MIT Technology Review

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. I am writing this because one of my editors woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled on a bedside notepad: What is a...

Nandan Nilekani can't stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state capacity that started with Aadhaar-the world's largest digital identity system. Aadhaar means foundation" in Hindi, and on that bedrock Nilekani and people working with him went on to build a sprawling...

Ever since nuclear fusion was discovered in the 1930s, scientists have wondered if we could somehow replicate and harness the phenomenon behind starlight-the smashing together of hydrogen atoms to form helium and a stupendous amount of clean energy. Fusing hydrogen would yield 200 million times more energy than simply burning it. Unlike nuclear fission, which...

Jaden Chizuruoke May '29 worked with teammates Rihanna Arouna '29 and Marian Akinsoji '29 to design the chemically powered model car whose framework he is building in this scene from the Huang-Hobbs BioMaker Space, where students have a chance to work safely and independently with biological systems. The assignment to build the car-and the layered...

As MIT navigates a difficult and constantly changing higher education landscape, I believe our best response is not easy but simple: Keep doing our very best work. The presidential initiatives we've launched since fall 2024 are a vital part of our strategy to advance excellence within and across high-impact fields, from health care, climate, and...

Nearly everyone has experienced it-after a night of poor sleep, your brain might seem foggy, and your mind drifts off when you should be paying attention. A new MIT study reveals what happens biologically as these momentary lapses occur: Your brain is performing essential maintenance that it usually takes care of while you sleep. During...

Right now, MIT alumni and friends are voicing their support for: America's scientific and technological leadership Merit-based admissions and affordable education Advances that increase US health, security, and prosperity Our community is standing up for MIT and its mission to serve the nation and the world. And we need you to join us at this...

Lithium-ion batteries produce faint sounds as they charge, discharge, and degrade. But until now, nobody could interpret those sounds to detect when a battery might be about to lose power, fail, or burst into flames. Now, MIT engineers have found a way to do that, even with noisy data. The findings could provide the basis...

Earthquakes are driven by energy stored up in rocks over millennia-energy that, once released, we perceive mainly in the form of the ground's shaking. But a quake also generates a flash of heat and fractures and damages underground rocks. And exactly how much energy goes into each of these three processes is exceedingly difficult to...

Concrete already builds our world, and an MIT-invented variant known as electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3, pronounced e c cubed") holds out the possibility of helping power it, too. Now that vision is one step closer. Made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black, and electrolytes, ec3 creates a conductive nanonetwork" that could enable walls, sidewalks,...

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 2026 In an industry in constant flux, sticking your neck out to predict what's coming next may seem reckless. (AI bubble? What AI bubble?) But for the last...

Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers of the 4th Light Brigade, also known as the Black Rats, descended upon the damp forests of Estonia's eastern territories. They had rushed in from Yorkshire by air, sea, rail, and road. Once there, the Rats joined 14,000 other troops at the front line, dug in, and waited for 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. Sometimes AI feels like a niche topic to write about, but then the holidays happen, and I hear relatives of all ages talking about cases of chatbot-induced psychosis, blaming rising electricity prices...

When business leaders talk about digital transformation, their focus often jumps straight to cloud platforms, AI tools, or collaboration software. Yet, one of the most fundamental enablers of how organizations now work, and how employees experience that work, is often overlooked: audio. As Genevieve Juillard, CEO of IDC, notes, the shift to hybrid collaboration made...

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. Welcome to Kenya's Great Carbon Valley: a bold new gamble to fight climate change In June last year, startup Octavia Carbon began running a high-stakes test in the small town of Gilgil in...

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 them here. In an industry in constant flux, sticking your neck out to predict what's coming next may seem reckless. (AI bubble? What AI bubble?) But for the...

The most amazing drummer on the internet My daughter introduced me to El Estepario Siberiano's YouTube channel a few months back, and I have been obsessed ever since. The Spanish drummer (real name: Jorge Garrido) posts videos of himself playing supercharged cover versions of popular tracks, hitting his drums with such jaw-dropping speed and technique...

The Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has been preparing for a surgery that might never happen. His idea? Swap a sick person's head-or perhaps just the brain-onto a younger, healthier body. Canavero caused a stir in 2017 when he announced that a team he advised in China had exchanged heads between two corpses. But he never...

We're in the midst of a global mental-health crisis. More than a billion people worldwide suffer from a mental-health condition, according to the World Health Organization. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is growing in many demographics, particularly young people, and suicide is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives globally each year. Given the clear...

Pollution from textile production-dyes, chemicals, and heavy metals like lead and cadmium-is common in the waters of the Buriganga River as it runs through Dhaka, Bangladesh. It's among many harms posed by a garment sector that was once synonymous with tragedy: In 2013, the eight-story Rana Plaza factory building collapsed, killing 1,134 people and injuring...

It's been a busy and productive year here at MIT Technology Review. We published magazine issues on power, creativity, innovation, bodies, relationships, and security. We hosted 14 exclusive virtual conversations with our editors and outside experts in our subscriber-only series, Roundtables, and held two events on MIT's campus. And we published hundreds of articles online,...

If the past 12 months have taught us anything, it's that the AI hype train is showing no signs of slowing. It's hard to believe that at the beginning of the year, DeepSeek had yet to turn the entire industry on its head, Meta was better known for trying (and failing) to make the metaverse...

In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he took a taxi to a mall and headed directly to the Apple Store to purchase a new laptop and iPhone. He'd wanted to keep the risk of having his personal devices confiscated...

