MIT Technology Review

Dried cells-it's what's for dinner. At least that's what a new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are hoping to convince us. Their claims sound too good to be true: They say they can make food out of thin air. But that's exactly how certain soil-dwelling bacteria work. In...

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 companies are creating food out of thin air A new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are promising something that seems too good to be true....

This is simply a question of right and wrong." You can't deny the costs, though. You keep saying that just one more year of taxes will solve- We're not solving-we're mitigating!" Then what's the point?" The shrill back-and-forth fills the kitchen, where Xia is busy making breakfast, some kind of awful cricket-protein smoothie with kale....

Meta is releasing a massive data set and models, called Open Materials 2024, that could help scientists use AI to discover new materials much faster. OMat24 tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks in the discovery process: data. To find new materials, scientists calculate the properties of elements across the periodic table and simulate different combinations...

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 could help people find common ground during deliberations Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views. Perhaps an AI tool could help....

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. There have been plenty of reports of potentially concerning viruses this last year. Covid is still causing thousands of deaths, and bird flu appears set to make the...

Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views. Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a caucus mediator," generating summaries that outline a group's areas of agreement on complex but important...

Generative AI's promises for the software development lifecycle (SDLC)-code that writes itself, fully automated test generation, and developers who spend more time innovating than debugging-are as alluring as they are ambitious. Some bullish industry forecasts project a 30% productivity boost from AI developer tools, which, if realized, could inject more than $1.5 trillion into 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. The quest to figure out farming on Mars Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from...

Lab scientists spend much of their time doing laborious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or running the same analyses over and over again. But what if they could simply tell a robot to do the experiments, analyze the data, and generate a report? Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers...

Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from thick, cloudy skies. It wasn't really so different from our own planet 4 billion years ago, except for one crucial detail-its size. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth,...

In an age where customer experience can make or break a business, Cathay Pacific is embracing cloud transformation to enhance service delivery and revolutionize operations from the inside out. It's not just technology companies that are facing pressure to deliver better customer service, do more with data, and improve agility. An almost 80-year-old airline, Cathay...

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. Intro to AI: a beginner's guide to artificial intelligence from MIT Technology Review It feels as though AI is moving a million miles a minute. Every week, it seems, there are product launches,...

A company making fire-suppressing battery materials just got a $670.6 million loan commitment from the US Department of Energy. Aspen Aerogels makes insulating materials that can be layered inside an EV's battery to prevent or slow heat and fires from spreading within the pack. The company is building a new factory in Georgia to produce...

Does ChatGPT treat you the same whether you're a Laurie, Luke, or Lashonda? Almost, but not quite. OpenAI has analyzed millions of conversations with its hit chatbot and found that ChatGPT will produce a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user's name in around one in 1000 responses on average, and as many...

It feels as though AI is moving a million miles a minute. Every week, it seems, there are product launches, fresh features and other innovations, and new concerns over ethics and privacy. It's a lot to keep up with. Maybe you wish someone would just take a step back and explain some of the basics....

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 quest to protect farmworkers from extreme heat On July 21, 2024, temperatures soared in many parts of the world, breaking the record for the hottest day ever recorded on the planet. The...

On July 21, 2024, temperatures soared in many parts of the world, breaking the record for the hottest day ever recorded on the planet. The following day-July 22-the record was broken again. But even as the heat index rises each summer, the people working outdoors to pick fruits, vegetables, and flowers for American tables keep...

Organizations are starting the heavy lifting to get real business value from generative AI. As Arnab Chakraborty, chief responsible AI officer at Accenture, puts it, 2023 was the year when clients were amazed with generative AI and the possibilities. In 2024, we are starting to see scaled implementations of responsible generative AI programs." Some generative...

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. Africa fights rising hunger by looking to foods of the past After falling steadily for decades, the prevalence of global hunger is now on the rise-nowhere more so than in sub-Saharan Africa. Conflicts,...

The first time the rains failed, the farmers of Kanaani were prepared for it. It was April of 2021, and as climate change had made the weather increasingly erratic, families in the eastern Kenyan village had grown used to saving food from previous harvests. But as another wet season passed with barely any rain, 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. These are the best ways to measure your body fat -Jessica Hamzelou We all know that being overweight is not great for your health-it's linked to metabolic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular problems....

When Martin Roth began his career as a forest ranger in the 1980s, his job was to care for the forest in a way that would ensure continuity for decades, even centuries. Now, with climate change, it's more about planning for an uncertain future. It's turned into disaster management," says Roth, for whom the 3,000...

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. This week, an office conversation turned to body weight. We all know that being overweight is not great for your health-it's linked to metabolic diseases like diabetes and...

Recorded on October 10, 2024 Producing Climate-Friendly Food with special guests from Pivot Bio and Rumin8 Speakers: James Temple, Sr Editor for Energy, Casey Crownhart, Sr Reporter for Climate, Karsten Temme, Chief Innovation Officer & Co-founder of Pivot Bio, and Matt Callahan, Co-founder and Counsel of Rumin8. Planet-warming emissions aren't only spewed from power plants...

