MIT Technology Review

Across industries, enterprises are increasingly adopting an on-demand approach to compute, storage, and applications. They are favoring digital services that are faster to deploy, easier to scale, and better integrated with partner ecosystems. Yet, one critical pillar has lagged: the network. While software-defined networking has made inroads, many organizations still operate rigid, pre-provisioned networks. As...

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 Security issue It would be naive to think we are going back to a world without AI. We're not. But it's only one of many urgent problems we need to address...

When Jitender was a child in New Delhi, both his parents worked as manual scavengers-a job that involved clearing the city's sewers of solid waste by hand. Now, he is among almost 200 contractors involved in the Delhi government's effort to shift from this manual process to safer mechanical methods. Although it has been outlawed...

When I picked up my daughter from summer camp, we settled in for an eight-hour drive through the Appalachian mountains, heading from North Carolina to her grandparents' home in Kentucky. With little to no cell service for much of the drive, we enjoyed the rare opportunity to have a long, thoughtful conversation, uninterrupted by devices....

Earlier this year, the $800 million Vera Rubin Observatory commenced its decade-long quest to create an extremely detailed time-lapse movie of the universe. Rubin is capable of capturing many more stars than any other astronomical observatory ever built; it also sees many more satellites. Up to 40% of images captured by the observatory within its...

Overthink This is a podcast in which two very smart people (who happen to be young and hilarious professors of philosophy) draw unexpected philosophical connections between facets of modern life. Ellie Anderson and David Pena-Guzman have done hour-long episodes on everything from mommy issues to animal justice, with particularly sharp segments on tech-adjacent issues like...

As I write in late July, we're contending with a major tax increase on the annual returns from MIT's endowment as well as other investments and assets. This new tax burden will strain the resources we use to support research, innovation, and student scholarships and financial aid-the heart and soul of the Institute. And the...

Textiles account for 5% of landfill space-and clothing made with polyester can take up to 200 years to decompose. Massachusetts tackled the problem by banning disposal of clothing and fabrics in 2022. And Infinite Threads, a spinoff of the Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee, is addressing it by collecting lightly used clothing from the MIT community...

Art restoration takes steady hands and a discerning eye. For centuries, conservators have identified areas needing repair and then mixed the exact shades needed to fill in one area at a time. Restoring a single painting can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a decade. Now an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering...

Most people with type 1 diabetes inject insulin to prevent their blood sugar levels from getting too high. However, if their blood sugar gets too low, it can lead to confusion, seizures, and even death. To combat this hypoglycemia, some patients carry syringes of glucagon, a hormone that stimulates release of glucose. Now MIT engineers...

Today, 2.2 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. But the atmosphere contains millions of billions of gallons of water in the form of vapor, and researchers have tried various strategies to capture and condense it in places where traditional sources are inaccessible. Now MIT engineers have improved on that approach...

Anantha Chandrakasan became the Institute's new provost on July 1, succeeding Cynthia Barnhart, SM '86, PhD '88, who announced her decision to step down in February. Chandrakasan, who earned his BS, MS, and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, joined MIT in 1994. Head of the Energy-Efficient Circuits...

A team at MIT and the Scripps Research Institute has made important progress toward vaccines that can protect against HIV, and potentially other diseases, with a single dose. The researchers treated mice with a vaccine that combines two different adjuvants, materials that help stimulate the immune system-one incorporating a compound previously developed by Scripps professor...

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAIBy Karen Hao '15PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 2025, $32 Read MIT Technology Review's excerpt here. Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the ArtsBy Samuel Jay Keyser, HM '97, emeritus professor of linguisticsMIT PRESS, 2025, $30 Data, Systems, and Society: Harness AI for Societal GoodBy Munther A. Dahleh,...

On a mission to reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing components, Siemens turned its attention to the design of a robot gripper. Making up just 2%of the robot, the impact of this hand-likedevice may seem inconsequential. But, reducing its weight by 90% and the number of constituent parts by 84% can save up to 3...

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 these two brothers became go-to experts on America's mystery drone" invasion In 2024 alone, 350 known drone incursions were reported over a hundred different US military installations. A lack of coordination or...

On a Friday evening last December, every tier of US law enforcement-federal, state, and local-was dispatched to the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, a military research installation outside Boston. A squadron of about 15 to 20 drones had been spotted violating the base's restricted airspace. The culprits could not be found. One retired major...

Baafour Asiamah-Adjei '03 is the founder and CEO of one of Ghana's largest private power companies, Genser Energy-an entrepreneurial engineer who aims to deliver sustainable energy across West Africa. And he credits MIT with much of his success. But when he was applying to colleges, the Institute wasn't even on his radar. The son of...

Stop me if you've heard this one before. The AI learns it is about to be switched off and goes rogue, disobeying commands and threatening its human operators. It's a well-worn trope in science fiction. We see it in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's the premise of the Terminator series, in...

The wildfires that swept through Los Angeles County in January 2025 left an indelible mark on the Southern California landscape. The Eaton and Palisades fires raged for 24 days, killing 29 people and destroying 16,000 structures, with losses estimated at $60 billion. More than 55,000 acres were consumed, and the landscape itself was physically transformed....

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. In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses Google has just released a report detailing how much energy its Gemini apps use for each query. In...

In October, a new academic conference will debut that's unlike any other. Agents4Science is a one-day online event that will encompass all areas of science, from physics to medicine. All of the work shared will have been researched, written, and reviewed primarily by AI, and will be presented using text-to-speech technology. The conference is the...

