MIT Technology Review

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The problem with thinking you're part Neanderthal There's a theory that many of us have an inner Neanderthal." The idea is that Homo sapiens and a cousin species once bred, leaving...

The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance." One of Brand's several biographers described him as a mainstay of both counterculture and cyberculture, and with Maintenance, Brand wants us...

Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They'd hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they'd spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba. The real ambition for many of these researchers was the robot of science fiction-one...

There's a fault line running through enterprise AI, and it's not the one getting the most attention. The public conversation still tracks foundation models and benchmarks-GPT versus Gemini, reasoning scores, and marginal capability gains. But in practice, the more durable advantage is structural: who owns the operating layer where intelligence is applied, governed, and improved....

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Cyberscammersare bypassing banks' security with illicit tools sold on Telegram Inside a money-launderingcenterin Cambodia, an employee opens a banking app on his phone. It asks for a photo linked to the...

The availability of artificial intelligence for use in warfare is at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon. This debate has become urgent, with AI playing a bigger role than ever before in the current conflict with Iran. AI is no longer just helping humans analyze intelligence. It is now an...

When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people sheltered at home and shifted to remote work. Air travel collapsed. Cities-normally filled with the honking, screeching, engine-gunning riot of transportation-became as silent as...

As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so-we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to Indigenous burning practices to prevent wildfires. Biologists are realizing that flower-dotted meadows were...

Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell. The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-handedly purchased something like 80% of all contracted carbon removal. If you're looking for someone to pay you to suck carbon dioxide out of the...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. NASA is building the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft. How will it work? Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, NASA revealed an even grander space travel...

From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone. The app asks him to upload a photo associated with the account, so he clicks on a picture of a 30-something Asian man. Next, the app requests to open the camera for a video liveness" check. The...

For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they'd landed on a compelling contender: making mirror" bacteria. Should they come to be,...

The practice of privacy-led user experience (UX) is a design philosophy that treats transparency around data collection and usage as an integral part of the customer relationship. An undertapped opportunity in digital marketing, privacy-led UX treats user consent not as a tick-box compliance exercise, but rather as the first overture in an ongoing customer relationship....

Software engineering has experienced two seismic shifts this century. First was the rise of the open source movement, which gradually made code accessible to developers and engineers everywhere. Second, the adoption of development operations (DevOps) and agile methodologies took software from siloed to collaborative development and from batch to continuous delivery. Now, a third such...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts. Ifyou'refollowing AI news,you'reprobably gettingwhiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AIcan'teven...

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. Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, Jared Isaacman, the recently confirmed NASA administrator, made a flurry of announcements from the agency's headquarters...

Each year we compile our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, featuring our educated predictions for which technologies will have the biggest impact on how we live and work. This year, however, we had a dilemma. While our final picks encompass all our core coverage areas (energy, AI, and biotech, plus a few more), our 2026 list...

You've probably heard some version of this idea before: that many of us have an inner Neanderthal." That is to say, around 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first arrived in Europe, they met members of a cousin species-the broad-browed, heavier-set Neanderthals-and, well, one thing led to another, which is why some people now carry...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. In an industry that doesn't stand still, Stanford's AI Index, an annual roundup of key results and trends, is a chance to take a breath. (It's a marathon, not a sprint, after...

If you're following AI news, you're probably getting whiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AI can't even read a clock. The 2026 AI Index from Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, AI's annual report card, comes out today and cuts through some of that noise....

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. You have no choice in reading this article-maybe How do humans make decisions? The question has been on Uri Maoz's mind since he read an article in his early twenties suggesting...

Grizzly bears have made such a comeback across eastern Montana that in 2017, the state hired its first-ever prairie-based grizzly manager: wildlife biologist Wesley Sarmento. For some seven years, Sarmento worked to keep both the bears, which are still listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and the humans, who are sprawling into once-wild...

Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion. Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad lecture. Maoz assumed his...

Is it the Department of Defense or the Department of War? The Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America? A vaccine-or an individualized neoantigen treatment"? That's the Trump-era vocabulary paradox facing Moderna, the covid-19 shot maker whose plans for next-generation mRNA vaccines against flus and emerging pathogens have been dashed by vaccine skeptics in...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Constellations -Constellations is a short story by Jeff VanderMeer, the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling Southern Reach series. A spacecraft has crash-landed on a hostile planet. The only survivors...

I. We had crash-landed on the planet. We were far from home. The spaceship could not be repaired, and the rescue beacon had failed. Besides me, only the astrogator, part of the captain, and the ship's AI mind were left. Outside, the atmosphere registered as hostile to most organisms. We huddled in the lifeboat, which...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Isfakegrassabadidea?TheAstroTurfwarsarefarfromover. In 2001,Americans installed just over 7 million square meters of synthetic turf. By 2024, that number was 79 million square meters-enough to carpet all of Manhattan and then some. The...

