MIT Technology Review

Computational models have been a major time saver when it comes to predicting which protein molecules could make effective drugs, but many of those methods themselves take a lot of time and computing power. Now researchers at MIT and Tufts have devised an alternative approach based on an algorithm known as a large language model,...

Palm oil is used in everything from soaps and cosmetics to sauces and crackers, but its production can be environmentally devastating. Producers burn down rainforests and swamps to make way for plantations, decimating wildlife habitats and producing staggering greenhouse-gas emissions. A company started by MIT classmates has used synthetic biology to develop an alternative. David...

The first in his family to graduate from college, Richard Smallwood '57, SM '58, ScD '62, remembers arriving at MIT certain he would flunk out. Stick it out," he recalls being urged by a teaching assistant in calculus. He did, earning bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. Today, he credits scholarships and fellowships...

The Great Polarization: How Ideas, Power, and Policies Drive InequalityEdited by Rudiger L. von Arnim and Joseph E. Stiglitz, PhD '66COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022, $70 Diversity and Satire: Laughing at Processes of MarginalizationBy Charisse L'Pree Corsbie-Massay '03WILEY, 2022, $59.95 The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and PowerBy Akel Isma'il Kahera, SM '87LEXINGTON...

Paul Samuelson, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, was finishing his Harvard PhD thesis in 1940 when he was offered a job in the Harvard economics department. It was only an instructorship, but Samuelson, who was already gaining an international reputation, accepted. A month into the semester, MIT offered Samuelson a...

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 ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download onto devices is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I'm back from a wholesome week off picking blueberries in a forest. Sothis storywe published last week about the messy ethics of AI in warfare is just the antidote, bringing my...

Venice, Italy, is suffering from a combination of subsidence-the city's foundations slowly sinking into the mud on which they are built-and rising sea levels. In the worst-case scenario, it could disappear underwater by the year 2100. Alessandro Gasparotto, an environmental engineer, is one of the many people trying to keep that from happening. Standing on...

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. This startup has engineered a clever way to reuse waste heat from cloud computing The idea of using the wasted heat of computing to do something else has been mooted plenty of times...

Moving quickly and carefully in two layers of gloves, Florian Krauss sets a cube of ice into a gold-plated cylinder that glows red in the light of the aiming laser. He steps back to admire the machine, covered with wires and gauges, that turns polar ice into climate data. If this were a real slice...

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 future of open source is still very much in flux When Xerox donated a new laser printer to MIT in 1980, the company couldn't have known that the machine would ignite a...

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. If you've been following health headlines in recent months, you may have heard that many prescription drugs are in short supply. Yesterday, the New York Times...

Using heat generated by computers to provide free hot water was an idea born not in a high-tech laboratory, but in a battered country workshop deep in the woods of Godalming, England. The idea of using the wasted heat of computing to do something else has been hovering in the air for some time," explains...

In the center of the laboratory dish, there was a subtle white film that could only be seen when the light hit the right way. Ayse Nihan Kilinc, a reproductive biologist, popped the dish under the microscope, and an image appeared on the attached screen. As she focused the microscope, the film resolved into clusters...

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 messy ethics of making war with machines In recent years, intelligent autonomous weapons-weapons that can select and fire upon targets without any human input-have become a matter of serious concern. Giving...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I don't know if there's a single conversation I've had about climate technology over the past year that didn't reference the Inflation Reduction Act at least once. I'm probably an exception to...

When Xerox donated a new laser printer to the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1980, the company couldn't have known that the machine would ignite a revolution. The printer jammed. And according to the 2002 book Free as in Freedom, Richard M. Stallman, then a 27-year-old programmer at MIT, tried to dig into the code...

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 rise of the tech ethics congregation Just before Christmas last year, a pastor preached a gospel of morals over money to several hundred members of his flock. But the leader in question...

A half-trillion dollars is starting to work its way through the US economy, remaking climate technology along the way. One year ago, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law, marking the most significant action on climate change to date from the federal government. The legislation set aside hundreds of billions of dollars to support...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology developments in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. This year, car buyers in China are constantly bombarded with claims about how advanced Navigation on Autopilot (NOA) systems are coming to their city. These software systems are not quite fully...

For Silicon Valley venture capitalists and founders, any inconvenience big or small is a problem to be solved-even death itself. And a new genre of products and services known as death tech," intended to help the bereaved and comfort the suffering, shows that the tech industry will try to address literally anything with an app....

In a near-future war-one that might begin tomorrow, for all we know-a soldier takes up a shooting position on an empty rooftop. His unit has been fighting through the city block by block. It feels as if enemies could be lying in silent wait behind every corner, ready to rain fire upon their marks 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 race to lead China's autonomous driving market Chinese car companies all seem fixated on one goal: launching their own autonomous navigation services in more and more cities as quickly as possible. In...

