MIT Technology Review

For a reporter who covers AI, one of the biggest stories this year has been the rise of large language models. These are AI models that produce text a human might have written—sometimes so convincingly they have tricked people into thinking they are sentient. These models’ power comes from troves of publicly available human-created text…

Ammonia might seem like an unlikely fuel to help cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Best known for its odor, the gas can be dangerous and toxic. But it could also play a key role in decarbonizing global shipping, providing an efficient way to store the energy needed to power large ships on long journeys. The American Bureau…

Roger Nichols remembers sending his first e-mail using wireless networks in the early 1990s, from the back of a bus during his daily commute. That was 30 years ago, on a 1G network—at a data rate about fifteen thousand times slower than today. Now the 6G program manager at Keysight Technologies, Nichols sees the rapid…

As the covid pandemic raged in late 2020, all eyes turned briefly from our troubled planet to our planetary neighbor Venus. Astronomers had made a startling detection in its cloud tops: a gas called phosphine that on Earth is created through biological processes. Speculation ran wild as scientists struggled to understand what they were seeing. …

I Was There When is an oral history project that’s part of the In Machines We Trust podcast. It features stories of how breakthroughs and watershed moments in artificial intelligence and computing happened, as told by the people who witnessed them. In this episode we meet Dave Johnson, the chief data and artificial intelligence officer…

As a globally unprecedented 70-day heat wave continues to hold its grip on southern China, with the highest temperature as much as 113°F (45°C), severe droughts and shortages in the hydropower supply are wreaking havoc on the lives of residents. Electric vehicle owners are one group particularly feeling the heat. Since public charging posts are temporarily closed…

The most viewed post on Facebook last quarter was a 69 joke, featuring reposted footage from an episode of the TV show Family Feud. The post, originally an Instagram Reel, had more than 52 million views on Facebook, according to Meta’s quarterly report on the most widely viewed content on the platform in the US.…

In the coming weeks, a volunteer in Boston, Massachusetts, will be the first to trial a new treatment that could end up creating a second liver in their body. And that’s just the start—in the months that follow, other volunteers will test doses that could leave them with up to six livers in their bodies.…

Mouse embryos recently generated from stem cells in a lab show more brain development than any synthetic mouse embryos created previously. While other researchers had created mouse embryos from stem cells, none had reached the point where the entire brain, including the anterior portion at the front, began to develop, according to the researchers from…

The Inflation Reduction Act, which US President Joe Biden signed into law last week, will steer tens of billions of dollars into projects designed to capture carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released from power plants and industrial facilities. That provision is proving to be one of the more controversial climate items in the sweeping…

In 2019, Amazon committed to achieving “net-zero carbon” across its businesses by 2040. The online retail behemoth’s company-wide emissions have soared by 40% since then, topping 70 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year. It’s a glaring example of the gulf between corporate pledges and climate progress, but far from the only one. Numerous…

Doctors can’t tell a person’s race from medical images such as x-rays and CT scans. But a team including MIT researchers was able to train a deep-learning model to identify patients as white, Black, or Asian (according to their own description) just by analyzing such images—and they still can’t figure out how the computer does…

The MIT inventors of tiny artificial muscles that flap the wings of robotic insects have now added electroluminescent particles that enable them to emit colored light during flight, similar to fireflies. The artificial muscles, called actuators, are made by alternating ultrathin layers of elastomer and carbon nanotube electrode material and then rolling the stack of…

In April, design major Karyn Nakamura ’23 transformed Simmons Hall into an interactive art project. Her piece, titled “116 x 31” after the number of squares in Simmons’s façade, converted audio into dynamically projected color patterns evocative of vintage video games.

After two years of virtual celebrations, MIT welcomed back more than 9,800 alumni and guests to celebrate the anniversaries of their graduation from the Institute. The festivities included an on-campus graduation celebration featuring a key-note address from Kealoha Wong ’99 for the classes of 2020 and 2021, whose commencement ceremonies were held online. In addition…

The first director of the White House’s National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, Lynne Parker, has just stepped down. The NAIIO launched in January 2021 to coordinate the different federal agencies that work on artificial-intelligence initiatives, with the goal of advancing US development of AI. Its goals are to ensure that the US is a leader…

Messy coils of plastic tubing sprawl across the gallery’s concrete floor. The liquid inside—opaque, white with a yellowish tinge—pulses once, twice, and the eye tracks its progress thanks to the air bubbles cycling through the loops. Could that be … milk? Follow the tubing back to an unassuming rectangular box. If it is milk, a…

Last year the Unicode Consortium—the group responsible for the selection and design of emoji—released a new series that reflected the multiplicity of gender identities. That’s thanks to Paul D. Hunt, who since 2016 has been a key advocate for making emoji more inclusive, less sexist, and a better reflection of the human experience. Fighting to…