A rare warm spell in January melted enough snow to uncover Cornell University's newest athletic field, built for field hockey. Months before, it was a meadow teeming with birds and bugs; now it's more than an acre of synthetic turf roughly the color of the felt on a pool table, almost digital in its saturation....

When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn't help but obsess over the numbers. I'd known on some level that desalination-pulling salt out of seawater to produce fresh water-was an increasingly important technology, especially in water-stressed regions including the Middle East. But just how much some countries rely on desalination,...

We evolved for a linear world. If you walk for an hour, you cover a certain distance. Walk for two hours and you cover double that distance. This intuition served us well on the savannah. But it catastrophically fails when confronting AI and the core exponential trends at its heart. From the time I began...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Desalination plants in the Middle East are increasingly vulnerable As the conflict in Iran has escalated, a crucial resource is under fire: the desalinization technology that supplies water in the region.President...

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. As the conflict in Iran has escalated, a crucial resource is under fire: the desalination technology that supplies water across much of the region. In early...

Unlike static, rules-based systems, AI agents can learn, adapt, and optimize processes dynamically. As they interact with data, systems, people, and other agents in real time, AI agents can execute entire workflows autonomously. But unlocking their potential requires redesigning processes around agents rather than bolting them onto fragmented legacy workflows using traditional optimization methods. Companies...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The one piece of data that couldactually shedlight on your job and AI Within Silicon Valley's orbit, an AI-fueledjobs apocalypse is spoken about as a given. Now even economists who 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. Within Silicon Valley's orbit, an AI-fueled jobs apocalypse is spoken about as a given. The mood is so grim that a societal impacts researcher at Anthropic, responding Wednesday to a call for...

For years Mike McClary sold the Guardian LTE Flashlight, a heavy-duty black model, online through his small outdoor brand. The product, designed for brightness and durability, became one of his most popular items ever. Even after he stopped offering it around 2017, customers kept sending him emails asking where they could buy it. When McClary...

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. In January, Elon Musk's SpaceX filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission to launch up to one million data centers into Earth's orbit. The...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Fuel prices are soaring. Plastic could be next. As the war in Iran continues, one of the most visible global economic ripple effects has been fossil-fuel prices.But looking ahead, further consequencescould...

As the war in Iran continues to engulf the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, one of the most visible global economic ripple effects has been fossil-fuel prices. In particular, you can't get away from news about the price of gasoline, which just topped an average of $4 a gallon in the...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The gig workers who are training humanoid robots at home When Zeus, a medical student in Nigeria, returns to his apartment from a long day at the hospital, he straps his...

When Zeus, a medical student living in a hilltop city in central Nigeria, returns to his studio apartment from a long day at the hospital, he turns on his ring light, straps his iPhone to his forehead, and starts recording himself. He raises his hands in front of him like a sleepwalker and puts a...

In the early days of large language models (LLMs), we grew accustomed to massive 10x jumps in reasoning and coding capability with every new model iteration. Today, those jumps have flattened into incremental gains. The exception is domain-specialized intelligence, where true step-function improvements are still the norm. When a model is fused with an organization's...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. There are more AI health tools than ever-but how well do they work? In the last few months alone, Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI have all launched medical chatbots. There'sa clear demand...

For decades, artificial intelligence has been evaluated through the question of whether machines outperform humans. From chess to advanced math, from coding to essay writing, the performance of AI models and applications is tested against that of individual humans completing tasks. This framing is seductive: An AI vs. human comparison on isolated problems with clear...

Earlier this month, Microsoft launched Copilot Health, a new space within its Copilot app where users will be able to connect their medical records and ask specific questions about their health. A couple of days earlier, Amazon had announced that Health AI, an LLM-based tool previously restricted to members of its One Medical service, would...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. Last Thursday, a California judge temporarily blocked the Pentagon from labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk and ordering government agencies to stop using its AI. It's the latest development in the month-long...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones Afteroperatingin secrecy for years, R3 Bio, a California-based startup, suddenly revealed last week that it had raised money to createnonsentientmonkey organ sacks"...

After operating in secrecy for years, a startup company called R3 Bio, in Richmond, California, suddenly shared details about its work last week-saying it had raised money to create nonsentient monkey organ sacks" as an alternative to animal testing. In an interview with Wired, R3 listed three investors: billionaire Tim Draper, the Singapore-based fund Immortal...

Think of this as a human body," says Javier Gonzalez. In front of me is essentially a metal box on wheels. Standing at around a meter in height, it reminds me of a stainless-steel counter in a restaurant kitchen. It is covered in flexible plastic tubing-which act as veins and arteries-connecting a series of transparent...