MIT Technology Review

The urgency of the global transition to a net-zero economy, focused on solutions that enable the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, cannot be overstated. As both the engine of global economic growth and substantial emissions generator, industry has a unique responsibility and opportunity to lead this process. And while the energy and petrochemicals sectors have…

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. Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death When a startup called Retro Biosciences eased out of stealth mode in mid-2022, it announced it had secured $180 million to…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. As I often say, the American people and the Chinese people have much more in common than either side likes to admit. For example, take the shared concern about how much time children and teenagers…

When a startup called Retro Biosciences eased out of stealth mode in mid-2022, it announced it had secured $180 million to bankroll an audacious mission: to add 10 years to the average human life span. It had set up its headquarters in a raw warehouse space near San Francisco just the year before, bolting shipping…

Forget about He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who created gene-edited babies. Instead, when you think about gene editing you should think of Victoria Gray, the African-American woman who says she’s been cured of her sickle-cell disease symptoms. This week in London, scientists are gathering for the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing. It’s gene…

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 geothermal startup showed its wells can be used like a giant underground battery In late January, a geothermal power startup began conducting experiments where it pumped water deep below the desert floor…

In late January, a geothermal power startup began conducting an experiment deep below the desert floor of northern Nevada. It pumped water thousands of feet underground and then held it there, watching for what would happen. Geothermal power plants work by circulating water through hot rock deep beneath the surface. In most modern plants, it…

I recently tried on a Cartier Tank watch and a slew of Tiffany bracelets, watching the metal and diamonds shine in the dim light. I wasn’t at a store, though; I was in my bed, barefoot and in sweatpants, using an AR experience on Snap that let me see how the jewelry looked on my…

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 to log off As soon as I wake up, I grab my phone to check any messages that have arrived overnight and thumb through news alerts before scrolling quickly through Twitter and…

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. If you use Google, Instagram, Wikipedia, or YouTube, you’re going to start noticing changes to content moderation, transparency, and safety features on those sites over the…

The US government had a hand in creating some of the most iconic inventions of the last century, from personal computers to modern GPS. Now, it’s making a similar push for energy. The agency behind those breakthroughs was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Founded in 1958 as part of the Department of…

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. As soon as I wake up, I grab my phone to check any messages that have arrived overnight and thumb through news alerts before scrolling quickly through Twitter and Instagram. At…

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 inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, with zero fanfare, in late November 2022, nobody inside the company was prepared for a…

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’ve been working on a big story about a controversial treatment that creates babies with three genetic parents. The “three-parent baby” technique was thought to help parents avoid passing diseases…

One of the earliest stages in the process of identifying a potential new drug is to expose cells to the compound in a lab dish and scour microscope images to see the effects. Biologists who do this work tend to focus on a few select features that could indicate the drug is working—a cluster of…

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, with zero fanfare, in late November 2022, the San Francisco–based artificial-intelligence company had few expectations. Certainly, nobody inside OpenAI was prepared for a viral mega-hit. The firm has been scrambling to catch up—and capitalize on its success—ever since. It was viewed in-house as a “research preview,” says Sandhini Agarwal, who works…

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. Three-parent baby technique could create babies at risk of severe disease When the first baby born using a controversial procedure that meant he had three genetic parents was born back in 2016, it…

When the first baby born using a controversial procedure that meant he had three genetic parents was born back in 2016, it made headlines. The baby boy inherited most of his DNA from his mother and father, but he also had a tiny amount from a third person. The idea was to avoid having the…

Last September, researchers in the UK launched a high-altitude weather balloon that released a few hundred grams of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, a potential scientific first in the solar geoengineering field, MIT Technology Review has learned. Solar geoengineering is the theory that humans can ease global warming by deliberately reflecting more sunlight into space.…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It’s official—after over a month of open voting, hydrogen planes are the readers’ choice for the 11th item on our 2023 list of Breakthrough Technologies! I’d like to thank the academy, and all…

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 companies want to tackle food waste with microbes Some people might look in a grocery store’s dumpster and see garbage. But others are starting to see dollar signs. New facilities are popping…

Some people might look in a grocery store’s dumpster and see garbage. But others are starting to see dollar signs. New facilities are popping up in the US to help tackle food waste using a process called anaerobic digestion, which uses microbes to break down organic materials. Divert, a company working to address food waste,…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. If you take a look at app stores in the US right now, you might be surprised to find they are dominated by Chinese programs. On Monday, the three most downloaded free apps on Apple’s…

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. Ethereum moved to proof of stake. Why can’t Bitcoin? Last year, Ethereum went green. The second-most popular crypto platform transitioned to proof of stake, an energy-efficient framework for adding new blocks of transactions,…

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. Last year, Ethereum went green. The second-most-popular crypto platform transitioned to proof of stake, an energy-efficient framework for adding new blocks of transactions, NFTs, and other information to the blockchain.…

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. Welcome to Chula Vista, where police drones respond to 911 calls In the skies above Chula Vista, California, where the police department runs a drone program 10 hours a day, seven days a…

A group of 10 companies, including OpenAI, TikTok, Adobe, the BBC, and the dating app Bumble, have signed up to a new set of guidelines on how to build, create, and share AI-generated content responsibly. The recommendations call for both the builders of the technology, such as OpenAI, and creators and distributors of digitally created…

