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by Julie Fox on (#65494)
When you think of rum, what comes to mind? A strawberry daiquiri? A piña colada with a cocktail umbrella? Marc-Kwesi Farrell ’03 thinks there is a lot more to rum than that, and he’s on a mission to reinvent the spirit as a versatile, top-shelf drink. “If you look at rum today, it is saddled…
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MIT Technology Review
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| Updated | 2025-04-07 19:32 |
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by Ken Shulman on (#65493)
Imagine you’re an automobile manufacturer. You have warehouse after warehouse full of parts. You’d like to use some of those parts in a new model and save on design and production costs. But you can’t find those parts through a text search. You don’t know what they’re called. Often the only record of them is…
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by Julie Fox on (#65492)
Tornadoes form in 10 seconds or less. So Howie Bluestein ’70, SM ’72, PhD ’76, a storm chaser for 40-plus years, is working with colleagues to build a new radar system that can scan nearly all of a storm’s volume in 15 seconds—and help forecasters quickly determine its potential to spawn life-threatening conditions. “This is…
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by Stephanie M. McPherson, SM ’11 on (#65491)
On the surface, writing and engineering don’t seem to have much in common. But the link between the two is more than apparent to Suzanne Lane ’85, who’s been director of MIT’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program since 2013. “I made our program’s motto ‘Building tomorrow’s world in words,’” she says. “Writing and…
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by The Editors on (#65490)
When Baldwin Lee ’72 was five years old, his father told him he’d be going to MIT. The oldest male child in a Chinese immigrant family, he did as he was told, becoming valedictorian of Brooklyn Tech and enrolling at the Institute in 1968. The intense focus on science and technology felt suffocating, however, and…
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by The Editors on (#6548Z)
Your MIT alumni benefits One of the most important MIT benefits alumni can access is the MITAA’s Infinite Connection (IC) web portal. With an IC account, you can search MIT’s online alumni directory and connect with alumni from your region, industry, course, living group, and more. You can also stay connected to other alumni by…
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by Grace van Deelen, SM ’22 on (#6548Y)
Close your eyes and, for a moment, imagine you know two languages. For any noun you can think of—object, feeling, place—two words exist where a monolingual brain comes up with only one. When speaking, reading, or writing, your brain must decide which of those words to use—an added task on top of the language processing…
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by Zeyi Yang on (#6546M)
China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about what’s happening in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Welcome back to China Report. Take a deep breath. The Chinese Communist Party Congress news cycle is (basically) over. There are many significant things from the high-level political assembly to talk about, mostly around understanding…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#653HQ)
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 scientists want to make you young again A little over 15 years ago, scientists at Kyoto University in Japan made a remarkable discovery. When they added just four proteins to a skin…
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by Antonio Regalado on (#653CQ)
A little over 15 years ago, scientists at Kyoto University in Japan made a remarkable discovery. When they added just four proteins to a skin cell and waited about two weeks, some of the cells underwent an unexpected and astounding transformation: they became young again. They turned into stem cells almost identical to the kind…
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by Tammy Xu on (#653BA)
Machine learning could help develop new types of metals with useful properties, such as resistance to extreme temperatures and rust, according to new research. This could be useful in a range of sectors—for example, metals that perform well at lower temperatures could improve spacecraft, while metals that resist corrosion could be used for boats and…
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by Melissa Heikkilä on (#652HP)
To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to The Algorithm! Considering how powerful AI systems are, and the roles they increasingly play in helping to make high-stakes decisions about our lives, homes, and societies, they receive surprisingly little formal scrutiny. That’s starting to change, thanks to the blossoming field of AI audits.…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#6527Z)
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 US Navy wants swarms of thousands of small drones The US Navy is working on ways to build, deploy, and control thousands of small drones that are able to flock together to…
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by David Hambling on (#6522W)
The US Navy is working on ways to build, deploy, and control thousands of small drones that are able to flock together to overwhelm anti-aircraft defenses with sheer numbers, budget documents reveal. The conflict in Ukraine has proved the worth of small drones, including consumer quadcopters, which have carried out reconnaissance, guided artillery fire, and…
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by Matthew Ponsford on (#6522V)
The emerald jewel wasp’s unusual arrival into the world—bursting from the body of a zombified cockroach it has eaten from the inside—ranks among nature’s most gruesome miracles. To give her larvae the best start in life, the mother wasp, an inch-long parasite clad in oil-slick iridescent armor, attacks her prey, spearing it once with her…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#64ZJZ)
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. Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS—whether SpaceX likes it or not For years, Todd Humphreys has been trying to persuade SpaceX to tweak its Starlink constellation to also offer ultra-precise…
