MIT Technology Review

Imagine a car that doesn't emit any planet-warming gases-or any pollution at all, for that matter. Unlike the EVs on the roads today, it doesn't take an hour or more to charge-just fuel up and go. It sounds too good to be true, but it's the reality of vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells. And...

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. TikTok has become an essential part of the digital landscape. Whether or not it's ultimately banned in the United States (my bet is it won't be), these short videos have transformed large...

In 1900, the recently completed Hotel Fitzpatrick in Washington, Georgia, stood out for its grand Queen Anne architecture, but even more for its technology-it offered electricity, an elevator, and a telephone. When Alfred E. Burton, MIT's first dean (1902-1921), chronicled his expedition to Washington to record a total solar eclipse for Technology Review, he noted...

Our world reflects a carbon divide, with the richest 10% of the population contributing half of net carbon emissions and the poorest 50% bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. So extreme is this climate inequality that marginalized communities are around five times more likely to be displaced by extreme disasters. This growing realization led...

As she walks across Foray's lab on the third floor of The Engine, Ashley Beckwith's eyes brighten. Then, from an incubator, she pulls out petri dishes of wood-like cells that she and her team grew in the lab from black cottonwood plants. They envision turning those cells into wood-based perfumes, cosmetics, oils, and-someday-entire beams and...

Tom Humberstone is a comic artist and illustrator based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

At a showroom in a Boston suburb, Patrick Elisha sat down and began to play the opening measures of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto #2 to demonstrate why Steinway & Sons grand pianos are celebrated in concert halls around the world. Steinways are meticulously crafted instruments: it takes around 250 workers a year to assemble each grand...

A hidden world is fundamentally different from the undiscovered. We know the hidden world is there. We just can't see it or reach it. Something about this tantalizing proximity has fascinated us throughout history. The blank spaces on the map that Joseph Conrad referred to in Heart of Darkness were, to Europeans, hidden worlds. The...

More than 9,000 metric tons of human-made metal and machinery are orbiting Earth, including satellites, shrapnel, and the International Space Station. But a significant bulk of that mass comes from one source: the nearly a thousand dead rockets that have been discarded in space since the space age began. Now, for the first time, 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. China's next cultural export could be TikTok-style short soap operas Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they...

Like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I find that my personal feed tends to be hit or miss. Usually more miss. The movies and shows the algorithms recommend often seem less predicated on my viewing history and ratings, and more geared toward promoting whatever's newly available. Still, when a superhero movie starring one of the...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. There has been some really encouraging news in thefight against deepfakes. A couple of weeks ago the US Federal Trade Commissionannouncedit is finalizing rules banning the use of deepfakes that impersonate...

Over a decade ago, Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed, carefully timing his breathing. Around him, 20 wireless transceivers stood sentry. As Patwari's chest rose and fell, their electromagnetic waves rippled around him. Patwari, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, had just demonstrated that those ripples could reveal his breathing patterns....

Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they got a casting call for their first shot at live-action content: a Chinese series called Adored by the CEO, which was being remade for an American audience. Coker was hired to dub...

In the ever-evolving landscape of customer experiences, AI has become a beacon guiding businesses toward seamless interactions. While AI has been transforming businesses long before the latest wave of viral chatbots, the emergence of generative AI and large language models represents a paradigm shift in how enterprises engage with customers and manage internal workflows. We...

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. Trump wants to unravel Biden's landmark climate law. Here is what's most at risk. President Joe Biden's crowning legislative achievement was enacting the Inflation Reduction Act, easily the nation's largest investment into addressing...

Selena Deckelmann has never been afraid of people on the internet. With a TV repairman and CB radio enthusiast for a grandfather and a pipe fitter for a stepdad, Deckelmann grew up solving problems by talking and tinkering. So when she found her way to Linux, one of the earliest open-source operating systems, as a...

This is one of the least visited places on planet Earth and I got to open the door," Matty Jordan, a construction specialist at New Zealand's Scott Base in Antarctica, wrote in the caption to the video he posted to Instagram and TikTok in October 2023. In the video, he guides viewers through an empty,...

President Joe Biden's crowning legislative achievement was enacting the Inflation Reduction Act, easily the nation's largest investment into addressing the rising dangers of climate change. Yet Donald Trump's advisors and associates have clearly indicated that dismantling the landmark law would sit at the top of the Republican front-runner's to-do list should he win the presidential...

MIT Technology Review is celebrating our 125th anniversary with an online series that draws lessons for the future from our past coverage of technology. In the nuclear magnetic resonance facility at Mississippi State University, three powerful magnets make it possible to see how atoms form bonds. Chemists there use the technology to design new polymers...

MIT immunoengineer Michal Mikki" Tal remembers the exact moment she had an insight that would change the trajectory of her research, getting her hooked on studying a long-neglected disease that leaves millions of Americans suffering without treatment. It was 2017, and she was a Stanford postdoc exploring connections between her immune regulation research and immuno-oncology,...

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 weird way Alabama's embryo ruling takes on artificial wombs A ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court last week that frozen embryos count as children is sending shock waves" through the fertility industry...

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. A ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court last week that frozen embryos stored in labs count as children is sending shock waves" through the fertility...

The other day some preschoolers were pretending to be one of their favorite Sesame Street characters, a baby goat named Ma'zooza who likes round things. They played with tomatoes-counting up to five, hiding one, and putting it back. A totally ordinary moment exploring shapes, numbers, and imagination. Except this version of Sesame Street-called Ahlan Simsim...

