MIT Technology Review

This August, strange balloons will drift high above Colorado. These airy aircraft, launched from the back of a pickup truck, will be equipped with sensors that can measure heat on the ground, pinpointing new wildfire outbreaks from above. The company behind the balloons, called Urban Sky, also plans to use them to understand conditions on...

If the last five years have taught businesses with complex supply chains anything, it is that resilience is crucial. In the first three months of the covid-19 pandemic, for example, supply-chain leader Amazon grew its business 44%. Its investments in supply chain resilience allowed it to deliver when its competitors could not, says Sanjeev Maddila,...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Corporate climate claims can be confusing-and sometimes entirely unintuitive. Tech giants Amazon and Google both recently released news about their efforts to clean up their climate impact. Both were a mixed bag,...

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. SpaceX's Falcon 9 is one of the world's safest, most productive rockets. But now it's been grounded: A rare engine malfunction on July 11 prompted the US...

In the rhythm of our fast-paced lives, most of us don't stop to think about where electricity comes from or or how it powers homes, industries, and the technologies that connect people around the world. As populations and economies grow, energy demands are set to increase by 50% by 2050-challenging century-old energy systems to adapt...

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. Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech's climate claims Last week, Amazon trumpeted that it had purchased enough clean electricity to cover the energy demands of all its global operations, seven years...

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. This week, we are taking a short break from China and turning to its neighbor South Korea instead. As K-pop sweeps the world and accumulates a massive, devout fan base, these fans...

MIT Technology ReviewExplains: 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. Last week, Amazon trumpeted that it had purchased enough clean electricity to cover the energy demands of all the offices, data centers, grocery stores, and warehouses across its...

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. Music streaming can be a drag on the environment. These K-pop fans want to clean it up. K-pop fans have for years been known for their incredible organizing power. As their numbers have...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It's the simplest questions that are often the hardest to answer. That applies to AI, too. Even though it's a technology being sold as a solution to the world's problems, nobody...

On Valentine's Day 2023, five K-pop fans came to a bustling street in the center of Seoul, one of them in a bee costume. Then they started dancing to Candy" by the boy band NCT Dream and unfurled a banner with a message for Korea's largest domestic music streaming platform: Melon, let's use 100% renewable...

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 can make you more creative-but it has limits Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. But...

All of a sudden, it seems that AI is everywhere, from executive assistant chatbots to AI code assistants. But despite the proliferation of AI in the zeitgeist, many organizations are proceeding with caution. This is due to the perception of the security quagmires AI presents. For the emerging technology to reach its full potential, data...

Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. Texts and media that might have taken years for humans to create can now be generated in seconds. But while AI's output can certainly seem creative, do these models actually boost human...

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. Robot-packed meals are coming to the frozen-food aisle What's happening: Advances in artificial intelligence are coming to your freezer, in the form of robot-assembled prepared meals. Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup, 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. I've just learned that July 11 is World Population Day. There are over 8 billion of us on the planet, and there'll probably be 8.5 billion of us...

Advances in artificial intelligence are coming to your freezer, in the form of robot-assembled prepared meals. Chef Robotics, a San Francisco-based startup, has launched a system of AI-powered robotic arms that can be quickly programmed with a recipe to dole out accurate portions of everything from tikka masala to pesto tortellini. After experiments with leading...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Look on the bottom of a plastic water bottle or takeout container, and you might find a logo there made up of three arrows forming a closed loop shaped like a triangle....

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 is AI? AI is sexy, AI is cool. AI is entrenching inequality, upending the job market, and wrecking education. The AI boom will boost the economy, the AI bubble is about to...

As technology goes, the internet of things (IoT) is old: internet-connected devices outnumbered people on Earth around 2008 or 2009, according to a contemporary Cisco report. Since then, IoT has grown rapidly. Researchers say that by the early 2020s, estimates of the number of devices ranged anywhere from the low tens of billions to over...

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. Can AI help me plan my honeymoon? -Melissa Heikkila I'm getting married later this summer and am feverishly planning a honeymoon together with my fiance. It has been at times overwhelming trying to...

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 getting married later this summer and am feverishly planning a honeymoon together with my fiance. It has been at times overwhelming trying to research and decide between what seem like...

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 use AI to plan your next vacation Planning a vacation should, in theory, be fun. But it can also be time-consuming and stressful, particularly if you don't know where to begin....

