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. How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans Police and federal agencies have found a controversial new way to skirt the growing patchwork of laws that curb how...

Police and federal agencies have found a controversial new way to skirt the growing patchwork of laws that curb how they use facial recognition: an AI model that can track people using attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories. The tool, called Track and built by the video analytics company...

As AI technologies become increasingly mainstream, there's mounting competitive pressure to transform traditional infrastructures and technology stacks. Traditional brick-and-mortar companies are finding cloud and data to be the foundational keys to unlocking their paths to digital transformation, and to competing in modern, AI-forward industry landscapes. In this exclusive webcast, experts discuss the building blocks for...

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 new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously What's new: Imagine going for dinner with a group of friends who switch in and out of different languages you don't speak,...

A few years ago, a Belgian man in his 30s drove into a lamppost. Twice. Local authorities found that his blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. Over the space of a few years, the man was apprehended for drunk driving three times. And on all three occasions, he insisted he hadn't been...

Imagine going for dinner with a group of friends who switch in and out of different languages you don't speak, but still being able to understand what they're saying. This scenario is the inspiration for a new AI headphone system that translates the speech of multiple speakers simultaneously, in real time. The system, called Spatial...

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 build a better AI benchmark It's not easy being one of Silicon Valley's favorite benchmarks. SWE-Bench (pronounced swee bench") launched in November 2024 as a way to evaluate an AI model's...

Wednesday, May 21, 2025 Big Tech's appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does even a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate? Join editor in chief Mat Honan, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart, and AI reporter James O'Donnell for a...

Manufacturing is in a state of flux. From supply chain disruptions to rising costs, tougher environmental regulations, and a changing consumer market, the sector faces a series of competing challenges. But a new way of operating offers a way to tackle complexities head-on: adaptive production hardwires flexibility and resilience into the enterprise, drawing on powerful...

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 patient's Neuralink brain implant gets a boost from generative AI Last November, Bradford G. Smith got a brain implant from Elon Musk's company Neuralink. The device, a set of thin wires attached...

Last November, Bradford G. Smith got a brain implant from Elon Musk's company Neuralink. The device, a set of thin wires attached to a computer about the thickness of a few quarters that sits in his skull, lets him use his thoughts to move a computer pointer on a screen. And by last week he...

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. Bryan Johnson wants to start a new religion in which the body is God" Bryan Johnson is on a mission to not die. The 47-year-old multimillionaire has already applied his slogan Don't Die"...

On Thursday I watched Daniela Rus, one of the world's top experts on AI-powered robots, address a packed room at a Boston robotics expo. Rus spent a portion of her talk busting the notion that giant fleets of humanoids are already making themselves useful in manufacturing and warehouses around the world. That might come as...

Bryan Johnson is on a mission to not die. The 47-year-old multimillionaire has already applied his slogan Don't Die" to events, merchandise, and a Netflix documentary. Now he's founding a Don't Die religion. Johnson, who famously spends millions of dollars on scans, tests, supplements, and a lifestyle routine designed to slow or reverse the aging...

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 senior State Department official demanded records of communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort...

Most pigs in the US are confined to factory farms where they can be afflicted by a nasty respiratory virus that kills piglets. The illness is called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, or PRRS. A few years ago, a British company called Genus set out to design pigs immune to this germ using CRISPR gene...

A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between the staff of a small government office focused on online disinformation and a lengthy list of public and private figures-many of whom are longtime targets of the political right. The document, originally shared...

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 long-abandoned US nuclear technology is making a comeback in China China has once again beat everyone else to a clean energy milestone-its new nuclear reactor is reportedly one of the first to...

China has once again beat everyone else to a clean energy milestone-its new nuclear reactor is reportedly one of the first to use thorium instead of uranium as a fuel and the first of its kind that can be refueled while it's running. It's an interesting (if decidedly experimental) development out of a country that's...

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 data set helps researchers spot harmful stereotypes in LLMs What's new? AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the...

AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the problem by spotting harmful stereotypes and other kinds of discrimination that emerge in AI chatbot responses across a wide range of languages. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, led 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. The AI Hype Index: AI agent cyberattacks, racing robots, and musical models Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn't always easy. That's why we've created the AI Hype Index-a simple, at-a-glance summary of...

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn't always easy. That's why we've created the AI Hype Index-a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. AI agents are the AI industry's hypiest new product-intelligent assistants capable of completing tasks without human supervision. But while they can be theoretically...

