MIT Technology Review

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 personhood credentials" could help prove you're a human online As AI models become better at mimicking human behavior, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between real human internet users and sophisticated systems...

As AI models become better at mimicking human behavior, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between real human internet users and sophisticated systems imitating them. That's a real problem when those systems are deployed for nefarious ends like spreading misinformation or conducting fraud, and it makes it a lot harder to trust what you encounter...

The power grid is underpinned by a single gas that is used to insulate a range of high-voltage equipment. The problem is, it's also a super powerful greenhouse gas, a nightmare for climate change. Sulfur hexafluoride (or SF6) is far from the most common gas that warms the planet, contributing around 1% of warming to...

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 machine learning is helping us probe the secret names of animals The news: Do animals have names? It seems so, after new research appears to have discovered that small monkeys called marmosets...

A tweak to the way artificial neurons work in neural networks could make AIs easier to decipher. Artificial neurons-the fundamental building blocks of deep neural networks-have survived almost unchanged for decades. While these networks give modern artificial intelligence its power, they are also inscrutable. Existing artificial neurons, used in large language models like GPT4, work...

Your breath can give away a lot about you. Each exhalation contains all sorts of compounds, including possible biomarkers for disease or lung conditions, that could give doctors a valuable insight into your health. Now a new smart mask, developed by a team at the California Institute of Technology, could help doctors check your breath...

Do animals have names? According to the poet T.S. Eliot, cats have three: the name their owner calls them (like George); a second, more noble one (like Quaxo or Cricopat); and, finally, a deep and inscrutable" name known only to themselves that no human research can discover." But now, researchers armed with audio recorders and...

When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most prosthetics are static, cumbersome, and hard to move. Now a new neural interface developed by MIT researchers and colleagues connects a bionic lower limb to nerve endings in the thigh, allowing it to be controlled by the...

Cloud has become a given for most organizations: according to PwC's 2023 cloud business survey, 78% of companies have adopted cloud in most or all parts of the business. These companies have migrated on-premises systems to the cloud seeking faster time to market, greater scalability, cost savings, and improved collaboration. Yet while cloud adoption is...

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. Kamala Harris should stand with tech workers, not their bosses -Stephen McMurtry is a Google Software Engineer and Communications Chair of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Tangled up in the contest to be the...

Tangled up in the contest to be the next US president, there is another battle brewing: Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Valley. In Donald Trump's corner are venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, along with executives like Elon Musk. In the other are execs like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and SV Angel investing mogul...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Last year's Canadian wildfires smashed records, burning about seven times more land in Canada's forests than the annual average over the previous four decades. Eight firefighters were killed and 180,000 people displaced....

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. Introducing: the 125th Anniversary issue With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines....

The year is 2149 and people mostly live their lives on rails." That's what they call it, on rails," which is to live according to the meticulous instructions of software. Software knows most things about you-what causes you anxiety, what raises your endorphin levels, everything you've ever searched for, everywhere you've been. Software sends messages...

Last year, as the harvest season drew closer, Olabokunde Tope came across an unpleasant surprise. While certain spots on his 70-hectare cassava farm in Ibadan, Nigeria, were thriving, a sizable parcel was pale and parched-the result of an early and unexpected halt in the rains. The cassava stems, starved of water, had withered to straw....

The magazine you now hold in your hands is 125 years old. Not this actual issue, of course, but the publication itself, which launched in 1899. Few other titles can claim this kind of heritage-the Atlantic, Harper's, Audubon (which is also turning 125 this year), National Geographic, and Popular Science among them. MIT Technology Review...

If a machine is to interact intelligently with people, it has to be endowed with an understanding of human life." -Dreyfus and Dreyfus Bold technology predictions pave the road to humility. Even titans like Albert Einstein own a billboard or two along that humbling freeway. In a classic example, John von Neumann, who pioneered modern...

DJ Tan, cofounder of the Singaporean startup Prefer Coffee, pops open a bottle of oat latte and pours some into my cup. The chilled drink feels wonderfully refreshing in Singapore's heat-and it tastes just like coffee. And that's impressive, because there isn't a single ounce of coffee in it. It turns out that our beloved...

Much of the western United States relies on winter snowpack to supply its rivers and reservoirs through the summer months. But with warming temperatures, less and less snow is falling-a recent study showed a 23% decline in annual snowpack since 1955. By some estimates, runoff from snowmelt in the western US could decrease by a...

Welcome to our 125th anniversary issue! With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines. Instead, we decided to try to use history as a way to explore what things may look like over the next...

In 1983, while on a field recording assignment in Kenya, the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause noticed something remarkable. Lying in his tent late one night, listening to the calls of hyenas, tree frogs, elephants, and insects in the surrounding old-growth forest, Krause heard what seemed to be a kind of collective orchestra. Rather...

If you took a walk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco's epicenter of AI froth, and asked the first dude-bro you saw wearing a puffer vest about the future of the interface, he'd probably say something about the movie Her, about chatty virtual assistants that will help you do everything from organize your email to book...

Saturn's moon Titan is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has active lakes and seas-in this case thought to have formed as liquid methane and ethane flooded a landscape crisscrossed with river valleys. Now MIT geologists have found evidence that those mysterious features may be shaped by waves. Until now, scientists...

Boosting the performance of solar cells and other devices will require novel electronic materials that researchers are working to identify with the help of AI. Now a computer vision technique developed by MIT engineers offers a speedy way to confirm that such materials perform as expected-one of the biggest bottlenecks in the screening process. The...

