly mundane things that have sparked the relentlessly imaginative mind of Kurt Schroder '90, leading to some of his groundbreaking inventions. I just can't stop doing it," he says, with a chuckle and a tiny trace...

The tiny beads added to some cleansers and cosmetics are one source of the long-lasting microplastics that threaten the environment. But MIT researchers have found a way to address the problem at its source: replacing them with polymers that break down into harmless sugars and amino acids. Particles of this polymer could also be used...

Wearable devices like smart watches and fitness trackers help us measure and learn from physical functions such as heart rates and sleep stages. Now MIT researchers have developed a tiny equivalent for individual brain cells. These soft, battery-free wireless devices, actuated with light, are designed to wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons...

For all the talk about artificial intelligence upending the world, its economic effects remain uncertain. But Institute Professor and 2024 Nobel winner Daron Acemoglu has some insights. Despite some predictions that AI will double US GDP growth, Acemoglu expects it to increase GDP by 1.1% to 1.6% over the next 10 years, with a roughly...

Although it is less abundant than carbon dioxide, methane gas contributes disproportionately to global warming. Its molecular structure of single carbon atoms bound to four hydrogen atoms makes it a potentially useful building block for products that could keep this carbon out of the atmosphere, but it's hard to get it to react with other...

The cerebral cortex contains regions devoted to processing different types of sensory information, including visual and auditory input. Now researchers led by Robert Desimone, director of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and colleagues have developed the most comprehensive picture yet of what all these regions do. They achieved this by analyzing data collected as...

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...