MIT Technology Review

Thinking big, aiming high, and making a difference were rules of the road embedded during my time at MIT," says Irene Cheng, SM '78, who went on to a successful Wall Street career as a managing director at Lazard Asset Management after earning a graduate degree in chemical engineering from the Institute. I was helped...

Filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri, SM '17, uses diverse media and techniques to delve deeply into his cultural identity, connecting him with the colonial history of his family's ancestral home: Goa, India. An alumnus of the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program, Sanzgiri uses a unique approach combining such things as analysis of historical texts and 3D...

Customer service experiences can really stick with you-a positive interaction can inspire brand loyalty, and a negative one can prompt a complete boycott. But encounters with automated customer interfaces, which often rely on limited phone menus or inept chatbots, rarely generate rave reviews. So Liz Tsai '11, SM '13, came up with an alternative. In...

What can be done to prevent war? That's the question that drives Neta Crawford, PhD '92, who chaired the political science department at Boston University from 2018 until 2022 and is now a professor of international relations at Oxford University. The answer, she believes, is for people to reject armed conflict as an acceptable way...

When Royal Dutch Shell solicited proposals for a new research center in Belgium in 1985, it received the usual series of plans for lifeless concrete bunkers. Philippe Samyn, SM '73, took a different tack. Noting the site's sloping valley and charming beech forest, he envisioned a grouping of administrative buildings and labs connected by streets...

In 1936, when John Francis Brady '48, SM '50, was in second grade, he was diagnosed with rheumatic fever. His doctors, following the practice of the day, prescribed complete rest. He wasn't even allowed to climb stairs. So when it came time to start third grade, which was taught on the third floor of his...

When Sawaka Kawashima Romaine '01 became president of MIT's Club of Japan in 2022, she was the first woman to hold the office in the club's more than 110-year history. Understandably, she felt a lot of pressure. I had just given birth to my first child, and I had also recently changed jobs, so it...

When I was a teenager in South Jersey and getting a driving lesson from my dad, he casually mentioned that I should look in the rearview mirror every now and then to see what was going on behind me. To borrow an expression from my Italian grandmother, I remained with my mouth open-that is, I...

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 AI in 2024 This time last year our AI writers did something reckless. In an industry where nothing stands still, they had a go at predicting the future. Turns out,...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The world is building and making things as never before, from roads and hospitals to vehicles and furniture. That's good news for people who benefit from new goods and infrastructure, but it's...

In the past 20 years, hundreds of companies, including giants like Google, Microsoft, and IBM, have staked a claim in the rush to establish quantum computing. Investors have put in well over $5 billion so far. All this effort has just one purpose: creating the world's next big thing. Quantum computers use the counterintuitive rules...

When British forces raided the African kingdom of Benin in the late 19th century, they took with them thousands of sculptures dating back centuries. Sold to private collectors and museums in the Global North, the artifacts, known as the Benin Bronzes, included ceremonial swords, ritualistic statues, and musical instruments that belonged to the Edo people....

This time last year we did something reckless. In an industry where nothing stands still, we had a go at predicting the future. How did we do? Our four big bets for 2023 were that the next big thing in chatbots would be multimodal (check: the most powerful large language models out there, OpenAI's GPT-4...

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 electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain Cement hides in plain sight-it's used to build everything from roads and buildings to dams and basement floors. But it's also a climate threat....

As sweltering ocean temperatures make graveyards of coral reefs across the Caribbean and beyond, a team of scientists is scrambling to cool corals down. Way down. To -200 C. The Coral Biobank Alliance, helmed in part by Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute biologist Mary Hagedorn, aims to cryopreserve or otherwise keep in captivity the roughly 1,000...

Cement hides in plain sight-it's used to build everything from roads and buildings to dams and basement floors. But there's a climate threat lurking in those ubiquitous gray slabs. Cement production accounts for more than 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions-more than sectors like aviation, shipping, or landfills. Humans have been making cement, in one...

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. We've never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change. When you're starving, hunger is like a demon. It awakens the most ancient and primitive parts of the brain, then commandeers...

You haven't seen hungry until you've seen Brad Lowell's mice. A few years ago, Lowell-a Harvard University neuroscientist-and a postdoc, Mike Krashes, figured out how to turn up the volume on the drive for food as high as it can go. They did it by stimulating a bundle of neurons in the hypothalamus, an area...

In September 2017, about two minutes before a magnitude 8.2 earthquake struck Mexico City, blaring sirens alerted residents that a quake was coming. Such alerts, which are now available in the United States, Japan, Turkey, Italy, and Romania, among other countries, have changed the way we think about the threat of earthquakes. They no longer...

In its final weeks, the Obama administration released a report that rippled through the federal science and technology community. Titled Ensuring Long-Term US Leadership in Semiconductors, it warned that as conventional ways of building chips brushed up against the laws of physics, the United States was at risk of losing its edge in the chip...

The surge of climate-tech startups seeking to reinvent clean energy and transform huge industrial markets is fueling optimism about our prospects for addressing climate change. Tens of billions are pouring into these venture-backed companies in just about every field you can imagine, from green steel to nuclear fusion. As I explain in Climate tech is...

When athletes or soldiers have a concussion, the most beneficial course of action is to simply get them off the playing field or out of the action so they can recover. Yet much about head injuries remains a mystery, including the reasons why some impacts result in concussion while others don't. But new measuring devices...

