MIT Technology Review

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...

Google DeepMind has used a large language model to crack a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle-producing verifiable and valuable new information that did...

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 two words that pushed international climate talks into overtime The annual UN climate negotiations at COP28 in Dubai have officially come to a close. Delegates scrambled to get a deal together in...

A new system that teaches robots a domestic task in around 20 minutes could help the field of robotics overcome one of its biggest challenges: a lack of training data. The open-source system, called Dobb-E, was trained using data collected from real homes. It can help to teach a robot how to open an air...

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 annual UN climate negotiations at COP28 in Dubai have officially come to a close. Delegates scrambled to get a deal together in the early morning hours, and the meetings ended a...

Vertex Pharmaceuticals has agreed to buy rights to use a dominant CRISPR patent owned by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, avoiding a potential lawsuit over its new gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell disease. The agreement allows Vertex to start selling its treatment, approved last Friday, without fear of patent infringement claims. The one-time treatment...

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. Two former Department of Energy staffers warn we're doing carbon removal all wrong The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it's already headed in...

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. It's a perennial debate: whether American tech companies are contributing to government control of the internet in China. But long before Apple ceded control of local user data to the state or...

The carbon removal industry is just starting to take off, but some experts are warning that it's already headed in the wrong direction. Two former staffers of the US agency responsible for advancing the technology argue that the profit-driven industry's focus on cleaning up corporate emissions will come at the expense of helping to pull...

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 decades-long fight over Yahoo's misdeeds in China When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for Chinese dissident Xu Wanping, the company still...

When you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for a 62-year-old Chinese dissident named Xu Wanping, the company still looms large-and has for nearly two decades. In 2005, Xu was arrested for signing online petitions relating to anti-Japanese protests. He didn't use his real name, but he...

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. It's done. It's over. Two and a half years after it was first introduced-after months of lobbying and political arm-wrestling, plus grueling final negotiations that took nearly 40 hours-EU lawmakers have reached a...

Brain organoids, clumps of human brain cells grown in a dish, can be hooked up to an electronic chip and carry out simple computational tasks, a new study shows. Feng Guo and his team at Indiana University Bloomington generated a brain organoid from stem cells, attached it to a computer chip, and connected their setup,...

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 the EU AI Act was so hard to agree on On Saturday, European Union lawmakers announced they'd finally agreed the terms of the final version of the EU AI Act, a major...

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. Update: On December 8, 2023, the EU AI Act was agreed on, after this story was written and sent as MIT Technology Review's weekly tech...

The results of my genetic test arrived in an unpretentious white envelope. It was the summer of 2021, and I almost missed it when I flipped through the mail, but I set it aside from the rest of the bills to look at later. About a month before, I had sent a sample of my...

No one can predict the future, but here at MIT Technology Review we spend much of our time thinking about what it might hold. One thing we know is that it's especially hard to make predictions about technology. Most emerging technologies fizzle or flame out. Some start out as consumer devices but wind up finding...

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 lucky break behind the first CRISPR treatment The world's first commercial gene-editing treatment is set to start changing the lives of people with sickle-cell disease. It's called Casgevy, and it was approved...

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. The human body is a labyrinth of vessels and tubing, full of barriers that are difficult to break through. That poses a serious hurdle for doctors....

There are two bowls on the kitchen table: one made of plastic, the other metal. You ask the robot to pick up the bowl and put it in the microwave. Which one will it choose? A human might ask for clarification, but given the vague command, the robot may place the metal bowl in the...

The world's first commercial gene-editing treatment is set to start changing the lives of people with sickle-cell disease.It's called Casgevy, and it was approved last month in the UK. US approval is pending this week. The treatment, which will be sold in the US by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, employs CRISPR, the Nobel-winning molecular scissors that have...