MIT Technology Review

It was drawing, or disegno, as deployed in the making of Italian buildings during the Renaissance, that gave us the word “design”—or such was the enthusiastic explanation I received as an architecture student at the end of the 1990s. History, of course, tells a more complex story. Though there was indeed a key shift in…

Wean Khing Wong, an attorney, mediator, speaker, and life coach, knows from personal experience that there are many ways to support the institutions and ideals that are important to you. As founder and former president of the MIT Chinese Alumni Group—which alumni and students of any ethnic background are welcome to join—she has produced free…

Sally Kornbluth officially began her tenure as MIT’s 18th president on January 1. A welcome banner—in Duke blue, presumably to ease her transition to 02139—greeted her in Lobby 7 as she began taking her first sips from the firehose. Here’s her video hello to the MIT community:

Forecasting earthquakes is complex, relying on specialized analysis of minute signals from the Earth’s crust. Cancer treatment is also a highly complex field, involving thousands of researchers and billions of dollars worldwide. Either would be enough to fill the waking hours of any scientist. But the work of Jie Zhang, PhD ’97, a geophysicist and…

In the days of the Apollo program, space policy wasn’t really about rockets, it was about international politics: beating the Soviets to the moon. But in the 21st century, with space now populated by thousands of satellites, telescopes, and other technologies, space policy has become far more complex. So after earning her degree in aerospace…

At Universal Studios Japan, one of the world’s most popular theme parks, a single parade can run 45 minutes and involve more than 100 performers, a half-dozen floats, intricate choreography, and a huge all-out water fight with the audience. It’s an enormous feat of engineering. Good thing an MIT alumnus is in charge. Daniel Pérez…

After a stroke in 2010, Debra Meyerson ’79, SM ’80, was paralyzed on the right side of her body and needed months of speech therapy before she was able to produce even the simplest of words. Today, she’s speaking out about stroke recovery—especially the mental health and emotional aspects of healing, which she says don’t…

Tina Bahadori ’84, SM ’88, studied the chemistry of turbulent diffusion flames and wrote a thesis on Les Liaisons Dangereuses as a double major in chemical engineering and humanities. Then she earned MIT master’s degrees in chemical engineering and technology and policy. So, it’s no surprise that she now works at the complex intersection of…

When the MIT Museum opened its new 56,000-square-foot space in Kendall Square last October, it was a time of public celebration. It was also a private point of pride for David Nuñez, SM ’15, who helped guide the museum’s transformation as its director of technology and digital strategy. Nuñez joined the museum in 2017, about…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How did China come to dominate the world of electric cars? Before most people could realize what was happening, China became a world leader in electric vehicles. And the momentum hasn’t slowed: In…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Have you been threatened by an AI chatbot yet? Over the past week it seems like almost every news outlet has tried Microsoft’s Bing AI search and found that the chatbot makes up…

Nakeema Stefflbauer had only lived in Berlin for a couple of years when refugees from countries such as Syria and Iraq began arriving in Germany in great numbers in 2015. A native New Yorker who was familiar with Arabic and Middle Eastern culture from her travels in the area, Stefflbauer decided to volunteer to support…

Tech Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here. Before most people could realize the extent of what was happening, China became a world leader in making and buying EVs. And the momentum hasn’t slowed: In just the past…

The residents of Vanuatu, a clutch of islands in the South Pacific, are no strangers to flooding. The ocean floor around them is frequently shaken by tsunami-triggering earthquakes. Some advance warning could give residents enough time to get to higher ground before tsunamis strike, saving lives. But the world’s 65 active deep-ocean buoys, which are…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How Citizen is trying to remake itself by recruiting elderly Asians Members of the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community in the US are living through a period of ongoing race-based attacks—most recently in…

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network. When it’s dark outside and Josephine Zhao has to walk even a few blocks home in San Francisco, she will sometimes call in an extra set of eyes—literally. After opening the Citizen app on her phone, Zhao connects with one of the…

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 often hear big (and unrealistic) promises about the potential of AI to solve the world’s ills, and I was skeptical when I first learned that AI…

ONE Jarrod Burks opened the rear cargo door of his van and pointed to an array of strange equipment tangled inside. White PVC tubes were locked together, forming an expandable, fence-like grid, with large, rugged wheels attached beneath. Beside it all, on a layer of soft blankets, were a tablet computer, many yards of cables,…

New batteries are coming to America. This week, Ford announced plans for a new factory in Michigan that will produce lithium iron phosphate batteries for its electric vehicles. The plant, expected to cost $3.5 billion and begin production in 2026, would be the first to make these batteries in the US. “This is a big…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Welcome to the oldest part of the metaverse Today’s headlines treat the metaverse as a hazy dream yet to be built. But if it’s defined as a network of virtual worlds we can…

Today’s headlines treat the metaverse as a hazy dream yet to be built, but if it’s defined as a network of virtual worlds we can inhabit, its oldest extant corner has been already running for 25 years. It’s a medieval fantasy kingdom created for the online role-playing game Ultima Online—and it has already endured a…

