MIT Technology Review

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…

Imagine that you were provided no-cost fertility treatment and also offered a free DNA test to gauge which of those little IVF embryos floating in a dish stood the best chance of getting into a top college someday. Would you have the test performed? If you said yes, you’re among about 40% percent of Americans…

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. ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from We’ve reached peak ChatGPT. Released in December as a web app by the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight. …

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’ve come across some pretty wild technologies aimed at fighting climate change. Hydrogen-powered planes, underwater mining robots, and nuclear fusion reactors—each could play a role in cutting down on greenhouse-gas emissions. But there…

When Kyle Cornforth first walked into IDEO’s San Francisco offices in 2011, she felt she had entered a whole new world. At the time, Cornforth was a director at the Edible Schoolyard Project, a nonprofit that uses gardening and cooking in schools to teach and to provide nutritious food. She was there to meet with…

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. We’ve reached peak ChatGPT. Released at the end of November as a web app by the San Francisco–based firm OpenAI, the chatbot exploded into the mainstream almost overnight. According to…

From AI-powered platforms that can detect abnormal activities in supermarkets, to edge servers helping preserve biodiversity in remote locations, today’s technologies drive innovation in ways never before imaginable. “Innovation serves the purpose of making our life better, our work more productive, and our planet more sustainable,” says Yang Yuanqing, CEO and chairman of Lenovo. Technology…

For enterprises looking to shift from hardware investments to services and beyond, a change in technology and data infrastructure could be key. One approach is a focus on the “New IT,” a term coined by Lenovo, that features five elements: client, edge and cloud, network, and intelligence to meet business goals. “The mission of the…

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. Neuroscientists listened in on people’s brains for a week. They found order and chaos. The news: Our brains exist in a state somewhere between stability and chaos as they help us make sense…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. First of all, I’m still processing the whole “Chinese spy balloon” saga, which, from start to finish, took over everyone’s brains for just about 72 hours and has been one of the weirdest recent events…

For over a decade, we’ve heard that small reactors could be a big part of nuclear power’s future. Because of their size, small modular reactors (SMRs) could solve some of the major challenges of traditional nuclear power, making plants quicker and cheaper to build and safer to operate. That future may have just gotten a…

Our brains exist in a state somewhere between stability and chaos as they help us make sense of the world, according to recordings of brain activity taken from volunteers over the course of a week. As we go from reading a book to chatting with a friend, for example, our brains shift from one semi-stable…

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 original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video What’s happened: Runway, the generative AI startup that co-created last year’s breakout text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, has released an AI…

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, OpenAI unveiled a tool that can detect text produced by its AI system ChatGPT. But if you’re a teacher who fears the coming deluge of ChatGPT-generated essays, don’t get the party…

Runway, the generative AI startup that co-created last year’s breakout text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, has released an AI model that can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image. In a demo reel posted on its website, Runway shows how its software, called Gen-1, can…

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. When my dad was sick, I started Googling grief. Then I couldn’t escape it. —Tate Ryan-Mosley, senior tech policy reporter I’ve always been a super-Googler, coping with uncertainty by trying to learn as…

I’ve always been a super-Googler, coping with uncertainty by trying to learn as much as I can about whatever might be coming. That included my father’s throat cancer. Initially I focused on the purely medical. I endeavored to learn as much as I could about molecular biomarkers, transoral robotic surgeries, and the functional anatomy of…

Popular image generation models can be prompted to produce identifiable photos of real people, potentially threatening their privacy, according to new research. The work also shows that these AI systems can be made to regurgitate exact copies of medical images and copyrighted work by artists. It’s a finding that could strengthen the case for artists…

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 Indian health-care workers use WhatsApp to save pregnant women Across India, an all-women cadre of 1 million community health-care workers are responsible for making public health care accessible to people from remote…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. What is the value of a human organ? It’s a question that’s been on my mind since I heard about a disturbing proposed change to the law in Massachusetts that would allow…

Hirabai Koli’s medical reports were normal—but she wasn’t happy. She had been monitoring her weight over the first two months of her pregnancy, and she surprised community health-care worker Suraiyya Terdale when she asked why she wasn’t gaining more. (To protect her safety and private health information, Koli is being identified by a pseudonym.) “It…