Climate news hasn't been great in 2025. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit record highs (again). This year is set to be either the second or third warmest on record. Climate-fueled disasters like wildfires in California and flooding in Indonesia and Pakistan devastated communities and caused billions in damage. In addition to these worrying indicators of our...

At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses gently into the receptive lining of the uterus and then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of a future placenta appear. This is implantation-the moment that pregnancy officially begins. Only none of it is happening inside a...

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, summed it up in three words: This is embarrassing." Hassabis was replying on X to an overexcited post by Sebastien Bubeck, a research scientist at the rival firm OpenAI, announcing that two mathematicians had used OpenAI's latest large language model, GPT-5, to find solutions to 10 unsolved problems in...

The earth around Lake Naivasha, a shallow freshwater basin in south-central Kenya, does not seem to want to lie still. Ash from nearby Mount Longonot, which erupted as recently as the 1860s, remains in the ground. Obsidian caves and jagged stone towers preside over the steam that spurts out of fissures in the soil and...

At some point next month, a handful of volunteers will be injected with two experimental gene therapies as part of an unusual clinical trial. The drugs are potential longevity therapies, says Ivan Morgunov, the CEO of Unlimited Bio, the company behind the trial. His long-term goal: to achieve radical human life extension. The 12 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. China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries. In the past decade, China has seen an EV boom, thanks in part to government support. Buying an electric...

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 8 worst technology flops of 2025 Welcome to our annual list of the worst, least successful, and simply dumbest technologies of the year. We like to think there's a lesson in every...

Welcome to our annual list of the worst, least successful, and simply dumbest technologies of the year. This year, politics was a recurring theme. Donald Trump swept back into office and used his executive pen to reshape the fortunes of entire sectors, from renewables to cryptocurrency. The wrecking-ball act began even before his inauguration, when...

Judging from headlines and social media posts in recent years, one might reasonably assume that AI is going to fix the power grid, cure the world's diseases, and finish my holiday shopping for me. But maybe there's just a whole lot of hype floating around out there. This week, we published a new package called...

Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of the family's most vital chores: fetching water. Like most homes in his Palestinian neighborhood in Amman, Jordan, the Yaghis' had no electricity or running water. At least once...

Rolling out enterprise-grade AI means climbing two steep cliffs at once. First, understanding and implementing the tech itself. And second, creating the cultural conditions where employees can maximize its value. While the technical hurdles are signicant, the human element can be even more consequential; fear and ambiguity can stall momentum of even the most promising...

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 great AI hype correction of 2025 Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry-and several world...

Can I ask you a question: How do you feel about AI right now? Are you still excited? When you hear that OpenAI or Google just dropped a new model, do you still get that buzz? Or has the shine come off it, maybe just a teeny bit? Come on, you can be honest with...

In late September, a Spanish military plane carrying the country's defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly the subject of a kind of attack-not by a rocket or anti-aircraft rounds, but by radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system. The flight landed safely, but it was one of thousands that have been affected...

When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing's Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn't yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars mid-competition. Just over a decade later, Formula E has evolved into a global entertainment brand...

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 AI Hype Correction package AI is going to reproduce human intelligence. AI will eliminate disease. AI is the single biggest, most important invention in human history. You've likely heard it all-but...

Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems. The problem is right now, it's not easy to know which is true. As tech giants pour billions...

Each time you've heard a borderline outlandish idea of what AI will be capable of, it often turns out that Sam Altman was, if not the first to articulate it, at least the most persuasive and influential voice behind it. For more than a decade he has been known in Silicon Valley as a world-class...

It's a weird time to be an AI doomer. This small but influential community of researchers, scientists, and policy experts believes, in the simplest terms, that AI could get so good it could be bad-very, very bad-for humanity. Though many of these people would be more likely to describe themselves as advocates for AI safety...

Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry-and several world economies. Millions of people started talking to their computers, and their computers started talking back. We were enchanted, and we expected more. We got it. Technology companies scrambled to...

On April 28, 2022, at a highly anticipated concert in Spokane, Washington, the musician Paul McCartney astonished his audience with a groundbreaking application of AI: He began to perform with a lifelike depiction of his long-deceased musical partner, John Lennon. Using recent advances in audio and video processing, engineers had taken the pair's final performance...

When the generative AI boom took off in 2022, Rudi Miller and her law school classmates were suddenly gripped with anxiety. Before graduating, there was discussion about what the job market would look like for us if AI became adopted," she recalls. So when it came time to choose a speciality, Miller-now a junior associate...

The microwave-size instrument at Lila Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doesn't look all that different from others that I've seen in state-of-the-art materials labs. Inside its vacuum chamber, the machine zaps a palette of different elements to create vaporized particles, which then fly through the chamber and land to create a thin film, using a technique...

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. Expanded carrier screening: Is it worth it? Carrier screening tests would-be parents for hidden genetic mutations that might affect their children. It initially involved testing for specific genes in at-risk populations. Expanded carrier...

It's a scorching October day in Bangkok and I'm wandering through the exhibits at the Thai Space Expo, held in one of the city's busiest shopping malls, when I do a double take. Amid the flashy space suits and model rockets on display, there's a plain-looking package of Thai basil chicken. I'm told the same...

This week I've been thinking about babies. Healthy ones. Perfect ones. As you may have read last week, my colleague Antonio Regalado came face to face with a marketing campaign in the New York subway asking people tohave your best baby." The company behind that campaign, Nucleus Genomics, says it offers customers a way to...