MIT Technology Review

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 AI video games can help reveal the mysteries of the human mind Video gaming companies are applying large language models to generate new game characters with detailed backstories-characters that could engage with...

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 I've been thinking about thought. It was all brought on by reading my colleague Niall Firth's recent cover story about the use of artificial intelligence 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. Training AI music models is about to get very expensive AI music is suddenly in a make-or-break moment. On June 24, Suno and Udio, two startups that let you generate complete songs from...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Some people track sports scores or their favorite artists' tour set lists. Meanwhile, I'm just waiting to hear which climate tech startups are getting big funding awards from government agencies. It's basically...

AI music is suddenly in a make-or-break moment. On June 24, Suno and Udio, two leading AI music startups that make tools to generate complete songs from a prompt in seconds, were sued by major record labels. Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group claim the companies made use of copyrighted music 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. Supershoes are reshaping distance running Since 2016, when Nike introduced the Vaporfly, a paradigm-shifting shoe that helped athletes run more efficiently (and therefore faster), the elite running world has muddled through a period...

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. Whether you've flown a drone before or not, you've probably heard of DJI, or at least seen its logo. With more than a 90% share of the global consumer market, this Shenzhen-based...

The United States has an official web design system and a custom typeface. This public design system aims to make government websites not only good-looking but accessible and functional for all. Before the internet, Americans may have interacted with the federal government by stepping into grand buildings adorned with impressive stone columns and gleaming marble...

For children, play comes so naturally. They don't have to be encouraged to play. They don't need equipment, or the latest graphics processors, or the perfect conditions-they just do it. What's more, study after study has found that play has a crucial role in childhood growth and development. If you want to witness the absolute...

Stijn Lemmens has a cleanup job like few others. A senior space debris mitigation analyst at the European Space Agency (ESA), Lemmens works on counteracting space pollution by collaborating with spacecraft designers and the wider industry to create missions less likely to clutter the orbital environment. Although significant attention has been devoted to launching spacecraft...

The philosopher Karl Popper once argued that there are two kinds of problems in the world: clock problems and cloud problems. As the metaphor suggests, clock problems obey a certain logic. They are orderly and can be broken down and analyzed piece by piece. When a clock stops working, you're able to take it apart,...

In a November 1984 story for Technology Review, Carolyn Sumners, curator of astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, described how toys, games, and even amusement park rides could change how young minds view science and math. The Slinky," Sumners noted, has long served teachers as a medium for demonstrating longitudinal (soundlike) waves and...

I felt too fat to be a feminist in public." The startling admission appears in the opening paragraph of Kate Manne's new book, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. With that single frank and sobering sentence, Manne, an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell, captures the pervasiveness of anti-fat bias-and its stifling impact. Manne had...

It's hard not to laugh at NASA's blooper reel of astronauts falling and bouncing in slow motion on the moon. But coping with inertia where gravity is one-sixth that of Earth is no laughing matter when you're wearing a constricting space suit and need to finish an exhausting task. So mechanical engineering professor Harry Asada...

Using engineered mini-livers derived from donated human cells, MIT researchers have found that the time of day a drug is administered could significantly affect how much of it is available to the body and how much may be broken down into toxic by-products. The researchers identified more than 300 liver genes that follow a circadian...

Colonoscopies are a boon for preventing colon cancer, but patients may develop gastrointestinal bleeding or dangerous small tears in the intestine if doctors end up having to remove polyps in the process. Now MIT researchers have developed a gel that can be sprayed through an endoscope onto the surgical sites, where it instantly forms a...

Most people's sweat contains a protein that can prevent Lyme disease, researchers at MIT and the University of Helsinki have discovered. They also found that about one-third of the population carries a less protective variant that makes the tick-borne infection more likely. By running a genome-wide association study, the researchers identified three variants more common...

Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and DesignBy Barry Kudrowitz, SM '06, PhD '10ROUTLEDGE, 2023, $39.95 Open Building for Architects: Professional Knowledge for an Architecture of Everyday EnvironmentBy Stephen H. Kendall, PhD '90, and N. John HabrakenROUTLEDGE, 2023, $44.99 Measurements-Based Radar Signature Modeling: An Analysis FrameworkBy Joseph T. Mayhan, senior staff member at...

From semiconductor manufacturing to mining, water is an essential commodity for industry. It is also a precious and constrained resource. According to the UN, more than 2.3 billion people faced water stress in 2022. Drought has cost the United States $249 billion in economic losses since 1980. Climate change is expected to worsen water problems...

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. Supershoes are reshaping distance running Since 2016, when Nike introduced the Vaporfly, a paradigm-shifting shoe that helped athletes run more efficiently (and therefore faster), the elite running world has muddled through a period...

The track at Moi University's Eldoret Town Campus doesn't look like a facility designed for champions. Its surface is a modest mix of clay and gravel, and it's 10 meters longer than the standard 400. Runners use a classroom chair to mark the start and finish. Yet it's as good a place as any to...

Etienne Boulter walked into his lab at the Universite Cote d'Azur in Nice, France, one morning with a Lego Technic excavator set tucked under his arm. His plan was simple yet ambitious: to use the pieces of the set to build a mechanical cell stretcher. Boulter and his colleagues study mechanobiology-the way mechanical forces, such...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. It feels weird, talking to yourself online. Especially when you're pretty much the most unpleasant character you've ever met. The me" I've been chatting to this week, called King Fiall of Nirth,...

