MIT Technology Review

It all began with a simple origami model. As an undergrad at Harvard, Danna Freedman went to a professor's office hours for her general chemistry class and came across an elegant paper model that depicted the fullerene molecule. The intricately folded representation of chemical bonds and atomic arrangements sparked her interest, igniting a profound curiosity...

After decades of working as a biologist at a Southern school with a Division1 football team, coming to MIT was a bit of a culture shock-in the best possible way. I've heard from MIT alumni all about late-night psetting, when to catch MITHenge, and the best way to celebrate Pi Day (with pie, of course)....

Tiny flying robots could perform such useful tasks as pollinating crops inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture's harmful impacts on the environment. The latest robo-bug from an MIT lab, inspired by the anatomy of the bee, comes closer to matching nature's performance than ever before. Led by Kevin Chen, an associate...

Scientists have known for decades that certain neurons in the hippocampus are dedicated to remembering specific locations where an animal has been. More useful, though, is remembering where places are relative to each other, and it hasn't been clear how those mental maps are formed. A study by MIT neuroscientist Matthew Wilson and colleagues sheds...

In 2018 astronomers at MIT and elsewhere observed previously unseen behavior from a black hole known as 1ES 1927+654, which is about as massive as a million suns and sits in a galaxy 270 million light-years away. Its corona-a cloud of whirling, white-hot plasma-suddenly disappeared before reassembling months later. Now members of the team have...

One costly and time-consuming step in constructing a concrete building is creating the formwork," the wooden mold into which the concrete is poured. Now MIT researchers have developed a way to replace the wood with lightly treated mud. What we've demonstrated is that we can essentially take the ground we're standing on, or waste soil...

Soon after MIT's 18th president, Sally Kornbluth, was inaugurated in May 2023, she made it a priority to expand her early on-campus listening tour to alumni living and working around the world. She wanted to learn more about their priorities and their connections with MIT, while also engaging them in her expansive vision for its...

A new type of glue developed by researchers from MIT and Germany combines sticky polymers inspired by the mussel with the germ-fighting properties of another natural material: mucus. To stick to a rock or a ship, mussels secrete a fluid full of proteins connected by chemical cross-links. As it happens, similar cross-linking features are found...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging in everyday use cases, thanks to advances in foundational models, more powerful chip technology, and abundant data. To become truly embedded and seamless, AI computation must now be distributed-and much of it will take place on device and at the edge. To support this evolution, computation for running AI workloads...

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. $8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025 This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale...

My mind is still sharp and my hands work just fine, so I have no interest in getting help from AI to draw or write stories," says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist best known for his seminal series A Daunting Team, a 1983 manhwa about the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball players. Still,...

Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as paper architecture"). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted...

In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They're the products of living processes-places where coral has grown toward...

This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report. That's far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a...

A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for willfully turning a blind eye" to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will provide humanitarian assistance to persons...

At first glance, the Bathhouse spa in Brooklyn looks not so different from other high-end spas. What sets it apart is out of sight: a closet full of cryptocurrency-mining computers that not only generate bitcoins but also heat the spa's pools, marble hammams, and showers. When cofounder Jason Goodman opened Bathhouse's first location in Williamsburg...

Americans don't agree on much these days. Yet even at a time when consensus reality seems to be on the verge of collapse, there remains at least one quintessentially modern value we can all still get behind: creativity. We teach it, measure it, envy it, cultivate it, and endlessly worry about its death. And why...

The quest for long, healthy life-and even immortality-is probably almost as old as humans are, but it's never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer. A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should...

Google DeepMind's latest update to a top Gemini AI model includes a dial to control how much the system thinks" through a response. The new feature is ostensibly designed to save money for developers, but it also concedes a problem: Reasoning models, the tech world's new obsession, are prone to overthinking, burning money and energy...

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. US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio,...

As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While my dad was locating capacitors and resistors, I was in the toy section. It was there, in 1984, that I discovered the best toy of my childhood: the Armatron robotic arm. Described as...

While it's rare to look at the news without finding some headline related to AI and energy, a lot of us are stuck waving our hands when it comes to what it all means. Sure, you've probably read that AI will drive an increase in electricity demand. But how that fits into the context of...

President Trump and his appointees have repeatedly stressed the need to establish American energy dominance." But the White House's profusion of executive orders and aggressive tariffs, along with its determined effort to roll back clean-energy policies, are moving the industry in the wrong direction, creating market chaos and economic uncertainty that are making it harder...

On Thanksgiving weekend of 2013, Jeff Bezos, then Amazon's CEO, took to 60 Minutes to make a stunning announcement: Amazon was a few years away from deploying drones that would deliver packages to homes in less than 30 minutes. It lent urgency to a problem that Parimal Kopardekar, director of the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute,...

The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirming reporting by MIT Technology Review. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters...

