MIT Technology Review

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. Six weeks ago, I pre-ordered the Firefly Petunia," a houseplant engineered with genes from bioluminescent fungi so that it glows in the dark. After years of writing about...

Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up-in fact, it's what they're best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth the risk. A new tool created by Cleanlab, an AI startup spun out of a quantum computing lab at...

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. An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that's so good it's scary Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make...

Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies. But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to a new...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. From toaster ovens that work as air fryers to hair dryers that can also curl your hair, single tools that do multiple jobs have an undeniable appeal. In the climate world, hydrogen...

I'm stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity? This makes it sound like I'm dying, but it's the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today...

A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from New Jersey, has become the second. Her new kidney has just a single genetic modification-an approach that researchers hope...

Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and...

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 Build issue Building is a popular tech industry motif-especially in Silicon Valley, where Time to build" has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by...

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. I've wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was...

Today's climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity-which has discharged greenhouse-gas emissions into Earth's atmosphere for centuries-but reversing course and taming nature's growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. Yet the dream of human-powered flight-of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of mortal limbs-was...

As Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn serves up a plate of vegan brie, feta, and blue cheese in his offices in Emeryville, California, I'm keeping my expectations modest. Most vegan cheese falls into an edible uncanny valley full of discomforting not-quite-right versions of the real thing. But the brie I taste today is smooth, rich,...

The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. Companies define it in different ways, but its principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations. Danai Myrtzani of Sleed, a digital marketing agency in Greece, describes herself as more prompter than engineer....

In 1856, Napoleon III commissioned a baby rattle for his newborn son, to be made from one of the most precious metals known at the time: light, silvery, and corrosion-resistant aluminum. Despite its abundance-it's the third most common element in Earth's crust-the metal wasn't isolated until 1824, and the complexity and cost of the process...

Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard's hat near the northwestern corner of...

One of the formative memories of my youth took place on a camping trip at an Alabama state park. My dad's friend brought an at-the-time gee-whiz gadget, a portable television, and we used it to watch the very first space shuttle launch from under the loblolly pines. It was thrilling. And it was hard not...

For a harried wastewater manager, a commercial farmer, a factory owner, or anyone who might want to analyze dozens of water samples, and fast, it sounds almost miraculous. Light beamed from a central laser zips along fiber-optic cables and hits one of dozens of probes waiting at the edge of a field, or at the...

When I last wrote, the Institute had just announced MIT's Climate Project. Now that it's underway, I'd like to tell you a bit more about how we came to launch this ambitious new enterprise. In the fall of 2022, as soon as I accepted the president's job at MIT, several of my oldest friends spontaneously...

As an international student at MIT, I find that the privileges I've experienced in the States have made me even more conscious of my nation's struggles. Brief visits home remind me that in Jamaica, I can't always count on what I often take for granted in Massachusetts: water flowing through the faucet, timely public transportation,...

Alumni leave MIT armed with knowledge and a whole lot of memories. During Tech Reunions in 2023, the MIT Alumni Association asked returning alums what else they had held onto since leaving campus. Here are just a few of their responses. Check out the recent MIT alumni video about physical objects grads have kept-and why...

A county-by-county analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the US that stand to see the biggest economic changes from the switch to cleaner energy because their job markets are most closely linked to fossil fuels. While many of those places have intensive drilling and mining operations, the researchers find, areas that rely on...

One of the immune system's roles is to detect and kill cells that have acquired cancerous mutations. However, some early-stage cancer cells manage to survive. A new study on colon cancer from MIT and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified one reason why: they turn on a gene called SOX17, which renders them essentially invisible...

Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early-when any available treatments are likely...

Whenever you see a solar panel, most parts of it probably come from China. The US invented the technology and once dominated its production, but over the past two decades, government subsidies and low costs in China have led most of the solar manufacturing supply chain to be concentrated there. The country will soon be...

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 new proposals to restrict geoengineering are misguided -Daniele Visioni is a climate scientist and assistant professor at Cornell University The public debate over whether we should consider intentionally altering the climate system...

The public debate over whether we should consider intentionally altering the climate system is heating up, as the dangers of climate instability rise and more groups look to study technologies that could cool the planet. Such interventions, commonly known as solar geoengineering, may include releasing sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to cast away more sunlight,...

