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. Propagandists are using AI too-and companies need to be open about it -Josh A. Goldstein is a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), where he works on...

In January 2022, NASA's $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope was approaching the end of its one-million-mile trip from Earth. But reaching its orbital spot would be just one part of its treacherous journey. To ready itself for observations, the spacecraft had to unfold itself in a complicated choreography that, according to its engineers' calculations,...

At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new first" in its corporate history. It wasn't an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists-including players from Russia, China,...

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 AI-powered black box" could make surgery safer The operating room has long been defined by its hush-hush nature because surgeons are notoriously bad at acknowledging their own mistakes. These mistakes kill some...

The first time Teodor Grantcharov sat down to watch himself perform surgery, he wanted to throw the VHS tape out the window. My perception was that my performance was spectacular," Grantcharov says, and then pauses-until the moment I saw the video." Reflecting on this operation from 25 years ago, he remembers the roughness of...

On Tuesday, the FDA asked a panel of experts to weigh in on whether the evidence shows that MDMA, also known as ecstasy, is a safe and efficacious treatment for PTSD. The answer was a resounding no. Just two out of 11 panel members agreed that MDMA-assisted therapy is effective. And only one panel member...

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 classic game is taking on climate change -Casey Crownhart There are two things I love to do at social gatherings: play board games and talk about climate change. Don't I sound like...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. There are two things I love to do at social gatherings: play board games and talk about climate change. Don't I sound like someone you should invite to your next dinner party?...

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 a simple circuit could offer an alternative to energy-intensive GPUs On a table in his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, physicist Sam Dillavou has connected an array of breadboards via a...

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. Have you ever thought about the miraculous fact that despite the myriad differences between languages, virtually everyone uses the same QWERTY keyboards? Many languages have more or fewer than 26 letters in...

On a table in his lab at the University of Pennsylvania, physicist Sam Dillavou has connected an array of breadboards via a web of brightly colored wires. The setup looks like a DIY home electronics project-and not a particularly elegant one. But this unassuming assembly, which contains 32 variable resistors, can learn to sort data...

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 I learned from the UN's AI for Good" summit -Melissa Heikkila Last week, Geneva played host to the UN's AI for Good Summit. The summit's big focus was how AI can be...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Greetings from Switzerland! I've just come back from Geneva, which last week hosted the UN's AI for Good Summit, organized by theInternational Telecommunication Union.The summit's big focus was how AI can...

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's next for MDMA MDMA has been banned in the United States for more than three decades. But now, this potent mind-altering drug is poised to become a badly needed therapy for PTSD....

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. MDMA, sometimes called Molly or ecstasy, has been banned in the United States for more than three decades. Now this potent mind-altering drug is poised to become...

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 Google's AI Overviews gets things wrong When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that Google will do the googling for you."The...

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 here. When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial-intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that Google will do the googling for you." The new feature, called...

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. Here in the US, bird flu has now infected cows in nine states, millions of chickens, and-as of last week-a second dairy worker. There's no indication that the...

If a hiker gets lost in the rugged Scottish Highlands, rescue teams sometimes send up a drone to search for clues of the individual's route-trampled vegetation, dropped clothing, food wrappers. But with vast terrain to cover and limited battery life, picking the right area to search is critical. Traditionally, expert drone pilots use a combination...

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 messy quest to replace drugs with electricity In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor's office. Research into how the nervous system-the highway that carries electrical...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. SUVs are taking over the world-larger vehicle models made up nearly half of new car sales globally in 2023, a new record for the segment. There are a lot of reasons to...

In the early 2010s, electricity seemed poised for a hostile takeover of your doctor's office. Research into how the nervous system controls the immune response was gaining traction. And that had opened the door to the possibility of hacking into the body's circuitry and thereby controlling a host of chronic diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, asthma,...

For years, cloud technology has demonstrated its ability to cut costs, improve efficiencies, and boost productivity. But today's organizations are looking to cloud for more than simply operational gains. Faced with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape, a complex business environment, and rapid technological change, organizations are increasingly recognizing cloud's potential to catalyze business transformation. Cloud can...