Anyone who crammed for exams in college knows that an impressive ability to regurgitate information is not synonymous with critical thinking. The large language models (LLMs) first publicly released in 2022 were impressive but limited-like talented students who excel at multiple-choice exams but stumble when asked to defend their logic. Today's advanced reasoning models are...

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. AI is coming for music, too While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is...

Colossal Biosciences not only wants to bring back the woolly mammoth-it wants to patent it, too. MIT Technology Review has learned the Texas startup is seeking a patent that would give it exclusive legal rights to create and sell gene-edited elephants containing ancient mammoth DNA. Colossal, which calls itself the de-extinction company," hopes to use...

The end of this story includes samples of AI-generated music. Artificial intelligence was barely a term in 1956, when top scientists from the field of computing arrived at Dartmouth College for a summer conference. The computer scientist John McCarthy had coined the phrase in the funding proposal for the event, a gathering to work through...

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next. You can read more from the series here. When OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy excitedly took to X back in February to post about his new hobby, he probably had no idea he was about...

Bowling Green, Kentucky, is home to 75,000 residents who recently wrapped up an experiment in using AI for democracy: Can an online polling platform, powered by machine learning, capture what residents want to see happen in their city? When Doug Gorman, elected leader of the county that includes Bowling Green, took office in 2023, it...

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 the federal government is tracking changes in the supply of street drugs In 2021, the Maryland Department of Health and the state police were confronting a crisis: Fatal drug overdoses in the...

Last week, I spoke with two US Marines who spent much of last year deployed in the Pacific, conducting training exercises from South Korea to the Philippines. Both were responsible for analyzing surveillance to warn their superiors about possible threats to the unit. But this deployment was unique: For the first time, they were using...

The manufacturing industry is at a crossroads: Geopolitical instability is fracturing supply chains from the Suez to Shenzhen, impacting the flow of materials. Businesses are battling rising costs and inflation, coupled with a shrinking labor force, with more than half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. alone. And climate change is further intensifying...

Tech buzzwords are clanging through the halls of Washington, DC. The Trump administration has promised to leverage blockchain technology" to reorganize the US Agency for International Development, and Elon Musk's DOGE has already unleashed an internal chatbot to automate agency tasks-with bigger plans on the horizon to take over for laid-off employees. The executive order...

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. DOGE's tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data -Steven Renderos is the executive director of Media Justice Tech buzzwords are clanging through the halls of Washington, DC. The Trump...

One day, in the near or far future, an asteroid about the length of a football stadium will find itself on a collision course with Earth. If we are lucky, it will land in the middle of the vast ocean, creating a good-size but innocuous tsunami, or in an uninhabited patch of desert. But if...

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. Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military For much of last year, US Marines conducting training exercises in the waters off South Korea, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia were also...

1. Sophie and Martin are at the 2012 Gordon Research Conference on the Biology of Aging in Ventura, California. It is a foggy February weekend. Both are disappointed about how little sun there is on the California beach. They are two graduate students-Sophie in her sixth and final year, Martin in his fourth-who have traveled...

In 2021, 20 years after the death of her older sister, Vauhini Vara was still unable to tell the story of her loss. I wondered," she writes in Searches, her new collection of essays on AI technology, if Sam Altman's machine could do it for me." So she triedGPT-3. But as it expanded on Vara's...

For much of last year, about 2,500 US service members from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit sailed aboard three ships throughout the Pacific, conducting training exercises in the waters off South Korea, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia. At the same time, onboard the ships, an experiment was unfolding: The Marines in the unit responsible for...

The International Energy Agency states in a new report that AI could eventually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, possibly by much more than the boom in energy-guzzling data centers pushes them up. The finding echoes a point that prominent figures in the AI sector have made as well to justify, at least implicitly, the gigawatts' worth of...

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 AI can help supercharge creativity Existing generative tools can automate a striking range of creative tasks and offer near-instant gratification-but at what cost? Some artists and researchers fear that such technology could...

Sometimes Lizzie Wilson shows up to a rave with her AI sidekick. One weeknight this past February, Wilson plugged her laptop into a projector that threw her screen onto the wall of a low-ceilinged loft space in East London. A small crowd shuffled in the glow of dim pink lights. Wilson sat down and started...

Update: Since this story was first published in The Spark, our weekly climate newsletter, the White House announced that most reciprocal tariffs would be paused for 90 days. That pause does not apply to China, which will see an increased tariff rate of 125%. Today, new tariffs go into effect for goods imported into the...

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. A new biosensor can detect bird flu in five minutes Over the winter, eggs suddenly became all but impossible to buy. As a bird flu outbreak rippled through dairy and poultry farms, grocery...

Over the winter, eggs suddenly became all but impossible to buy. As a bird flu outbreak rippled through dairy and poultry farms, grocery stores struggled to keep them on shelves. The shortages and record-high prices in February raised costs dramatically for restaurants and bakeries and led some shoppers to skip the breakfast staple entirely. But...

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. Game of clones: Colossal's new wolves are cute, but are they dire? For several years now, Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences has been in the news for its plans to re-create woolly mammoths someday....