Recorded on June 24, 2024 The Future of AI Games Speakers: Niall Firth, executive editor, and Allison Arieff, editorial director Generative AI is coming for games and redefining what it means to play. AI-powered NPCs that don't need a script could make games-and other worlds-deeply immersive. This technology could bring an unprecedented expansiveness to video...

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. Synthesia's hyperrealistic deepfakes will soon have full bodies Startup Synthesia's AI-generated avatars are getting an update to make them even more realistic: They will soon have bodies that can move, and hands that...

Humanity has long sought to tame wood into something more predictable. Sawmills manufacture lumber from trees selected for consistency. Wood is then sawed into standard sizes and dried in kilns to prevent twisting, cupping, or cracking. Generations of craftsmen have employed sophisticated techniques like dovetail joinery, breadboard ends, and pocket flooring to keep wood from...

Startup Synthesia's AI-generated avatars are getting an update to make them even more realistic: They will soon have bodies that can move, and hands that gesticulate. The new full-body avatars will be able to do things like sing and brandish a microphone while dancing, or move from behind a desk and walk across a room....

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. Is this the end of animal testing? Animal studies are notoriously bad at identifying human treatments. Around 95% of the drugs developed through animal research fail in people, but until recently there was...

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. Earlier this week, the US surgeon general, also known as the nation's doctor," authored an article making the case that health warnings should accompany social media. The goal:...

In a clean room in his lab, Sean Moore peers through a microscope at a bit of intestine, its dark squiggles and rounded structures standing out against a light gray background. This sample is not part of an actual intestine; rather, it's human intestinal cells on a tiny plastic rectangle, one of 24 so-called organs...

A potential future conflict between Taiwan and China would be shaped by novel methods of drone warfare involving advanced underwater drones and increased levels of autonomy, according to a new war-gaming experiment by the think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS). The report comes as concerns about Beijing's aggression toward Taiwan have been...

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 generative AI could reinvent what it means to play To make them feel alive, open-world games like Red Dead Redemption 2 are inhabited by vast crowds of computer-controlled characters. These animated people-called...

First, a confession. I only got into playing video games a little over a year ago (I know, I know). A Christmas gift of an Xbox Series S for the kids" dragged me-pretty easily, it turns out-into the world of late-night gaming sessions. I was immediately attracted to open-world games, in which you're free 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. I tested out a buzzy new text-to-video AI model from China You may not be familiar with Kuaishou, but this Chinese company just hit a major milestone: It's released the first ever text-to-video...

Pneumatic tubes were touted as something that would revolutionize the world. In science fiction, they were envisioned as a fundamental part of the future-even in dystopias like George Orwell's 1984, where the main character, Winston Smith, sits in a room peppered with pneumatic tubes that spit out orders for him to alter previously published news...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. You may not be familiar with Kuaishou, but this Chinese company just hit a major milestone: It's released the first text-to-video generative AI model that's freely available for the public...

Meta has created a system that can embed hidden signals, known as watermarks, in AI-generated audio clips, which could help in detecting AI-generated content online. The tool, called AudioSeal, is the first that can pinpoint which bits of audio in, for example, a full hourlong podcast might have been generated by AI. It could help...

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 does AI hallucinate? The World Health Organization's new chatbot launched on April 2 with the best of intentions. The virtual avatar named SARAH, was designed to dispense health tips about how to...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Knock, knock. Who's there? An AI with generic jokes. Researchers from Google DeepMind asked 20 professional comedians to use popular AI language models to write jokes and comedy performances. Their results...

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. The World Health Organization's new chatbot launched on April 2 with the best of intentions. A fresh-faced virtual avatar backed by GPT-3.5, SARAH (Smart AI Resource Assistant...

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 cost of building the perfect wave For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. While this hunt has taken surfers from...

For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. It's not just aquestion of size, but also of shape, surface conditions, and duration-ideally in a beautiful natural environment. While this hunt has taken surfers from tropical coastlines reachable only by boat to swells breaking off...

AI is good at lots of things: spotting patterns in data, creating fantastical images, and condensing thousands of words into just a few paragraphs. But can it be a useful tool for writing comedy? New research suggests that it can, but only to a very limited extent. It's an intriguing finding that hints at 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. Biotech companies are trying to make milk without cows The outbreak of avian influenza on US dairy farms has started to make milk seem a lot less wholesome. Milk that's raw, or unpasteurized,...

It's game night, and I'm crossing my fingers, hoping for a hurricane. I roll the die and it clatters across the board, tumbling to a stop to reveal a tiny icon of a tree stump. Bad news: I just triggered deforestation in the Amazon. That seals it. I failed to stop climate change-at least this...

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. The outbreak of avian influenza on US dairy farms has started to make milk seem a lot less wholesome. Milk that's raw, or unpasteurized, can actually infect mice...

A London-based nonprofit is poised to become one of the world's largest financial backers of solar geoengineering research. And it's just one of a growing number of foundations eager to support scientists exploring whether the world could ease climate change by reflecting away more sunlight. Quadrature Climate Foundation, established in 2019 and funded through the...