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by Mark Harris on (#64ZF6)
Todd Humphreys’s offer to SpaceX was simple. With a few software tweaks, its rapidly growing Starlink constellation could also offer precise position, navigation, and timing. The US Army, which funds Humphreys’s work at the University of Texas at Austin, wanted a backup to its venerable, and vulnerable, GPS system. Could Starlink fill that role? When…
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by Jessica Hamzelou on (#64ZD0)
This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Hello, and welcome back to the Checkup! This week I found myself back in the classroom, sitting on a small plastic chair and carefully noting down what the teacher told me. It was…
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by Shannon Vallor on (#64ZD1)
This piece is from our forthcoming mortality-themed issue, available from 26 October. If you want to read it when it comes out, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for as little as $80 a year. On a recent evening, I sat at home scrolling through my Twitter feed, which—since I’m a philosopher who studies AI and…
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by Casey Crownhart on (#64YK0)
The US federal government is spending big on batteries and electric vehicles. As part of that spending spree, President Joe Biden and the Department of Energy have just announced $2.8 billion in awards to companies involved in producing the minerals and other materials that go into the batteries. The funding will go to 20 projects,…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#64Y83)
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. Bill Gates’s energy venture fund is plowing more money into climate adaptation The news: Bill Gates’s climate-oriented venture capital fund is expanding its mission, adding adaptation to its investment categories and establishing a…
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by Melissa Heikkilä on (#64Y84)
AI systems are deployed all the time, but it can take months or even years until it becomes clear whether, and how, they’re biased. The stakes are often sky-high: unfair AI systems can cause innocent people to be arrested, and they can deny people housing, jobs, and basic services. Today a group of AI and…
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by Bonnie Tsui on (#64Y21)
What happens when we lose weight? This is really a question about how our bodies store and use the energy we need to function. In general, we store backup energy in fat cells that are distributed around the body, some in the abdomen around the organs (visceral fat) and some under the skin (subcutaneous fat);…
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by Jonathan Weiner on (#64Y20)
Twenty years have passed since I first met Aubrey de Grey, the man with the Methuselah beard. Back then he was already a True Believer in the quest for immortality. But he wasn’t famous, or notorious, yet; he wasn’t Aubrey!, as he would soon become to his fans in the anti-aging crowd. And he wasn’t…
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by James Temple on (#64XQD)
Bill Gates’s climate-oriented venture capital fund is expanding its mission, adding adaptation to its investment categories and establishing a later-stage fund to help clean-tech startups begin building plants and scaling up their technologies. The announcement came at the end of the firm’s Breakthrough Energy Summit in Seattle on October 19. To date, Breakthrough has been…
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by Casey Crownhart on (#64XP5)
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Hello hello! This week in The Spark, we’re taking a look back at one of my favorite sessions from our ClimateTech conference last week, from a chapter we called “Cleaning Your Plate.” In…
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by James Temple on (#64X14)
Bill Gates, John Kerry, and US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm all struck positive notes at an energy summit in Seattle this week hosted by Gates’s climate-focused venture fund, Breakthrough Energy. With caveats. Government policy is accelerating clean energy projects. The cost of renewables continues to fall. Huge sums of private and public capital are pouring…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#64X15)
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 debate over whether aging is a disease rages on Last October, word began to spread among researchers that the World Health Organization was considering a change to its International Classification of Diseases,…
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by Anmol Irfan on (#64WVM)
“I am quitting because I’m tired,” Alex Hanna wrote on February 2, her last day on Google’s Ethical AI team. She felt that the company, and the tech industry as a whole, did little to promote diversity or mitigate the harms its products had caused to marginalized people. “In a word, tech has a whiteness…
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by Sarah Sloat on (#64WT4)
Last year, over Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, Kiran Rabheru eagerly joined a call with officials from the World Health Organization (WHO). Word had spread of a change coming to the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), a catalogue used to standardize disease diagnosis worldwide. In an upcoming revision, the plan was to replace the diagnosis of…
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by Zeyi Yang on (#64WB7)
China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about what’s happening in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Welcome back to China Report! I know this is going to be a long week for all of you China watchers. New stories seem to be coming out every minute about the 20th Party Congress…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#64VPT)
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. Technology that lets us speak to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? My colleague Charlotte embarked on an experiment during the pandemic. She created digital versions of her parents. They’re voice…
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by Charlotte Jee on (#64VEY)
My parents don’t know that I spoke to them last night. At first, they sounded distant and tinny, as if they were huddled around a phone in a prison cell. But as we chatted, they slowly started to sound more like themselves. They told me personal stories that I’d never heard. I learned about the…