Social media platforms are often urged to fight the spread of misinformation through content moderation, but two MIT-affiliated researchers are proposing an alternative: empowering users themselves to identify which information sources are trustworthy. The Trustnet browser extension, built by EECS professor David Karger and Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, SM '21, PhD '23, an assistant professor at the...

Take a beautiful spring weekend, add brass rats and Tim the Beaver swag, mix in technology talks and outdoor activities, fuse it all together with a lot of socializing, and what do you get? MIT Tech Reunions, which this year drew more than 3,300 alumni, family, and friends to campus. The long weekend, May 30-June...

In 1976, Tom Scholz '69, SM '70, was a 29-year-old product design engineer working at Polaroid on audio electronics and tape-recording technology, with 11 patents under his belt. But few colleagues knew what Scholz did after hours, why he often came in late, or why he was, in his own words, a horrible employee." For...

A butterfly's wing is covered in hundreds of thousands of tiny scales, like miniature shingles on a paper-thin roof. A single scale is as small as a speck of dust yet surprisingly complex, with a corrugated surface that helps wick away water, manage heat, and reflect light to give a butterfly its signature shimmer. MIT...

MIT people often find their greatest moments of inspiration in each other's company. And two big, beautiful additions to West Campus now underway will open up new spaces for connection, collaboration, rigorous exploration, and joyful play. Stretching along Mass. Ave. and Vassar Street, the familiar brick face of the historic Metropolitan Storage Warehouse may evoke...

One Tuesday morning this past January, So Young Lee walked into a lab on the fourth floor of Building 18 and discovered that her equipment had exploded. It was a minor explosion-thankfully, no one was hurt-but the chemical she had painstakingly made had splattered all over the walls, the ceiling, and the broken shards of...

While AI is accelerating cloud adoption, organizations' reasons for migrating their systems and applications to the cloud remain relatively consistent: a desire to lower capital expenditures, increase agility in a fast-paced business environment, and improve availability of business-critical resources. Flexera's 2024 State of the Cloud Report underscores organizations' consistent desire to make the most 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. Maybe you will be able to live past 122 How long can humans live? This is a good time to ask the question. The longevity scene is having a moment, thanks to a...

Around 2012, at a bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Skylar Tibbits noticed someone wearing a shirt with the logo of a 3D-printing company. Tibbits, a designer and computer scientist, approached her and posed a question: Why can't I print something that walks off the machine?" The idea kicked off a multiyear collaboration between the industrial 3D-printing...

By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Digital scientists will have perfect memory of every research paper ever published and think a million times faster than we can. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics...

Prominent AI researchers expect the arrival of artificial general intelligence anywhere between the next couple of years" and possibly never." At the same time, leading economists disagree about the potential impact of AI: Some anticipate a future of perpetually accelerating productivity, while others project more modest gains. But most experts agree that technological advancement, however...

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first,sign up here. We are living in humanoid summer" right now, if you didn't know. Or at least it feels that way to Ken Goldberg, a roboticist extraordinaire who leads research in the field at the University of...

Rapid advancements in AI technology offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance business operations, customer and employee engagement, and decision-making. Executives are eager to see the potential of AI realized. Among 100 c-suite respondents polled in WNS Analytics' The Future of Enterprise Data & AI" report, 76% say they are already implementing or planning to implement generative...

Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French-people usually...

The UK's Office of National Statistics has an online life expectancy calculator. Enter your age and sex, and the website will, using national averages, spit out the age at which you can expect to pop your clogs. For me, that figure is coming out at 88 years old. That's not too bad, I figure, given...

The other day I idly opened TikTok to find a video of a young woman refinishing an old hollow-bodied electric guitar. It was a montage of close-up shots-looking over her shoulder as she sanded and scraped the wood, peeled away the frets, expertly patched the cracks with filler, and then spray-painted it a radiant purple....

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. Andrew Ng's new model lets you play around with solar geoengineering to see what would happen AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the...

As a lifelong disabled person who constantly copes with multiple conditions, I have a natural tendency to view emerging technologies with skepticism. Most new things are built for the majority of people-in this case, people without disabilities-and the truth of the matter is there's no guarantee I'll have access to them. There are certainly exceptions...

AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the dials of a solar geoengineering model, exploring what might happen if nations attempt to counteract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere. The concept of solar geoengineering was born from the realization that the planet has...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week, we're acknowledging a special birthday. It's 100 years since EEG (electroencephalography) was first used to measure electrical activity in a person's brain. The finding was revolutionary....

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. Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world-and making an edited baby is fully illegal in most countries surveyed by...

Open-source AI is everywhere right now. The problem is, no one agrees on what it actually is. Now we may finally have an answer. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the self-appointed arbiters of what it means to be open source, has released a new definition, which it hopes will help lawmakers develop regulations to protect...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. On a sunny morning in late spring, I found myself carefully examining an array of somewhat unassuming-looking rocks at the American Museum of Natural History. I've gotten to see some cutting-edge technologies...

In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because it was so easy to use. With its discovery, Doudna explained, humanity had achieved the...

Even the most capable robots aren't great at sensing human touch; you typically need a computer science degree or at least a tablet to interact with them effectively. That may change, thanks to robots that can now sense and interpret touch without being covered in high-tech artificial skin. It's a significant step toward robots that...

In 2019, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among...