MIT Technology Review

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Floating is the new flying, at least according to a handful of companies focused on building futuristic blimps, airships, and hot-air balloons. Lighter-than-air vehicles (or LTAs) depend on the same basic physics that creates bubbles in water. They're filled with extremely light gas, like helium, which allows them to achieve lift and hover in the...

On May 10, 1985, a tricked-out van drove south on US Route 1 in Pawcatuck, Connecticut, on a sunny spring day. Every .01 miles, a 35-millimeter movie camera mounted on the dashboard captured an image out of the front of the van, along with a digital readout displaying the date, route, mileage, and bearing. Highway...

Technology," wrote the late historian of technology Melvin Kranzberg Jr., is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral." It's an observation that often doesn't stick with people as they think about technologies related to accessibility. So many of our dominant stories about technologies for disability, access, and mobility paint them as objects of empowerment...

Lot #651 on Somnium Space belongs to Zannes Law, a Toronto-based law firm. In this seven-level metaverse office, principal lawyer Madaline Zannes conducts private consultations with clients, meets people wandering in with legal questions, hosts conferences, and gives guest lectures. Zannes says that her metaverse office allows for a more immersive, imaginative client experience. She...

I often explain the concept of structural inequality using the example of MIT's bathrooms. Though the Institute never explicitly banned women, its buildings were designed for male students and the overwhelmingly male faculty and staff. When MIT's Cambridge campus opened in 1916, the bathrooms along the Infinite Corridor accommodated only men. Female undergraduate enrollment hovered...

Ananoparticle sensordeveloped by Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM '93, PhD '97, and colleagues including former MIT postdoc Liangliang Hao, now an assistant professor at Boston University, could make it possible to detect and monitor cancers with an affordable paper-based urine test. The nanoparticles are a variation on a type of synthetic biomarker" developed in Bhatia's lab...

A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet, and DiseaseBy Shilpa Ravella '03W.W. NORTON & CO., 2022, $30 The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of ScienceBy Alan Lightman, professor of the practice of the humanities PANTHEON, 2023, $26 A Crisis Like No Other: Understanding and Defeating Global WarmingBy Robert De Saro, SM '74BENTHAM BOOKS,...

Patches stuck to the skin can be an appealing alternative to injections, pills, and other ways of getting medicines into the body. Two MIT groups have found ways to advance this technology. Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in the Media Lab, and colleagues developed a patch that applies painless ultrasonic waves, creating tiny channels that...

Counterfeit seeds can cost farmers more than two-thirds of expected crop yields. Now an MIT team may have found a way to outwit fakers: tiny tags of biodegradable silk-based material, each containing a unique combination of chemical signatures. The technology is based on what are known as physically unclonable functions, or PUFs, a concept used...

The Namaqua sandgrouse, a bird native to the deserts of southern Africa, has a unique way of helping chicks survive before they can fly: the males frolic in the nearest watering hole and carry water back in their belly feathers for them to drink. In 1967, researchers found that the feathers can absorb 25 milliliters...

A nanoparticle developed by MIT chemical engineer Daniel Anderson and colleagues can deliver messenger RNA encoding CRISPR gene-editing proteins to the lungs of mice. With further development, the researchers say, such particles could offer an inhalable treatment for cystic fibrosis and other lung diseases, snipping out and replacing the faulty genes that cause them. The...

It's no Lionel Messi, but a four-legged robot developed at CSAIL's Improbable Artificial Intelligence Lab can dribble a soccer ball on surfaces including grass, sand, gravel, mud, and snow. To develop these hard-to-script skills, the researchers turned to a simulation-a digital twin of the natural world. DribbleBot" started out with no idea how to dribble,...

Whether you think next-generation AI heralds an exciting new world for humankind or sows the seeds for its destruction, few business leaders can afford to ignore it. But in this febrile environment, it can be hard to plot a course that neither falls foul of the hype nor misses the opportunity entirely. You need only...

The chemicals industry helped build the 20th century, and is urgently adapting to the 21st. Almost all daily goods rely on output from the chemicals sector, from clothes and home insulation to fertilizer and medicine. But this energy-hungry industry needs innovation to find safer, more sustainable products. With tightening regulation and growing pressure from consumers...

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 electrifying steam could cut beer's carbon emissions What's happening? Next year, New Belgium Brewing will swap out one of the four natural-gas-powered boilers at its main brewing facility in Fort Collins, Colorado,...

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've heard a lot about AI risks in the era of large language models like ChatGPT (including from me!)-risks such as prolific mis- and disinformation...

Next year, New Belgium Brewing will swap out one of the four natural-gas-powered boilers at its main brewing facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, for an electrified version designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. The modular, 650-kilowatt pilot boiler system was developed by AtmosZero, a startup also based in Fort Collins and coming out of stealth today....

As Rodrigo Camarena sees it, you can hail a car and order food on your smartphone; why shouldn't it also help you exercise your rights? Reclamo, a new web app created by Justicia Lab, the nonprofit innovation incubator that Camarena directs, helps documented and undocumented immigrant workers who have experienced wage theft. By clicking through...

We are witnessing a historic, global paradigm shift driven by dramatic improvements in AI. As AI has evolved from predictive to generative, more businesses are taking notice, with enterprise adoption of AI more than doubling since 2017. According to McKinsey, 63% of respondents expect their organizations' investment in AI to increase over the next three...

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. Junk websites filled with AI-generated text are pulling in money from programmatic ads The news: AI chatbots are filling junk websites with AI-generated text that attracts paying advertisers. More than 140 major brands...

The Japanese concept of forest bathing," or shinrin-yoku (), has long been acclaimed for its supposed health benefits. Hundreds of scientific studies suggest that it can improve mental health and cognitive performance, reduce blood pressure, and even treat depression and anxiety. Yet forests can be hard to reach or, for some, completely inaccessible in a...

People are using AI chatbots to fill junk websites with AI-generated text that attracts paying advertisers, according to a new report from the media research organization NewsGuard that was shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review. Over 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge. Ninety...

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 people paid to train AI are outsourcing their work... to AI The news: Many people who are paid to train AI models may be themselves outsourcing that work to AI, a new...

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...