The batteries propelling electric vehicles have quickly become the most crucial component, and expense, for a new generation of cars and trucks. They represent not only the potential for cleaner transportation but also broad shifts in geopolitical power, industrial dominance, and environmental protection. According to recent predictions, EVs will make up just over half of…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How K-pop fans are shaping elections around the globe Back in the early ‘90s, Korean pop music, known as K-pop, was largely conserved to its native South Korea. It’s since exploded around the…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. When it comes to watching the Super Bowl, I’ve always been more of a football person than a commercials person. During Sunday’s game, though, I couldn’t help but notice something about the ads. …

It’s a good time to be a search startup. When I spoke to Richard Socher, the CEO of You.com, last week he was buzzing: “Man, what an exciting day—looks like another record for us,” he exclaimed. “Never had this many users. It’s been a whirlwind.” You wouldn’t know that two of the biggest firms in…

Less than a month before Chile’s presidential election on December 19, 2021, Constanza Jorquera, an associate researcher at the Chilean Korean Study Center at the University of Santiago, Chile, feared that her country’s future—and her own rights—hung in the balance. The right-wing candidate, a 55-year-old former congressman named Jose Antonio Kast, had won the first…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These startups hope to spray iron particles above the ocean to fight climate change A Palo Alto–based startup wants to begin releasing iron particles into the exhaust stream of a shipping vessel crossing…

Every once in a while, there’s one thing that gets everybody obsessed. In the Chinese tech world last week, it was ChatGPT. Maybe it was because of the holiday season, or maybe it was because ChatGPT is not currently available in China, but it took more than two months for the natural-language-processing chatbot to finally…

At 82 years old, with an aggressive form of blood cancer that six courses of chemotherapy had failed to eliminate, “Paul” appeared to be out of options. With each long and unpleasant round of treatment, his doctors had been working their way down a list of common cancer drugs, hoping to hit on something that…

Within the next 18 months, a Palo Alto–based startup wants to begin releasing a small quantity of iron-rich particles into the exhaust stream of a shipping vessel crossing the open ocean. Blue Dot Change hopes to determine whether the particles will accelerate the destruction of methane, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases in the…

We’re entering the era of the heat pump. The concept behind heat pumps is simple: powered by electricity, they move heat around to either cool or heat buildings. It’s not a new idea—they were invented in the 1850s and have been used in homes since the 1960s. But all of a sudden, they’ve become the…

The finance sector is among the keenest adopters of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), the predictive powers of which have been demonstrated everywhere from back-office process automation to customer-facing applications. AI models excel in domains requiring pattern recognition based on well-labeled data, like fraud detection models trained on past behavior. ML can support…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Why you shouldn’t trust AI search engines Last week was the week chatbot-powered search engines were supposed to arrive. The idea is for AI bots to generate chatty answers to our questions, instead…

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 was the week chatbot-powered search engines were supposed to arrive. The big idea is that these AI bots would upend our experience of searching the web by generating chatty answers…

Many software projects emerge because—somewhere out there—a programmer had a personal problem to solve. That’s more or less what happened to Graydon Hoare. In 2006, Hoare was a 29-year-old computer programmer working for Mozilla, the open-source browser company. Returning home to his apartment in Vancouver, he found that the elevator was out of order; its…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This biohacking company is using a crypto city to test controversial gene therapies Last year, biotech startup Minicircle started recruiting participants for a clinical trial of gene therapy. But several details made it…

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. Recommendation algorithms sort most of what we see online and determine how posts, news articles, and accounts you follow are prioritized on digital platforms. In the…

The advertisement—posted on Mirror, a Web3 publishing platform, in March last year—outlined an eye-catching if perhaps confusing proposal: “Access NFTs for a follistatin plasmid phase I clinical trial in Prospera ZEDE, Honduras.” The ad had been posted by a biotech startup called Minicircle, which was recruiting participants for a clinical trial of gene therapy. But…

When the Mexica people left their ancestral land of Aztlán in search of a new home, they were following orders from the sun god Huitzilopochtli. In 1325, the god’s prophecy brought them to a salty swamp at the lowest dip of the Valley of Mexico. “Among the reeds and bushes they spotted an eagle perched…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These prosthetics break the mold with third thumbs, spikes, and superhero skins Traditionally, prosthetics designers have looked to the human body for inspiration. Prosthetics were seen as replacements for missing body parts; hyper-realistic…

Many mornings, Dani Clode wakes up, straps a robotic thumb to one of her hands, and gets to work, poring through reams of neuroscience data, sketching ideas for new prosthetic devices, and thinking about ways to augment the human body. Clode works as a specialist at the University of Cambridge’s Plasticity Lab, which studies the…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. How worried should we be about bird flu? Some have warned that avian flu will be the next deadly pandemic. Others have said the risk is no different from what it was…