MIT Technology Review

Minnesota's Highway 210 threads through the tiny towns of Aitkin County, a poor and sparsely populated stretch of forests, lakes, and wetlands that reaches just into the northeastern corner of the state. A short drive off the highway, due south past the Tamarack Church, delivers you to Jackson's Hole, the last remaining business in 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. Last week the AI world was buzzing over a new paper inNature from Google DeepMind, in which the lab managed to create an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems....

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Reviews weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. The Iowa caucuses on January 15 officially kicked off the 2024 presidential election.I've said it before and I'll say it again-the biggest story of this...

For many people, covid is an illness that blusters in and out of our lives as cases spike and recede. But for tens of millions of others, a case of covid is the beginning of a chronic and sometimes debilitating illness that persists for months or even years. What makes individuals with long covid different...

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 brain-dead man was attached to a gene-edited pig liver for three days Surgeon Abraham Shaked thinks he has probably carried out more than 2,500 liver transplants. But in December 2023, the team...

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. Hooked up to a ventilation machine, a person can be dead in the eyes of the law, medical professionals, and loved ones, yet still alive enough...

Raesetje Sefala grew up sharing a bedroom with her six siblings in a cramped township in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The township's inhabitants, predominantly Black people, had inadequate access to schools, health care, parks, and hospitals. But just a few miles away in Limpopo, white families lived in big, attractive houses, with easy...

Surgeon Abraham Shaked thinks he has probably carried out more than 2,500 liver transplants. But in December 2023, a team he oversees at the University of Pennsylvania did something he'd never tried before. Working on the body of a brain-dead man, they attached his veins to a refrigerator-size machine with pig liver mounted in 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. Exascale computers: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 In May 2022, the global supercomputer rankings were shaken up by the launch of Frontier. It's the fastest supercomputer in the world, and can perform as many...

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've got nuclear power on the brain this week. The workings of nuclear power plants have always fascinated me. They're massive, technically complicated, and feel a little bit magic (splitting the atom-what...

For more than a month in total, 12 metric tons of molten salt coursed through pipes at Kairos Power in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company is developing a new type of nuclear reactor that will be cooled using this salt mixture, and its first large-scale test cooling system just completed 1,000 hours of operation in...

In business, the acceleration of change means enterprises have to live in the future, not the present. Having the tools and technologies to enable forward-thinking and underpin digital transformation is key to survival. Supply chain procurement leaders are tasked with improving operational efficiencies and keeping an eye on the bottom line. For Raimundo Martinez, global...

A new AI system could help detect the most common form of pancreatic cancer, new research has found. Pancreatic cancer is a difficult disease to detect. The pancreas itself is hidden by other organs in the abdomen, making it tough to spot tumors during tests. Patients also rarely experience symptoms in the early stages, meaning...

Google DeepMind has created an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems. It's a significant step towards machines with more human-like reasoning skills, experts say. Geometry, and mathematics more broadly, have challenged AI researchers for some time. Compared with text-based AI models, there is significantly less training data for mathematics because it is symbol...

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. Twitter killers: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 For the better part of 17 years, the roiling, rolling, fractious, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, never-ever-ending global conversation had a central home: Twitter. If you wanted to...

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 year was a banner year for artificial intelligence. Thanks to products like ChatGPT, many millions of people are now directly interacting with AI, talking about it, and grappling with its impact...

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. Apple Vision Pro: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 History is littered with doomed face computers. Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens, and even Meta's Quest line all flopped. Now, it's Apple's turn to try. At the...

There was one individual Olympic spot left. According to the intricate set of rules governing who gets slots for the games, it would come down to who placed highest in the high bar final: Croatia's Tin Srbi or Brazil's Arthur Nory Mariano. They were at the 2023 World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, last October. Mariano...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Welcome back to The Algorithm! I have a chair of shame at home. By that I mean a chair in my bedroom onto which I pile used clothes that aren't quite...

In 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby said, data is the new oil." While the phrase is almost a cliche, the advent ofgenerative AIis breathing new life into this idea. A global study on theFuture of Enterprise Data & AI by WNS Triange and Corinium Intelligence shows 76% of C-suite leaders and decision-makers are planning or...

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. Super-efficient solar cells: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 In November 2023, a buzzy solar technology broke yet another world record for efficiency. The previous record had existed for only about five months-and it likely...

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Reviews weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. We're only a few weeks into 2024, and violations of people's privacy are already making some big headlines! First we had the continued drama with...

Sophisticated robots don't have to cost a fortune. Even relatively cheap robots can do complex manipulation tasks and learn new skills quickly using AI, a new study has shown. With just $32,000, researchers from Stanford University managed to build a wheeled robot that can cook a three-course Cantonese meal with human supervision. Then they used...

In Swift Solar's lab, more than a dozen pairs of elbow-length rubber gloves hover horizontally in midair, inflated like arms. The gloves are animated by gaseous nitrogen and jut out of waist-high, glass-walled enclosures, designed to keep the workspaces dry and airtight to protect the delicate solar materials inside. In a corner, technician Roger Thompson...

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. Heat pumps: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 We've entered the era of the heat pump. Heat pumps are appliances that can cool and heat spaces using electricity. Many buildings today are still heated with...