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 tracking animal movement may save the planet Animals have long been able to offer unique insights about the natural world around us, acting as organic sensors picking up phenomena invisible to humans....

This spring I am looking forward to growing some biotech in my backyard for the first time. It's possible because of startups that have started selling genetically engineered plants directly to consumers, including a bright-purple tomato and a petunia that glows in the dark. This week, for $73, I ordered both by pressing a few...

There was something strange about the way the sharks were moving between the islands of the Bahamas. Tiger sharks tend to hug the shoreline, explains marine biologist Austin Gallagher, but when he began tagging the 1,000-pound animals with satellite transmitters in 2016, he discovered that these predators turned away from it, toward two ancient underwater...

An AI-trained surgical robot that can make a few stitches on its own is a small step toward systems that can aid surgeons with such repetitive tasks. A video taken by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, shows the two-armed robot completing six stitches in a row on a simple wound in imitation skin,...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. For someone who does not own or drive a car, I sure do have a lot of thoughts about them. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about transportation in general,...

With more than 5,000 branches across 48 states and 80 million customers, each with its own unique requirements to satisfy its customers' financial needs, a clear data strategy is key for JPMorgan Chase. According to Mark Birkhead, firm-wide chief data officer at JPMorgan Chase, data analytics is the oxygen that breathes life into the firm...

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. Meet the divers trying to figure out how deep humans can go Two hundred thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, Richard Harry" Harris knew that not far ahead...

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. The first time I heard the term virtual power plants," I was reporting on how extreme heat waves in 2022 had overwhelmed the Chinese grid and led the government to restrict electric-vehicle...

Two hundred thirty meters into one of the deepest underwater caves on Earth, Richard Harry" Harris knew that not far ahead of him was a 15-meter drop leading to a place no human being had seen before. Getting there had taken two helicopters, three weeks of test dives, two tons of equipment, and hard work...

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 hunt for new physics at the world's largest particle collider In 2012, using data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider, researchers discovered a particle called the Higgs boson. In the process, they...

Gary Marcus meets me outside the post office of Vancouver's Granville Island wearing neon-coral sneakers and a blue Arc'teryx jacket. I'm in town for a family thing, and Marcus has lived in the city since 2018, after 20 years in New York City. I just find it to be paradise," he tells me, as I...

In 1977, Ray and Charles Eames released a remarkable film that, over the course of just nine minutes, spanned the limits of human knowledge. Powers of Ten begins with an overhead shot of a man on a picnic blanket inside a one-square-meter frame. The camera pans out: 10, then 100 meters, then a kilometer, 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 search for extraterrestrial life is targeting Jupiter's icy moon Europa Europa, Jupiter's fourth-largest moon, is nothing like ours. Its surface is a vast saltwater ocean, encased in a blanket of cracked ice,...

We've known of Europa's existence for more than four centuries, but for most of that time, Jupiter's fourth-largest moon was just a pinprick of light in our telescopes-a bright and curious companion to the solar system's resident giant. Over the last few decades, however, as astronomers have scrutinized it through telescopes and six spacecraft have...

Recorded on February 15, 2024 Building a Cleaner Future: Better Batteries and Their Materials Speakers: Casey Crownhart, Climate reporter, David Rotman, Editor at large, James Temple, Sr Editor of Climate & Energy Electric vehicles are taking to the roads like never before, and a grid with a growing share of renewables like wind and solar...

On a warm, sunny day in Montevideo, Uruguay, the air is smogless and crisp. Inside a highly secured facility at the National Institute of Agricultural Research (INIA) are a sophisticated gene gun, giant microscopes, and tens of thousands of gene-edited flies, their bright blue wings fluttering against the walls of their small, white, netted cages....

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. OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a...

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. Lynn Cole had a blood infection she couldn't shake. For years, she was in and out of the hospital. Each time antibiotics would force the infection...

OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a detailed, high-definition film clip up to a minute long. Based on four sample videos that OpenAI shared with MIT Technology Review ahead of today's announcement, the San Francisco-based firm has pushed the...

The sudden appearance of application-ready generative AI tools over the last year has confronted us with challenging social and ethical questions. Visions of how this technology could deeply alter the ways we work, learn, and live have also accelerated conversations-and breathless media headlines-about how and whether these technologies can be responsibly used. Responsible technology use,...

Google DeepMind today launched the next generation of its powerful artificial-intelligence model Gemini, which has an enhanced ability to work with large amounts of video, text, and images. It's an advancement from the three versions of Gemini 1.0 that Google announced back in December, ranging in size and complexity from Nano to Pro to Ultra....

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. Three things to love about batteries It's hard to pick favorites when it comes to climate technologies. Really, anything that helps us get closer to tackling climate change is worth writing about, both...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I wouldn't exactly say I have favorites when it comes to climate technologies. Anything that could help us get closer to tackling climate change is worth writing about, both to share the...

Whether your favorite condiment is Heinz ketchup or your preferred spread for your bagel is Philadelphia cream cheese, ensuring that all customers have access to their preferred products at the right place, at the right price, and at the right time requires careful supply chain organization and distribution. Amid the proliferation of e-commerce and shifting...

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 internet pushed China's New Year red packet tradition to the extreme If you ask any child in China what's the most exciting thing about the Lunar New Year, they are likely...