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are bitter rivals in the commercial space race, but they agree on one thing: Settling space is an existential imperative. Space is the place. The final frontier. It is our human destiny to transcend our home world and expand our civilization to extraterrestrial vistas. This belief has been mainstream for...

Last year, I added my DNA profile to a private genealogical database, FamilyTreeDNA, and clicked Yes" to allow the police to search my genes. In 2018, police in California announced they'dcaught the Golden State Killer, a man who had eluded capture for decades. They did it by uploading crime-scene DNA to websites like the 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. On the ground in Ukraine's largest Starlink repair shop Starlink is absolutely critical to Ukraine's ability to continue in the fight against Russia. It's how troops in battle zones stay connected with faraway...

Google has just released a technical report detailing how much energy its Gemini apps use for each query. In total, the median prompt-one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand-consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second. The company also provided average estimates...

I remember using a princess toothbrush when I was little. The handle was purple, teal, and sparkly. Like most of the other pieces of plastic that have ever been made, it's probably still out there somewhere, languishing in a landfill. (I just hope it's not in the ocean.) I've been thinking about that toothbrush again...

Oleh Kovalskyy thinks that Starlink terminals are built as if someone assembled them with their feet. Or perhaps with their hands behind their back. To demonstrate this last image, Kovalskyy-a large, 47-year-old Ukrainian, clad in sweatpants and with tattoos stretching from his wrists up to his neck-leans over to wiggle his fingers in the air...

NASA and IBM have released a new open-source machine learning model to help scientists better understand and predict the physics and weather patterns of the sun. Surya, trained on over a decade's worth of NASA solar data, should help give scientists an early warning when a dangerous solar flare is likely to hit Earth. Solar...

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 churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby-unaware they've just passed through a...

Despite decades of green certifications, better material sourcing, and the use of more sustainable materials such as mass timber, the built environment is still responsible for a third of global emissions worldwide. According to a 2024 UN report, the building sector has fallen significantly behind on progress" toward becoming more sustainable. Changing the way we...

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 make clean energy progress under Trump in the states-blue and red alike -Joshua A. Basseches is the David and Jane Flowerree Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Public Policy at Tulane...

When the US Food and Drug Administration approved over-the-counter hearing-aid software for Apple's AirPods Pro in September 2024, with a device price point right around $200, I was excited. I have mild to medium hearing loss and tinnitus, and my everyday programmed hearing aids cost just over $2,000-a lower-cost option I chose after my audiologist...

On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby-unaware they've just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face probes" per second, isolating eyes, noses, and mouths before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital...

How do you want your AI to treat you? It's a serious question, and it's one that Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, has clearly been chewing on since GPT-5's bumpy launch at the start of the month. He faces a trilemma. Should ChatGPT flatter us, at the risk of fueling delusions that can spiral out of...

The second Trump administration is proving to be more disastrous for the climate and the clean energy economy than many had feared. Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act repealed most of the clean energy incentives in former president Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Meanwhile, his EPA administrator moved to revoke the endangerment finding, 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. Why we should thank pigeons for our AI breakthroughs People looking for precursors to artificial intelligence often point to science fiction by authors like Isaac Asimov or thought experiments like the Turing test....

In 1943, while the world's brightest physicists split atoms for the Manhattan Project, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner led his own secret government project to win World War II. Skinner did not aim to build a new class of larger, more destructive weapons. Rather, he wanted to make conventional bombs more precise. The idea struck...

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. Taiwan's silicon shield" could be weakening Taiwanese politics increasingly revolves around one crucial question: Will China invade? China's ruling party has wanted to seize Taiwan for more than half a century. But in...

June had no idea that GPT-5 was coming. The Norwegian student was enjoying a late-night writing session last Thursday when her ChatGPT collaborator started acting strange. It started forgetting everything, and it wrote really badly," she says. It was like a robot." June, who asked that we use only her first name for privacy reasons,...

There is no word for art in most Native American languages. Instead, the closest terms speak not to objecthood but to action and intention. In Lakota, wowahitaka" implies deep thought or reflection, while wohekiye" suggests offering or prayer. Art is not separate from life; it is ceremony, instruction, design. Like architecture or code, it carries...

One winter afternoon in a conference room in Taipei, a pair of twentysomething women dragged their friend across the floor. Lying on the ground in checkered pants and a brown sweatshirt, she was pretending to be either injured or dead. One friend picked her up by her arms, the other grabbed hold of her legs,...

This time five years ago, we were in the throes of the covid-19 pandemic. By August 2020, we'd seen school closures, national lockdowns, and widespread panic. That year, the coronaviruswas responsible for around 3 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization. Then came the vaccines. The first mRNA vaccines for covid were authorized for...

On Monday, Ford announced plans for an affordable electric truck with a 2027 delivery date and an expected price tag of about $30,000, thanks in part to a new manufacturing process that it says will help cut costs. This could be the shot in the arm that the slowing US EV market needs. Sales are...

Artificial intelligence models that can discover drugs and write code still fail at puzzles a lay person can master in minutes. This phenomenon sits at the heart of the challenge of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Can today's AI revolution produce models that rival or surpass human intelligence across all domains? If so, what underlying enablers-whether...

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 Trump's golden dome" missile defense idea is another ripped straight from the movies Within a week of his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order to develop The Iron Dome for America"...

In 1940, a fresh-faced Ronald Reagan starred as US Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft in Murder in the Air, an action film centered on a fictional superweapon" that could stop enemy aircraft midflight. A mock newspaper in the movie hails it as the greatest peace argument ever invented." The experimental weapon is the exclusive property...

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. Meet the early-adopter judges using AI The propensity for AI systems to make mistakes that humans miss has been on full display in the US legal system as of late. The follies began...