Generative AI, like predictive AI before it, has rightly seized the attention of business executives. The technology has the potential to add trillions of dollars to annual global economic activity, and its adoption for business applications is expected to improve the top or bottom lines-or both-at many organizations. While generative AI offers an impressive 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. Quartz, cobalt, and the waste we leave behind It is easy to convince ourselves that we now live in a dematerialized ethereal world, ruled by digital startups, artificial intelligence, and financial services. Yet...

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 quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete -This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published on...

This is an excerpt from The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age by Thomas S. Mullaney, published on May 28 by The MIT Press. It has been lightly edited. ymiw2 klt4 pwyy1 wdy6 o1 dfb2 wdv2 fypw3 uet5 dm2 dlu1 ... A young Chinese man sat down at his QWERTY keyboard 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. That viral video showing a head transplant is a fake. But it might be real someday. An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but...

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 wrote about an external stimulator that delivers electrical pulses to the spine to help improve hand and arm function in people who are paralyzed. This...

An animated video posted this week has a voice-over that sounds like a late-night TV ad, but the pitch is straight out of the far future. The arms of an octopus-like robotic surgeon swirl, swiftly removing the head of a dying man and placing it onto a young, healthy body. This is BrainBridge, the animated...

Modern life is noisy. If you don't like it, noise-canceling headphones can reduce the sounds in your environment. But they muffle sounds indiscriminately, so you can easily end up missing something you actually want to hear. A new prototype AI system for such headphones aims to solve this. Called Target Speech Hearing, the system gives...

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. Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a systemic level" Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Tech companies keep finding new ways to bring AI into every facet of our lives. AI has taken over my search engine results, and new virtual assistants from Google and OpenAI announced...

Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, said the company's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, on Wednesday. The interesting thing so far-I stress, so far-is not how much but how little AI-generated content [there is]," said Clegg during an...

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. Five ways criminals are using AI Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity-to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far...

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. Last week's release of GPT-4o, a new AI omnimodel" that you can interact with using voice, text, or video, was supposed to be a big moment for OpenAI. But just days later,...

Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity-to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before, says Vincenzo Ciancaglini, a senior threat researcher at the security company Trend Micro. Most criminals are not living in some dark...

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. AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I'm excited to spend this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm visiting the mothership forMIT Technology Review's annual flagship AI conference,EmTech Digital, on May 22-23. Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul...

Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other. AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published today in Nature Human Behavior found that some large language models (LLMs)...

Fourteen years ago, a journalist named Melanie Reid attempted a jump on horseback and fell. The accident left her mostly paralyzed from the chest down. Eventually she regained control of her right hand, but her left remained useless," she told reporters at a press conference last week. Now, thanks to a new noninvasive device that...

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. GPT-4o's Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o last Monday, some Chinese speakers started to notice that something seemed off about this newest version of...

In deserts across Australia and South Africa, astronomers are planting forests of metallic detectors that will together scour the cosmos for radio signals. When it boots up in five years or so, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory will look for new information about the universe's first stars and the different stages of galactic evolution. But...

Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, some Chinese speakers started to notice that something seemed off about this newest version of the chatbot: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a PhD student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in...

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 cuddly robots could change dementia care Companion animals can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer's disease, according to studies. Sadly, people with Alzheimer's aren't always...

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, I scoured the internet in search of a robotic dog. I wanted a belated birthday present for my aunt, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease....

Recorded on May 16, 2024 Why thermal batteries are so hot right now Speakers: Casey Crownhart, climate reporter and Amy Nordrum, executive editor Thermal batteries could be a key part of cleaning up heavy industry, and our readers chose them as the 11th breakthrough on MIT Technology Review's 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. Learn what...

Generative AI is poised to unlock trillions in annual economic value across industries. This rapidly evolving field is changing the way we approach everything from content creation to software development, promising never-before-seen efficiency and productivity gains. In this session, experts from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey,discuss the drivers fueling the massive...

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 grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters Last August, a wildfire tore through the Hawaiian island of Maui. The list of missing residents climbed into the...

Seven days No matter who he called-his mother, his father, his brother, his cousins-the phone would just go to voicemail. Cell service was out around Maui as devastating wildfires swept through the Hawaiian island. But while Raven Imperial kept hoping for someone to answer, he couldn't keep a terrifying thought from sneaking into his mind:...