MIT Technology Review

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday,sign up here. This week, Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine is filling in for Jess Hamzelou. Something journalists and scientists have in common is that they hate getting scooped. And it's especially annoying when the...

When we talk about computing these days, we tend to talk about software and the engineers who write it. But we wouldn't be anywhere without the hardware and the physical sciences that have enabled it to be created-disciplines like optics, materials science, and mechanical engineering. It's thanks to advances in these areas that we can...

In some San Francisco neighborhoods, at certain hours of the night, it seems as if one in 10 cars on the road has no driver behind the wheel. These are not experimental test vehicles, and this is not a drill. Many of San Francisco's ghostly driverless cars are commercial robotaxis, directly competing with taxis, Uber...

A significant proportion of people paid to train AI models may be themselves outsourcing that work to AI, a new study has found. It takes an incredible amount of data to train AI systems to perform specific tasks accurately and reliably. Many companies pay gig workers on platforms like Mechanical Turk to complete tasks that...

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. Two companies can now sell lab-grown chicken in the US The news: The first cultivated, or lab-grown, meat has been approved for sale in the US. Two companies, Upside Foods and Eat Just,...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Say, theoretically, that a pipe in your bathroom springs a leak. Bad situation, right? The good news is that there are pretty much only two things you need to do: turn the...

In Colombia, there's a national debate about what to do with Pablo Escobar's feral cocaine hippos." To many, the 160 hippos-descendants of four illegally imported African hippopotamuses that escaped from the drug kingpin's private zoo after his death in 1993-are agents of destruction. Each night, they collectively chomp through half a ton of vegetation, and...

When Molly Burhans first started trying to map the Catholic Church's global property holdings so the land could be put to work fighting climate change, the idea seemed so obvious to her that she was sure someone else must be doing it already. Burhans, a cartographer, was then an ecological-design grad student who had recently...

The first cultivated, or lab-grown, meat has been approved for sale in the US. Two California-based companies, Upside Foods and Eat Just, received grants of inspection from the United States Department of Agriculture today. It's the final approval needed for each company to begin commercial US production and sales. Animal agriculture makes up nearly 15%...

As the world becomes increasingly networked and connected devices proliferate, organizations are producing a plethora of data. The potential to collect data is growing exponentially. From smart grids to mobile phones and from connected cars to the industrial internet of things, tens of billions of devices will act as sensors, delivering data to networks. Whether...

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 counterfeit lawsuits that scoop up hundreds of Chinese Amazon sellers at once Sun Qunming had no idea that the word airbag" could be trademarked. Sun, who owns an e-commerce company in Shenzhen,...

China Report is MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology developments in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Want to know how to make Chinese Amazon sellers anxious? Put Chicago in the delivery address when you order. Why? Because in the last few years, many sellers have been slapped with massive lawsuits for...

In December 2022, a few months after learning that he'd won an Iowa Arts Fellowship to attend the MFA program at the University of Iowa, David James DJ" Savarese sat for a televised interview with a local news station. But in order to answer the anchorman's questions, Savarese, a 30-year-old poet with autism who uses...

Multi-tenant systems are invaluable for modern, fast-paced businesses. These systems allow multiple users and teams to access and use them at the same time. Machine learning operations (MLOps) teams, in particular, benefit greatly from using multi-tenant systems. MLOps teams that don't leverage multi-tenant systems can fall victim to inefficiency, inconsistency, duplicative work, and bumpy onboarding-adding...

Sun Qunming had no idea that the word airbag" could be trademarked. Sun, who owns an e-commerce company of 13 people in Shenzhen, China, has been selling phone cases to Amazon buyers in Europe and the US since 2016. But last year, her business ground to a halt. One of her products has air-filled bumper...

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 existential risk became the biggest meme in AI Who's afraid of the big bad bots? A lot of people, it seems. Hundreds of scientists, business leaders, and policymakers have recently made public...

The Wi-Fi signal is weak outside the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Anacostia, a historic African-American section of Washington, DC. The abolitionist leader's former home sits serenely atop a grassy hill in the otherwise bustling neighborhood. It is one of Monica Sanders's final stops on an overcast December afternoon. Facing the property, she holds...

It's a really weird time in AI. In just six months, the public discourse around the technology has gone from Chatbots generate funny sea shanties" to AI systems could cause human extinction." Who else is feeling whiplash? My colleague Will Douglas Heaven asked AI experts why exactly people are talking about existential risk, and why...

Who's afraid of the big bad bots? A lot of people, it seems. The number of high-profile names that have now made public pronouncements or signed open letters warning of the catastrophic dangers of artificial intelligence is striking. Hundreds of scientists, business leaders, and policymakers have spoken up, from deep learning pioneers Geoffrey Hinton 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. Police got called to an overcrowded presentation on rejuvenation" technology It's not every day that police storm through the doors of a scientific session and eject half the audience. But that's what happened...

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. It was a big week in tech policy in Europe withthe European Parliament's vote to approve its draft rules for the AI Acton the same...