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. All eyes were on the US Supreme Court this week as it weighed up arguments for two cases relating to recommendation algorithms and content moderation, both…

In the skies above Chula Vista, California, where the police department runs a drone program 10 hours a day, seven days a week from four launch sites, it’s not uncommon to see an unmanned aerial vehicle darting across the sky. For officers on the force, tapping into this aerial reconnaissance resource has gone from a…

Penny Chisholm picked up Nancy Hopkins in the cancer center an hour before their appointment with the dean on August 11, 1994. They walked across the street to collect Lisa Steiner and Mary-Lou Pardue in the biology department, then to the main campus to pick up JoAnne Stubbe and Sylvia Ceyer. The six MIT professors…

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. AI image generator Midjourney blocks porn by banning words about the human reproductive system The news: The popular AI image generator Midjourney bans a wide range of words about the human reproductive system…

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’s newsletter is coming to you from Lisbon, Portugal. It’s a nice change of scene from chilly London. The sun is shining, the sky is bright blue, and the Tagus River…

The popular AI image generator Midjourney bans a wide range of words about the human reproductive system from being used as prompts, MIT Technology Review has discovered. If someone types “placenta,” “fallopian tubes,” “mammary glands,” “sperm,” “uterine,” “urethra,” “cervix,” “hymen,” or “vulva” into Midjourney, the system flags the word as a banned prompt and doesn’t…

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 hydrogen will help climate change—and when it won’t. Hydrogen is often heralded as a climate hero because when it’s used as a fuel in things like buses or steel production, there are…

Have you ever heard of the hydrogen rainbow? While hydrogen gas is colorless, the industry sometimes uses colors as shorthand to describe which of the many possible processes was used to make a particular batch. There’s gray, green, and blue hydrogen, along with more vibrant tones like pink—a whole rainbow (kind of). Hydrogen is often…

Many companies looking to enter the software economy, the ecosystem of companies that create or are enabled by software, do so through acquisitions, often by targeting startups. Evaluating the potential value of these smaller companies, however, is a specialized skill, says Jeff Vogel, head of the Software Strategy Group for EY-Parthenon. For companies, discovering and…

The combined power of AI and robotics is revolutionizing mobility and manufacturing. Automated vehicles, airplanes, people movers, and warehouse robots are improving in their range, flexibility, situational awareness, and intelligence, while better technology, a hunger for increased productivity and efficiency, and the pressures of covid-19 lockdowns have fueled investment in autonomous systems. In 2020 and…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. It’s the perfect moment to talk about EV batteries and China: yesterday, I published a story unpacking the country’s two decades of investment into becoming a world leader in the EV industry. It’s about how…

Good design has a habit of making things simple—sometimes too simple. You may look at the first iPod, for example, and marvel at its minimalist elegance without having to consider who designed it, where it was made and by whom, what materials it required, or even how long it would work. The ease of use…

It was drawing, or disegno, as deployed in the making of Italian buildings during the Renaissance, that gave us the word “design”—or such was the enthusiastic explanation I received as an architecture student at the end of the 1990s. History, of course, tells a more complex story. Though there was indeed a key shift in…

Wean Khing Wong, an attorney, mediator, speaker, and life coach, knows from personal experience that there are many ways to support the institutions and ideals that are important to you. As founder and former president of the MIT Chinese Alumni Group—which alumni and students of any ethnic background are welcome to join—she has produced free…

Sally Kornbluth officially began her tenure as MIT’s 18th president on January 1. A welcome banner—in Duke blue, presumably to ease her transition to 02139—greeted her in Lobby 7 as she began taking her first sips from the firehose. Here’s her video hello to the MIT community:

Forecasting earthquakes is complex, relying on specialized analysis of minute signals from the Earth’s crust. Cancer treatment is also a highly complex field, involving thousands of researchers and billions of dollars worldwide. Either would be enough to fill the waking hours of any scientist. But the work of Jie Zhang, PhD ’97, a geophysicist and…

In the days of the Apollo program, space policy wasn’t really about rockets, it was about international politics: beating the Soviets to the moon. But in the 21st century, with space now populated by thousands of satellites, telescopes, and other technologies, space policy has become far more complex. So after earning her degree in aerospace…

At Universal Studios Japan, one of the world’s most popular theme parks, a single parade can run 45 minutes and involve more than 100 performers, a half-dozen floats, intricate choreography, and a huge all-out water fight with the audience. It’s an enormous feat of engineering. Good thing an MIT alumnus is in charge. Daniel Pérez…

After a stroke in 2010, Debra Meyerson ’79, SM ’80, was paralyzed on the right side of her body and needed months of speech therapy before she was able to produce even the simplest of words. Today, she’s speaking out about stroke recovery—especially the mental health and emotional aspects of healing, which she says don’t…

Tina Bahadori ’84, SM ’88, studied the chemistry of turbulent diffusion flames and wrote a thesis on Les Liaisons Dangereuses as a double major in chemical engineering and humanities. Then she earned MIT master’s degrees in chemical engineering and technology and policy. So, it’s no surprise that she now works at the complex intersection of…

When the MIT Museum opened its new 56,000-square-foot space in Kendall Square last October, it was a time of public celebration. It was also a private point of pride for David Nuñez, SM ’15, who helped guide the museum’s transformation as its director of technology and digital strategy. Nuñez joined the museum in 2017, about…