The way we make babies could be about to change. Maybe. An embryo forms when sperm meets egg. But what if we could start with other cells—if a blood sample or skin biopsy could be transformed into “artificial” sperm and eggs? What if those were all you needed to make a baby? That’s the promise…

Many of us will struggle to remember things as we get older. A gentle form of brain stimulation might help, according to new research. The approach appears to boost the memories of older people and help them remember lists of words. The technique can be adapted to improve either long-term or short-term memory, and the…

For transgender and nonbinary people like me, a society organized into only “male” and “female” makes us feel excluded. And it’s something that happens frequently, especially online. Take Gmail. There are three gender options when you register. If you choose “other,” you can write in any gender identity. But first you must choose how you’d…

We’ve often thought about muscle as a thing that exists separately from intellect—and perhaps that is even oppositional to it, one taking resources from the other. The truth is, our brains and muscles are in constant conversation with each other, sending electrochemical signals back and forth. In a very tangible way, our lifelong brain health…

For decades, lawmakers, researchers, journalists, and parents have worried that video games are bad for us: that they encourage violent behavior or harm mental health. These fears have spilled into policy decisions affecting millions of people. The World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in 2019, while China restricts…

There’s a genre of video floating around TikTok, Facebook, Nextdoor, and countless other social apps that you’ve probably seen, or at least scrolled past. They’re characterized by their brevity, their fish-eye framing, and often their prominent logo placement—which typically reads “Ring.com.” This footage comes from Ring customers, who install the company’s camera devices to protect…

Erik Prince’s pitch to investors was simple—but certainly ambitious: pay just €5 million and cure the biggest cybersecurity and privacy plagues of our day. The American billionaire—best known for founding the notorious private military firm Blackwater, which became globally infamous for killing Iraqi civilians and threatening US government investigators—was pushing Unplugged, a smartphone startup promising…

At a table in the Berghoff German restaurant in downtown Chicago in 2012, Charlie Catlett feverishly drew software architecture on a napkin. A senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory at the time, Catlett had been working with scientists from the US Environmental Protection Agency to understand the effects of air pollution on residents’ health.…

In October 2021, Facebook announced a massive pivot, changing its name to Meta and going all in on augmented and virtual reality through a futuristic vision of the internet called the metaverse. In fact, the strategy had been taking shape gradually for years, with help from a seemingly frivolous product feature on Instagram. Face filters…

The US has moved to restrict export of EDA software. What is it, and how will the move affect China?

When Jay told his mom he was bisexual at 14, she was supportive. But when he came out as transgender a few years later, she pushed back. She felt blindsided by the news. YouTube videos and online forums soon convinced her that she was right to feel that way. To her, it was clear that…

Minuscule lab-grown models of human brains can be fitted with caps that measure their activity, just as electroencephalogram (EEG) caps record electrical signals produced by full-size human brains. The minibrains are examples of organoids—three-dimensional clusters of living cells, grown in a lab, that simulate the structure and function of human organs so that researchers can…

Startups are exploring how electric planes could clean up air travel, which accounts for about 3% of worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions. The problem is that today’s electric aircraft could safely carry you and about a dozen fellow passengers only around 30 miles, according to a recent analysis. The limiting factor is the battery, in particular the…

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article. In the late 1950s, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies—which the US Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains—worked well for holding…

Late one evening in June of 2016, John Barentine stood alone at Mather Point, an iconic and rarely empty overlook at Grand Canyon National Park. The moon slid away, leaving the darkness of a crisp, clear sky. The stars that make up our galaxy seemed to align overhead. The inky chasm of the ancient canyon…

Fertility treatments can be undesirable for transgender men, as they involve pausing gender-affirming hormone therapy and undergoing potentially distressing procedures such as female hormone treatments and vaginal exams. New evidence suggests combining two existing techniques for the first time could help sidestep those issues. The process involves removing pieces of a transgender man’s ovary, extracting…

A hacking group linked to China has spent the last three years targeting human rights organizations, think tanks, news media, and agencies of multiple foreign governments, according to a revealing new report from the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. The report, shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review, offers new clues about how private contractors and front…

Ransomware, hackers, and nation-state threat actors have long dominated security teams’ focus. These external threats often feel more urgent and more dangerous, carrying greater potential consequences for the business. There’s no question about intent—it’s malicious. From a psychological perspective, it’s straightforward for security teams to identify the enemy and prepare for a fight. But what…

When Ollie’s mother, Katie, was nine weeks pregnant, her obstetrician-gynecologist’s office in Boulder, Colorado, offered her a special $100 price on a new prenatal blood test that she was told could detect major chromosomal hiccups such as Down syndrome and trisomy 18. She and her husband agreed—who can say no to a deal?—with one caveat.…

A heritage financial services institution isn’t necessarily the first place a technologist looks to grow their career. But that hasn’t been a problem for JPMorgan Chase, which has made itself an appealing career destination for technologists. “Technology is not an afterthought,” says Gill Haus, chief information officer of consumer and community banking at JPMorgan Chase.…