Toward the end of a nearly 15-minute video, William Sundin, creator of the ChinaDriven channel on YouTube, gets off the highway and starts driving in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Or rather, he allows himself to be driven. For while he's still in the driver's seat, the car is now steering, stopping, and changing...

Just before Christmas last year, a pastor preached a gospel of morals over money to several hundred members of his flock. Wearing a sport coat, angular glasses, and wired earbuds, he spoke animatedly into his laptop from his tiny glass office inside a co-working space, surrounded by six whiteboards filled with his feverish brainstorming. Sharing...

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. Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation PowerPoint is everywhere. It's used in religious sermons; by schoolchildren preparing book reports; at funerals and weddings. In 2010, Microsoft announced that PowerPoint...

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. Recently, I took myself to one of my favorite places in New York City, the public library, to look at some of the hundreds of...

One morning in August 2021, as she had nearly every morning for about a decade, Janice Smith opened her computer and went to Kiva.org, the website of the San Francisco-based nonprofit that helps everyday people make microloans to borrowers around the world. Smith, who lives in Elk River, Minnesota, scrolled through profiles of bakers in...

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. This week I've been thinking about America's addiction to opioids. The statistics are staggering. Since 2010, opioid overdose deaths have nearly quadrupled. More than 80,000 people...

The US Department of Energy announced today that it's providing $1.2 billion to develop regional hubs that can draw down and store away at least 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year as a means of combating climate change. The move represents a major step forward in the effort to establish a market...

It's 1948, and it isn't a great year for alcohol. Prohibition has come and gone, and booze is a buyer's market again. That much is obvious from Seagram's annual sales meeting, an 11-city traveling extravaganza designed to drum up nationwide sales. No expense has been spared: there's the two-hour, professionally acted stage play about the...

Fifty years ago, the average business transaction was pretty straightforward. Shoppers handed purchases directly to cashiers, business partners shook hands in person, and people brought malfunctioning machines to a repair shop across the street. The proximity of all participating parties meant that both customers and businesses could verify authority and authenticity with their own eyes....

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. Who gets to decide who receives experimental medical treatments? There has been a trend toward lowering the bar for new medicines, and it is becoming easier for people to access treatments that might...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Tucked away behind a brick building on MIT's campus sits a nuclear reactor. I've been hearing about this facility for over a decade, and it's taken on a somewhat mythic quality in...

Max was only a toddler when his parents noticed there was something different" about the way he moved. He was slower than other kids his age, and he struggled to jump. He couldn't run. Blood tests suggested he might have a genetic disease- one that affected a key muscle protein. Max's dad, Tao Wang, a...

Organizations are building resilient supply chains with a phygital" approach, a blend of digital and physical tools. In recent years, the global supply chain has been disrupted due to the covid-19 pandemic, geopolitical volatility, overwhelmed legacy systems, and labor shortages. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), an industrial advocacy group, warns the disruption isn't over-NAM's...

In late May, the Pentagon appeared to be on fire. A few miles away, White House aides and reporters scrambled to figure out whether a viral online image of the exploding building was in fact real. It wasn't. It was AI-generated. Yet government officials, journalists, and tech companies were unable to take action before 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. After 25 years of hype, embryonic stem cells are still waiting for their moment In 1998, researchers isolated powerful stem cells from human embryos. It was a breakthrough for biology, since these cells...

Twenty-five years ago, in 1998, researchers in Wisconsin isolated powerful stem cells from human embryos. It was a fundamental breakthrough for biology, since these cells are the starting point for human bodies and have the capacity to turn into any other type of cell-heart cells, neurons, you name it. National Geographic would later summarize the...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology developments in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Two years ago, parents around the world likely looked at China with a bit of jealousy: the country had instituted a strict three-hour-per-week limit for children playing video games. In 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. AI language models are rife with different political biases The news: AI language models contain different political biases, according to a new study. Researchers conducted tests on 14 large language models and found...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. AI language models have recently become the latest frontier in the US culture wars. Right-wing commentators have accused ChatGPT of having a woke bias," and conservative groups have started developing theirown...

Should companies have social responsibilities? Or do they exist only to deliver profit to their shareholders? If you ask an AI you might get wildly different answers depending on which one you ask. While OpenAI's older GPT-2 and GPT-3 Ada models would advance the former statement, GPT-3 Da Vinci, the company's more capable model, would...

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. What's next for China's digital currency? China's digital yuan was seemingly born out of a desire to centralize a tech giant-dominated payment system. According to its central bank, the digital currency, also known...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of our series here. China's digital yuan was seemingly born out of a desire to centralize a payment system dominated by the tech companies Alibaba and Tencent. According 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. How hot is too hot for the human body? There's no other way to say it: it's hot. Temperatures this summer have yet again broken records, and around the world, climate change is...