What is the true value of a honeybee? A mountain stream? A mangrove tree? Gretchen Daily, cofounder and faculty director of the Stanford Natural Capital Project, has dedicated her career to answering such complex questions. Using emerging scientific data and the project's innovative open-source software, Daily and her team help governments, international banks, and NGOs...

What if all you needed to lose weight were some good vibrations? That's the idea behind a new weight-loss pill that tricks the brain into thinking the stomach is full, by stimulating the nerve endings that sense when the stomach expands. The capsule, about the size of a large vitamin, houses a tiny motor 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. The worst technology failures of 2023 Welcome to our annual list of the worst technologies. This year, one technology disaster in particular holds lessons for the rest of us: the Titan submersible that...

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. Welcome back to The Checkup. This will be our last issue of 2023, so this week I've been reflecting on our biotechnology coverage over the past...

Welcome to our annual list of the worst technologies. This year, one technology disaster in particular holds lessons for the rest of us: the Titan submersible that imploded while diving to see the Titanic. Everyone had warned Stockton Rush, the sub's creator, that it wasn't safe. But he believed innovation meant tossing out the rule...

When the Canadian engineer Harold Orr and his colleagues began designing an ultra-efficient home in Saskatchewan in the late '70s, responding to a provincial conservation mandate during the oil embargo, they knew that the trick wasn't generating energy in a greener way, but using less of it. They needed to make a better thermos, not...

If you think about it, there are so many people we meet on the internet daily whose real names we will never know. The TikTok teen who learned the trendy new dance, the anime artist who uploaded a new painting, the random commenter who posted under a YouTube video you just watched. That's the internet...

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. Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTML Websites weren't always slick digital experiences. There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This has been quite the year for climate news, with weather disasters, technological breakthroughs, and policy changes making headlines around the world. There's an abundance of bad news, but there are also...

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. There was some good climate news in 2023. Really. Scientists are loudly warning that the world is running out of time to avoid dangerous warming levels. The picture is grim. But if you...

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 new year will be here soon! Typically, it's a great time for a fresh start. But not always. And today I want to talk about something that's unfortunately moving in the...

Google Glass, a prototype augmented-reality headset released in April 2013, had the makings of a hit. It promised intuitive, hands-free access to a smartphone's most important features-video recording, navigation, and even email. Forget touch screens and buttons: the future of computing was on your face. It was a disaster. Though beautiful in concept, Glass was...

Bad climate news was everywhere in 2023. It's been the hottest year on record, with January through November clocking in at 1.46 C (2.62 F) warmer on average than preindustrial temperatures. Meanwhile, emissions from fossil fuels hit a new high-36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, 1.1% more than in 2022. Scientists are loudly warning...

I composed the following palindromes in honor of the 125th anniversary of MIT Technology Review. They include what I call a punctuate-it-yourself" (or p-i-y) palindrome on James Mason Crafts. (Volume I, Issue 1 of the Review contained a lengthy profile of Crafts, who served as MIT's fourth president and held the office from 1897 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. These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI The internet changed everything-how we work and play, how we spend time with friends and family, how we learn, how we consume, how...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This has been one of the craziest years in AI in a long time: endless product launches, boardroom coups, intense policy debates about AI doom, and a race to find the...

It was a stranger who first brought home for me how big this year's vibe shift was going to be. As we waited for a stuck elevator together in March, she told me she had just used ChatGPT to help her write a report for her marketing job. She hated writing reports because she didn't...

After years of committing to sustainable practices in his personal life from recycling to using cloth-based diapers, Asim Hussain, currently the director of green software and ecosystems at Intel, began to ask questions about the practices in his work: software development. Developers often asked if their software was secure enough, fast enough, or cost-effective enough...

One can't step into the same river twice. This simple representation of change as the only constant was taught by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus more than 2000 years ago. Today, it rings truer than ever with the advent of generative AI. The emergence of generative AI is having a profound effect on today's enterprises-business leaders...

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 hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are...

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. We're already at that time of year when we start looking ahead to what's coming in 2024. For Technocrat readers (and the rest of the...

We're all teeming with microbes. We've got guts full of them, and they're crawling all over our skin. These tiny, ancient life forms have evolved with us. And over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important they are to our health and well-being. They help extract nutrients from our...

The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history. And election campaigns are using artificial intelligence in novel ways. Earlier this year in the US, the Republican...

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. Vertex developed a CRISPR cure. It's already on the hunt for something better. The company that just got approval to sell the first gene-editing treatment in history, for sickle-cell disease, is already looking...

The company that just got approval to sell the first gene-editing treatment in history, for sickle-cell disease, is already looking for an ordinary drug that could take its place. Vertex Pharmaceuticals has a 50-person team working to make a pill that doesn't do gene editing at all," says David Altshuler, head of research at the...

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. Covid shots do an admirable job of boosting our immune response enough to protect against serious illness, but they don't boost immunity in the one spot...

OpenAI has announced the first results from its superalignment team, the firm's in-house initiative dedicated to preventing a superintelligence-a hypothetical future computer that can outsmart humans-from going rogue. Unlike many of the company's announcements, this heralds no big breakthrough. In a low-key research paper, the team describes a technique that lets a less powerful large...