MIT Technology Reviews How To series helps you get things done. Planning a vacation should, in theory, be fun. But drawing up a list of activities for a trip can also be time consuming and stressful, particularly if you don't know where to begin. Luckily, tech companies have been competing to create tools that 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 are AI agents? When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned to a new...

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. When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned...

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. Can you spot a liar? It's a question I imagine has been on a lot of minds lately, in the wake of various televised political debates. Research has...

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 polyester-dissolving process could make modern clothing recyclable The news: Less than 1% of clothing is recycled. Most of the rest ends up dumped in a landfill or burned. A team of researchers...

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 nearly two years, I've been thinking about a set of photos of fish I saw at a conference. The presentation was from our ClimateTech event in 2022, when we invited scientists,...

Less than 1% of clothing is recycled, and most of the rest ends up dumped in a landfill or burned. A team of researchers hopes to change that with a new process that breaks down mixed-fiber clothing into reusable, recyclable parts without any sorting or separation in advance. We need a better way to recycle...

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 way to let robots learn by listening will make them more useful Most AI-powered robots today use cameras to understand their surroundings and learn new tasks, but it's becoming easier to train...

Most AI-powered robots today use cameras to understand their surroundings and learn new tasks, but it's becoming easier to train robots with sound too, helping them adapt to tasks and environments where visibility is limited. Though sight is important, there are daily tasks where sound is actually more helpful, like listening to onions sizzling on...

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. People can move this bionic leg just by thinking about it What's new: When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most prosthetics are...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The generative AI boom is built on scale. The more training data, the more powerful the model. But there's a problem. AI companies have pillaged the internet for training data, and...

When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most prosthetics are static, cumbersome, and hard to move. A new neural interface connects a bionic limb to nerve endings in the thigh, allowing the limb to be controlled by the brain. The new device, which is described...

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 AI video games can help reveal the mysteries of the human mind Video gaming companies are applying large language models to generate new game characters with detailed backstories-characters that could engage with...

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 thinking about thought. It was all brought on by reading my colleague Niall Firth's recent cover story about the use of artificial intelligence 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. Training AI music models is about to get very expensive AI music is suddenly in a make-or-break moment. On June 24, Suno and Udio, two startups that let you generate complete songs from...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Some people track sports scores or their favorite artists' tour set lists. Meanwhile, I'm just waiting to hear which climate tech startups are getting big funding awards from government agencies. It's basically...

AI music is suddenly in a make-or-break moment. On June 24, Suno and Udio, two leading AI music startups that make tools to generate complete songs from a prompt in seconds, were sued by major record labels. Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group claim the companies made use of copyrighted music 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. Supershoes are reshaping distance running Since 2016, when Nike introduced the Vaporfly, a paradigm-shifting shoe that helped athletes run more efficiently (and therefore faster), the elite running world has muddled through a period...

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. Whether you've flown a drone before or not, you've probably heard of DJI, or at least seen its logo. With more than a 90% share of the global consumer market, this Shenzhen-based...

The United States has an official web design system and a custom typeface. This public design system aims to make government websites not only good-looking but accessible and functional for all. Before the internet, Americans may have interacted with the federal government by stepping into grand buildings adorned with impressive stone columns and gleaming marble...

For children, play comes so naturally. They don't have to be encouraged to play. They don't need equipment, or the latest graphics processors, or the perfect conditions-they just do it. What's more, study after study has found that play has a crucial role in childhood growth and development. If you want to witness the absolute...

Stijn Lemmens has a cleanup job like few others. A senior space debris mitigation analyst at the European Space Agency (ESA), Lemmens works on counteracting space pollution by collaborating with spacecraft designers and the wider industry to create missions less likely to clutter the orbital environment. Although significant attention has been devoted to launching spacecraft...

The philosopher Karl Popper once argued that there are two kinds of problems in the world: clock problems and cloud problems. As the metaphor suggests, clock problems obey a certain logic. They are orderly and can be broken down and analyzed piece by piece. When a clock stops working, you're able to take it apart,...

In a November 1984 story for Technology Review, Carolyn Sumners, curator of astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, described how toys, games, and even amusement park rides could change how young minds view science and math. The Slinky," Sumners noted, has long served teachers as a medium for demonstrating longitudinal (soundlike) waves and...