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 week,MIT Technology Reviewheld its inaugural EmTech Digital conference in London. It was a great success! I loved seeing so many of you there asking excellent questions, and it was a...

As a child, Emily Baker loved to make paper versions of things: cameras, a spaceship cockpit, buildings for a town in outer space. It was a habit that stuck. Years later, studying architecture in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, she was playing around with some paper and scissors. It was...

Nobel Prizes and other scientific honors are nearly routine at MIT, but a Grammy Award is something we don't see every year. That's what Miguel Zenon, an assistant professor of music and theater arts, has won: El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2, which he recorded with the pianist and composer Luis Perdomo, received the Grammy...

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 artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change For millennia, during Finland's blistering winters, wind drove snow into meters-high snowbanks along Lake Saimaa's shoreline, offering prime real estate from which seals carved...

Just before 10 a.m., hydrobiologist Jari Ilmonen and his team of six step out across a flat, half-mile-wide disk of snow and ice. For half the year this vast clearing is open water, the tip of one arm of the labyrinthine Lake Saimaa, Finland's biggest lake, which reaches almost to Russia's western border. As each...

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. Beyond Neuralink: Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces In the world of brain-computer interfaces, it can seem as if one company sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Last month, Neuralink...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. In the world of brain-computer interfaces, it can seem as if one company sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Last month, Neuralink posted a video to...

Every Friday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri speaks to the people. He has made a habit of hosting weekly ask me anything" sessions on Instagram, in which followers send him questions about the app, its parent company Meta, and his own (extremely public-facing) job. When I started watching these AMA videos years ago, I liked them....

The ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence has the potential to dramatically improve our lives-from the way we work to what we do to stay healthy. Yet ensuring that America and other democracies can help shape the trajectory of this technology requires going beyond the tech development taking place at private companies. Research at universities drove...

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 Hydrogen trains could revolutionize how Americans get around Like a mirage speeding across the dusty desert outside Pueblo, Colorado, the first hydrogen-fuel-cell passenger train in the United States is getting warmed up on...

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 votes have been tallied, and the results are in. The winner of the 11th Breakthrough Technology, 2024 edition, is ... drumroll please ... thermal batteries! While the editors of MIT Technology...

Like a mirage speeding across the dusty desert outside Pueblo, Colorado, the first hydrogen-fuel-cell passenger train in the United States is getting warmed up on its test track. Made by the Swiss manufacturer Stadler and known as the FLIRT (for Fast Light Intercity and Regional Train"), it will soon be shipped to Southern California, where...

We've all seen videos over the past few years demonstrating how agile humanoid robots have become, running and jumping with ease. We're no longer surprised by this kind of agility-in fact, we've grown to expect it. The problem is, these shiny demos lack real-world applications. When it comes to creating robots that are useful and...

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 commercial takeover of low-Earth orbit NASA designed the International Space Station to fly for 20 years. It has lasted six years longer than that, though it is showing its age, and...

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. I don't know about you, but I only learned last week that there's something connecting MSG and computer chips. Inside most laptop and data center chips today, there's a tiny component called...

Washington, DC, was hot and humid on June 23, 1993, but no one was sweating more than Daniel Goldin, the administrator of NASA. Standing outside the House chamber, he watched nervously as votes registered on the electronic tally board. The space station wasn't going to make it. The United States had spent more than $11...

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 AI was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened? When police departments first started buying and deploying bodycams in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The holy grail of robotics since the field's beginning has been to build a robot that can do our housework. But for a long time, that has just been a dream....

On July 25 last year, in circuit court in Dane County, Wisconsin, a motion was filed to dismiss a criminal case as a result of what defense attorneys described as institutional bad-faith actions" by a local police department. The evidence was unearthed, in part, because of artificial intelligence. Attorney Jessa Nicholson Goetz had been preparing...

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 stop a state from sinking In a 10-month span between 2020 and 2021, southwest Louisiana saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes. As if that wasn't bad enough, more storms...

We need heat to make everything from steel bars to ketchup packets. Today, a whopping 20% of global energy demand goes to producing heat used in industry, and most of that heat is generated by burning fossil fuels. In an effort to clean up industry, a growing number of companies are working to supply that...