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by Melissa Heikkilä on (#64TN9)
To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to The Algorithm! Let me introduce you to Philip Nitschke, also known as “Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide.” Nitschke has a curious goal: He wants to “demedicalize” death and make assisted suicide as unassisted as possible through technology. As…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#64TDZ)
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. WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their censored accounts back On Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, hundreds of desperate users were writing “confession letters” this past week. They are urgent…
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by Rebecca Ackermann on (#64T74)
Oregon 6th Congressional District candidate Carrick Flynn seemed to drop out of the sky. With a stint at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, a track record of voting in only two of the past 30 elections, and $11 million in support from a political action committee established by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, Flynn didn’t fit…
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by Zeyi Yang on (#64SCG)
On Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, hundreds of desperate users were writing “confession letters” this past week. “I have been in a terrible mental state due to the massive pressure from recent pandemic prevention measures. I lost my control, and sent sensitive statements in a group chat with six people,” one user wrote.…
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by Jenn Webb on (#64R0G)
Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” Luc Teboul, managing director and head of engineering—transaction banking at Goldman Sachs, talks to Kapol Tandon, business head—Americas at Infosys Finacle, about what differentiates their first ever cloud-native transaction banking platform, TxB, from that offered by incumbents. Click here to continue.
by Jenn Webb on (#64R0H)
Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” Brown-Forman’s global information security leader and CISO Sailaja Kotra-Turner shares her cybersecurity insights with Jeff Kavanaugh, chief learner at Infosys Knowledge Institute. Click here to continue.
by Jenn Webb on (#64R0J)
Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” Enterprise AI has generally not scaled well or worked across business functions. It also struggles to react quickly enough to fast-changing markets. A reference architecture can help businesses scale AI that is more agile, holistic, and future-proof. Click here to continue.
by Jenn Webb on (#64QVN)
Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” Turrka Kuusisto, CEO of Posti, talks about how the group reinvented and transformed from a traditional postal company to a next-generation and efficient delivery and fulfillment company using the cloud. Click here to continue.
by Jenn Webb on (#64QVP)
Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” Avrohom Gottheil, the founder of AskTheCEO Media, recaps the fascinating conversation he had with Gary Bhattacharjee, AI practice leader at Infosys, about the evolution of AI and how it will transform businesses in the future. Click here to continue.
by Jenn Webb on (#64QRR)
Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” Senior leaders from BNY Mellon, HSBC, and Citizens Bank share their perspectives with experts from Infosys Financial Services and Google Cloud on building a hyper-personalized digital banking journey for customers through the cloud. Click here to continue.
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#64QKS)
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 the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China in 2016, he was traveling there to guide China’s first forays into…
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by Laurie Clarke on (#64QD4)
When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China’s eastern Jinan province in 2016, he was whisked into a state-of-the-art biotech hub. More than 1,000 staffers—including an army of PhDs and MDs—were working on things like studies of the stem cells in umbilical cord blood. The center specialized in research on…
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by Jessica Hamzelou on (#64Q9C)
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 I wrote about a fascinating experiment that involved implanting human brain cells into rats’ brains. The brain cells from both species were able to form connections and work together. The…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#64P80)
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 messy morality of letting AI make life-and-death decisions In a workshop in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke is overseeing testing on his new assisted suicide machine. Sealed inside the coffin-sized pod, a person…
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by Rhiannon Williams, Tammy Xu, Hana Kiros on (#64P69)
5.05 And that wraps up our first-ever ClimateTech conference! I hope you’ve learned as much as I have about what humanity is cooking up to beat back climate change. I’m looking forward to the strides we’ll discuss next year and feel more optimistic about our ability to confront this massive challenge. Signing off, and see you…
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by Will Douglas Heaven on (#64P2M)
In a workshop in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke—“Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide” to some—is overseeing the last few rounds of testing on his new Sarco machine before shipping it to Switzerland, where he says its first user is waiting. This is the third prototype that Nitschke’s nonprofit, Exit International, has…
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by Tammy Xu on (#64NQ1)
Progress is being made on a truly impossible-seeming area of plant-based meat products: steak. And not just any steak—filet mignon. At MIT Technology Review’s ClimateTech event this afternoon, Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown shared that while he couldn’t give an exact date for when the company’s steak product will be ready for consumers to purchase,…
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