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. Therapies to treat brain diseases share a common problem: they struggle to reach their target. The blood vessels that permeate the brain have a special lining...

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. Enhanced geothermal systems: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 Geothermal heat, an abundant and carbon-free energy source, offers an alternative to fossil fuels that doesn't vary with the weather or time of day. However, conventional...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Awards season is upon us, and I can't get enough. Red-carpet fashion, host drama, heartwarming speeches-I love it all. I caught the Golden Globes last weekend, and the Grammys and Oscars aren't...

Although AI is by no means a new technology there have been massive and rapid investments in it and large language models. However, the high-performance computing that powers these rapidly growing AI tools - and enables record automation and operational efficiency - also consumes a staggering amount of energy. With the proliferation of AI comes...

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. Weight-loss drugs: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 One-third of US adults have obesity, a condition that makes them more susceptible to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. However, there's huge hope that anti-obesity drugs-including Wegovy...

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. Happy New Year! I hope you had a good rest over the holidays and feel ready to take on 2024. But for one more time, please allow me to indulge in a...

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 our series here. It's a turbulent time for offshore wind power. Large groups of turbines installed along coastlines can harness the powerful, consistent winds that blow offshore. Given...

As organizations recognize the transformational opportunity presented by generative AI, they must consider how to deploy that technology across the enterprise in the context of their unique industry challenges, priorities, data types, applications, ecosystem partners, and governance requirements. Financial institutions, for example, need to ensure that data and AI governance has the built-in intelligence 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. AI for everything: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, nobody knew what was coming. But that low-key release changed everything, and by January, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Happy new year! I hope you had a relaxing break. I spent it up in the Arctic Circle skiing, going to the sauna, and playing card games with my family by...

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: MIT Technology Review's 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2024 The start of a new year offers a great opportunity to reflect while also thinking about what's to come. That is especially true for...

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review's weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. In the US and elsewhere, 2023 was a blockbuster year for artificial intelligence and AI regulation, and this next year is guaranteed to bring even...

WHO CRISPR Therapeutics, Editas Medicine, Precision BioSciences, Vertex Pharmaceuticals WHEN Now The first gene-editing cure has arrived. Grateful patients are calling it life changing." It was only 11 years ago that scientists first developed the potent DNA-snipping technology called CRISPR. Now they've brought CRISPR out of the lab and into real medicine with a treatment...

WHO Daikin, Mitsubishi, Viessmann WHEN Now We've entered the era of the heat pump. Heat pumps are appliances that can cool and heat spaces using electricity. Many buildings today are still heated with fossil fuels, specifically natural gas. Switching to electric heat pumps that run on renewable energy could help homes, offices, and even manufacturing...

WHO Bluesky, Discord, Mastodon, Nostr, Threads WHEN Now For the better part of 17 years, the roiling, rolling, fractious, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, never-ever-ending global conversation had a central home: Twitter. If you wanted to know what was happening and what people were talking about right now, it was the only game in town. But...

WHO Eli Lilly, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Viking Therapeutics WHEN Now One-third of US adults have obesity, a condition that makes them more susceptible to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Anti-obesity drugs-including Wegovy and Mounjaro-could help address this public health crisis. Success stories are everywhere online, from Reddit to TikTok. Novo Nordisk, the company behind...

WHO AltaRock Energy, Fervo Energy, Utah FORGE lab WHEN 3 to 5 years Geothermal heat, an abundant and carbon-free energy source, offers an alternative to fossil fuels that doesn't vary with the weather or time of day. However, conventional geothermal plants require specific geological conditions-in particular, permeable rocks with water sources. Because of this, geothermal...

WHO Beyond Silicon, Caelux, First Solar, Hanwha Q Cells, Oxford PV, Swift Solar, Tandem PV WHEN 3 to 5 years In November 2023, a buzzy solar technology broke yet another world record for efficiency. The previous record had existed for only about five months-and it likely won't be long before it too is obsolete. This...

WHO Advanced Micro Devices, Intel, Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express WHEN Now Packaging. It may sound boring, but it's an essential part of building computer systems. Now companies are defining what that looks like for a new generation of machines. For decades, chipmakers have improved performance by making transistors smaller and cramming more of them...

WHO Oak Ridge National Lab, Julich Supercomputing Centre, China's Supercomputing Center in Wuxi WHEN Now In May 2022, the global supercomputer rankings were shaken up by the launch of Frontier. Now the fastest supercomputer in the world, it can perform more than 1 quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second. That's a 1 followed by 18...

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 produce rare earth materials Abandoning fossil fuels and adopting lower-carbon technologies are our best options for warding off the accelerating threat of climate change. And access to rare earth elements,...

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. This week I came across a paper that uses AI in a way that I hadn't heard of before. Researchers developed a smartphone app that can...

Abandoning fossil fuels and adopting lower-carbon technologies are our best options for warding off the accelerating threat of climate change. Access to rare earth elements, key ingredients in many of these technologies, will partly determine which countries will meet their goals for lowering emissions or increasing the proportion of electricity generated from non-fossil-fuel sources. But...

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 our series here. In 2023, AI policy and regulation went from a niche, nerdy topic to front-page news. This is partly thanks to OpenAI's ChatGPT, which helped AI...