In 2022, the US made a massive bet on the carbon removal industry, committing $3.5 billion to build four major regional hubs in an effort to scale up the nascent sector. But industry observers fear that market demand isn't building fast enough to support it, even with these substantial federal grants and other subsidies. Some...

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 weeds are winning Since the 1980s, more and more plants have evolved to become immune to the biochemical mechanisms that herbicides leverage to kill them. This herbicidal resistance threatens to decrease yields-out-of-control...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. We get to celebrate a very special birthday today-The Spark just turned two! Over the past couple of years, I've been bringing you all the news you need to know in climate...

On a languid, damp July morning, I meet weed scientist Aaron Hager outside the old Agronomy Seed House at the University of Illinois' South Farm. In the distance are round barns built in the early 1900s, designed to withstand Midwestern windstorms. The sky is a formless white. It's the day after a storm system hundreds...

This sponsored session was presented by Ford Pro at MIT Technology Review's 2024 EmTech MIT event. A decarbonized transportation system is a necessary pre-requisite for a sustainable economy. In the transportation industry, the road to electrification and greater technology adoption can also increase business bottom lines and reduce downstream costs to tax payers. Focusing on...

Adobe has announced a new tool to help creators watermark their artwork and opt out of having it used to train generative AI models. The web app, called Adobe Content Authenticity, allows artists to signal that they do not consent for their work to be used by AI models, which are generally trained on vast...

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and '90s underpins all of the most powerful AI models in the world today, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Speaking on the phone to the Academy minutes after the announcement,...

We are in the early stages of a geopolitical competition for the future of artificial intelligence. The winners will dominate the global economy in the 21st century. But what's been too often left out of the conversation is that AI's huge demand for concentrated and consistent amounts of power represents a chance to scale 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. Chatting with an AI chatbot is so 2022. The latest hot AI toys take advantage ofmultimodal models, which can handle several things at the same time, such as images, audio, 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. How to break free of Spotify's algorithm Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to paranormal...

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. People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts-and they're weird and amazing Google's new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched...

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. On September 28, California became the second US state to officially recognize the importance of mental privacy in state law. That pink, jelly-like, throbbing mass under your skull-a.k.a....

All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech," a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google's new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September 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: 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch The urgency of addressing climate change has never been clearer. Emissions of planet-warming gases are at record highs, as are global temperatures. All that extra heat...

Pivot Bio is using genetically edited microbes to deliver just the right amount of nitrogen to crops, cutting climate emissions without reducing agricultural yields. The development of synthetic fertilizer was one of the great achievements of the last century, providing an abundant source of nitrogen that boosted crop yields and helped feed a growing global...

LanzaJet is making next-generation aviation fuel without fossil fuels. The company recently opened the world's first commercial-scale production facility that turns alcohol into jet fuel and plans to produce up to 9 million gallons each year. LanzaJet wants to cut aviation's climate impact by rethinking where jet fuel comes from. Today, hopping on a plane...

Electric vehicles can take a long time to charge up, and places to do so can be hard to find. Gogoro's innovative technology offers a quick and easy way to swap drained batteries for charged ones at a growing number of stations worldwide. When a magnitude 7.4 earthquake rolled through Taiwan in April, it was...

Pano AI is helping communities spot fires faster, enabling firefighters to put out small blazes before they grow into infernos. The four-year-old startup installs networks of rotating cameras in high vantage points throughout forests, grasslands, and other areas with high fire risk. Each station can capture ultra-high-definition video within a 10-mile radius, as well 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. The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It's the AI. In case you missed the memo, we are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. At its...

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 AI research, everyone seems to think that bigger is better. The idea is that more data, more computing power, and more parameters will lead to models that are more powerful....

This article is from The Debrief with Mat Honan, MIT Technology Reviews weekly newsletter from its editor in chief. To receive it every Friday, sign up here. In case you missed the memo, we arebarrelingtoward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. At its developer conference last week, Meta (nee Facebook)introduced a positively mind-blowing...

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 UK is done with coal. How's the rest of the world doing? The UK is shutting down its final coal-fired power plant today, marking the end of an era for the country's...

The UK is shutting down its final coal-fired power plant today, marking the end of an era for the country's energy system. Once the backbone of the grid, coal has been steadily replaced with other, less polluting energy sources. Coal is the most emissions-intensive fuel powering the grid today, and moving away from it, even...

In an essay last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that the accelerating capabilities of AI will usher in an idyllic Intelligence Age," unleashing unimaginable" prosperity and astounding triumphs" like fixing the climate." It's a promise that no one is in a position to make-and one that, when it comes to the topic...

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. Space travel is dangerous. Could genetic testing and gene editing make it safer? Long-distance space travel can wreak havoc on human health. There's radiation and microgravity to contend with, as well as the...