In the cavernous grand ballroom of the Seattle Convention Center, Sarah Kane stood in front of an oversize computer monitor, methodically reconstructing the life history of the Milky Way. Waving her shock of long white hair as she talked (I'm easy to spot from a distance," she joked), she outlined the Hunt for Galactic Fossils,"...

It's not every day that police storm through the doors of a scientific session and eject half the audience. But that is what occurred on Friday at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center during a round of scientific presentations featuring Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a specialist in rejuvenation" technology at a secretive, wealthy anti-aging startup...

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 new US border wall is an app Keisy Plaza, 39, left her home in Colombia seven months ago. She walked a 62-mile stretch of dense mountainous rainforest and swampland with her two...

A few minutes before 9 a.m. on a day in late March, Keisy Plaza, 39, leans against a wall on the corner of Juarez Avenue and Gardenias Street in Ciudad Juarez. It's the last intersection before Mexico turns into El Paso, Texas, and a stream of commuters drive past on their way to work and...

If we're going to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming, experts agree, removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential. That's why, over the past few years, projects focused on growing seaweed to suck CO2 from the air and lock it in the sea have attracted attention-and significant amounts of funding-from...

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. A brain implant changed her life. Then it was removed against her will. Sticking an electrode inside a person’s brain can do more than treat a disease. Take the case of Rita Leggett,…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Ian Burkhart sustained a severe spinal cord injury while he was on vacation at 19 years old. “It left me as a quadriplegic,” he says. “I had a little bit of movement…

Sticking an electrode inside a person’s brain can do more than treat a disease. Take the case of Rita Leggett, an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant changed her sense of agency and self. She told researchers that she “became one” with her device. She was devastated when, two years later, she was told she…

The e-mobility revolution is in high gear. Automakers are promising to launch dozens of electric models over the next decade. In August 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden set a target for 50% of new car sales to be electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030. And electric car registrations in Europe increased from 3.5% in 2019 to…

The automotive industry is rapidly changing as connected and autonomous vehicles — enabled by AI and machine learning — are transforming transportation to create a seamless and personalized customer experience. The modernization of systems and software is steering vehicles to be more intelligent than ever, improving driving experiences and propelling operational efficiencies. From simulation testing…

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. IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer What’s happening: Last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor containing 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Sitting in a booth in a hotel lobby in Brooklyn, I stared down the lineup of sliders, each on a separate bamboo plate. On the far left was a plant-based burger from Impossible…

Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years. IBM…

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. Food delivery by drone is just part of daily life in Shenzhen —Zeyi Yang In a buzzy urban area in Shenzhen, China, I watched as a drone descended onto a pickup kiosk 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. It feels as though a switch has turned on in AI policy. For years, US legislators and American tech companies were reluctant to introduce—if not outright against—strict technology regulation. Now both have…

My iced tea arrived from the sky. In a buzzy urban area in Shenzhen, China, sandwiched between several skyscrapers, I watched as a yellow-and-black drone descended onto a pickup kiosk by the street. The top of the vending-machine-size kiosk opened up for the drone to land, and a white cardboard box containing my drink was…

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. AI regulation is hot. Ever since the success of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, the public’s attention has been grabbed by wonder and worry about what these powerful AI tools can do. Generative…

Meta has built AI models that can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages—a tenfold increase on what’s currently available. It’s a significant step toward preserving languages that are at risk of disappearing, the company says. Meta is releasing its models to the public via the code hosting service GitHub. It claims that…

Brain signals can be used to detect how much pain a person is experiencing, which could overhaul how we treat certain chronic pain conditions, a new study has suggested. The research, published in Nature Neuroscience today, is the first time a human’s chronic-pain-related brain signals have been recorded. It could aid the development of personalized…

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. The FDA just approved rub-on gene therapy that helps “butterfly” children The news: Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration approved sales of the first gene therapy that is directly applied to…

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. I recently published a short story about new policies recently announced by Google and Twitter that allow the companies to remove inactive accounts. Google said the decision…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Regular readers will know that the microbiome is one of my favorite topics to cover. The billions of bacteria crawling all over our bodies play a vital role in our health, influencing…

Last week a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech’s grip on AI. New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers…

Things got weird at yesterday’s Google I/O conference right from the jump, when the duck hit the stage. The day began with a musical performance described as a “generative AI experiment featuring Dan Deacon and Google’s MusicLM, Phenaki, and Bard AI tools.” It wasn’t clear exactly how much of it was machine-made and how much…

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. Google is throwing generative AI at everything The news: Google is stuffing powerful new AI tools into tons of its existing products and launching a slew of new ones, including a coding assistant,…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Buckle up, because this week, we’re talking about batteries. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been noticing a lot of announcements about a new type of battery, one that could majorly shake…

Google is stuffing powerful new AI tools into tons of its existing products and launching a slew of new ones, including a coding assistant, it announced at its annual I/O conference today. Billions of users will soon see Google’s latest AI language mode, PaLM 2, integrated into over 25 products like Maps, Docs, Gmail, Sheets,…

The joke about the Human Genome Project is how many times it’s been finished, but not actually. The first time was in 2000, when Bill Clinton announced the “first survey of the entire human genome” at a White House ceremony, calling it “the most important and most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.” But the…