Right now, despite its ubiquity, AI is seen as anything but a normal technology. There is talk of AI systems that will soon merit the term superintelligence," and the former CEO of Google recently suggested we control AI models the way we control uranium and other nuclear weapons materials. Anthropic is dedicating time and money...

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 Chinese manufacturers are going viral on TikTok Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside...

Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: Let's expose luxury's biggest secret." He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermes Birkin bag, 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. Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound Despite the geopolitical chaos and market collapses triggered by President Trump's announcement of broad tariffs on international goods, some supporters still hope the strategy will...

Despite the geopolitical chaos and market collapses triggered by President Trump's announcement of broad tariffs on international goods, some supporters still hope the strategy will produce a golden age" of American industry. Trump himself insists, Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country." While it's possible that very targeted tariffs could help protect...

Organizations are deepening their cloud investments at an unprecedented pace, recognizing its fundamental role in driving business agility and innovation. Synergy Research Group reports that companies spent $84 billion worldwide on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of 2024, a 23% rise over the third quarter of 2023 and the fourth consecutive quarter 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. Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple's carbon neutral goal We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge...

The past few years have been an almost nonstop parade of good news for climate tech in the US. Headlines about billion-dollar grants from the government, massive private funding rounds, and labs churning out advance after advance have been routine. Now, though, things are starting to shift. About $8 billion worth of US climate tech...

We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest. The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a...

Recorded onApril 23, 2025 Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 byMIT Technology Reviews readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist...

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: the Creativity issue The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist's studio or writers' workshop. But...

A new play about OpenAI I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in...

Ariel Aberg-Riger is the author of America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History.

The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago. I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things...

It all began with a simple origami model. As an undergrad at Harvard, Danna Freedman went to a professor's office hours for her general chemistry class and came across an elegant paper model that depicted the fullerene molecule. The intricately folded representation of chemical bonds and atomic arrangements sparked her interest, igniting a profound curiosity...

After decades of working as a biologist at a Southern school with a Division1 football team, coming to MIT was a bit of a culture shock-in the best possible way. I've heard from MIT alumni all about late-night psetting, when to catch MITHenge, and the best way to celebrate Pi Day (with pie, of course)....

Tiny flying robots could perform such useful tasks as pollinating crops inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture's harmful impacts on the environment. The latest robo-bug from an MIT lab, inspired by the anatomy of the bee, comes closer to matching nature's performance than ever before. Led by Kevin Chen, an associate...

Scientists have known for decades that certain neurons in the hippocampus are dedicated to remembering specific locations where an animal has been. More useful, though, is remembering where places are relative to each other, and it hasn't been clear how those mental maps are formed. A study by MIT neuroscientist Matthew Wilson and colleagues sheds...

In 2018 astronomers at MIT and elsewhere observed previously unseen behavior from a black hole known as 1ES 1927+654, which is about as massive as a million suns and sits in a galaxy 270 million light-years away. Its corona-a cloud of whirling, white-hot plasma-suddenly disappeared before reassembling months later. Now members of the team have...

One costly and time-consuming step in constructing a concrete building is creating the formwork," the wooden mold into which the concrete is poured. Now MIT researchers have developed a way to replace the wood with lightly treated mud. What we've demonstrated is that we can essentially take the ground we're standing on, or waste soil...

Soon after MIT's 18th president, Sally Kornbluth, was inaugurated in May 2023, she made it a priority to expand her early on-campus listening tour to alumni living and working around the world. She wanted to learn more about their priorities and their connections with MIT, while also engaging them in her expansive vision for its...

A new type of glue developed by researchers from MIT and Germany combines sticky polymers inspired by the mussel with the germ-fighting properties of another natural material: mucus. To stick to a rock or a ship, mussels secrete a fluid full of proteins connected by chemical cross-links. As it happens, similar cross-linking features are found...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging in everyday use cases, thanks to advances in foundational models, more powerful chip technology, and abundant data. To become truly embedded and seamless, AI computation must now be distributed-and much of it will take place on device and at the edge. To support this evolution, computation for running AI workloads...

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. $8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025 This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale...

My mind is still sharp and my hands work just fine, so I have no interest in getting help from AI to draw or write stories," says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist best known for his seminal series A Daunting Team, a 1983 manhwa about the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball players. Still,...

Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as paper architecture"). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted...

In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They're the products of living processes-places where coral has grown toward...