MIT Technology Review

Nikhita Singhal’s breath still catches when she talks about how her life changed. A psychiatry resident at the University of Toronto, Singhal says it was using psychedelic drugs—ayahuasca, ketamine, and MDMA—that finally addressed the eating disorder she’d had since she was seven years old. “It was really emotionally and psychologically painful,” she says, recounting a…

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. Social media is polluting society. Moderation alone won’t fix the problem We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to our opponents.…

We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to our opponents. At the same time, we don’t want to be exposed to speech that is inappropriate or crosses a line. Technology companies address this conundrum by setting standards for free speech, a practice protected…

I learned on a liveblog that I had lost the right to have an abortion. When the United States Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade on the morning of June 24, 2022, I was one of the nearly 16,000 people reading SCOTUSblog, a news site launched 20 years ago, which has no official relationship with…

Fifteen years ago, David Glowacki was walking in the mountains when he took a sharp fall. When he hit the ground, blood began leaking into his lungs. As he lay there suffocating, Glowacki’s field of perception swelled. He peered down at his own body—and, instead of his typical form, saw that he was made up…

China’s chipmaking industry descended into chaos last week, with at least four top executives associated with a state-owned semiconductor fund arrested on corruption charges. It’s an explosive turn of events that could force the country to fundamentally rethink how it invests in chip development, according to analysts and experts. On July 30, China’s top anticorruption…

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 startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage…

Machine-learning researchers make many decisions when designing new models. They decide how many layers to include in neural networks and what weights to give inputs at each node. The result of all this human decision-making is that complex models end up being “designed by intuition” rather than systematically, says Frank Hutter, head of the machine-learning…

In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage versions of people in order to harvest tissues for use in transplant treatments. The company, Renewal Bio, is pursuing recent advances in stem-cell technology and artificial wombs demonstrated by Jacob Hanna, a biologist 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. Researchers repaired cells in damaged pig organs an hour after it died The news: A new system called OrganEx stopped the deterioration of cells in pig organs one hour after the animal’s death,…

A new system stopped the deterioration of cells in pig organs one hour after the animal’s death, a finding that suggests cells don’t die as quickly as previously understood. The technology successfully restored blood circulation and repaired damaged cells in the pigs. The research, described in Nature today, could pave the way to making human…

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. Everything you need to know about the monkeypox vaccines The global outbreak of monkeypox has so far led to more than 24,000 cases in over 80 countries, and the World Health Organization has…

The global outbreak of monkeypox has so far led to more than 24,000 cases in over 80 countries, and the World Health Organization has warned that the window of opportunity to contain the disease and prevent it from becoming endemic outside Africa is rapidly closing. Vaccines represent a potentially crucial measure. Monkeypox vaccines are already…

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. Electric vehicle uptake in the US could be held back by a lack of batteries The news: The US Senate Democrats released a bill last week that could significantly cut the country’s carbon…

A tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 designed to spur adoption of EVs could fail to reach consumers because of the auto industry’s heavy reliance on battery materials and components from China. To qualify for the credit, which could effectively shave up to $7,500 off the price of a new EV, the…

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. Wildfires are raging across the US The news: Five large wildfires ignited across the US yesterday, with further outbreaks expected over the next few days, experts have warned. The new fires in California,…

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. Here are the biggest technology wins in the breakthrough climate bill Two weeks after blowing up hopes of a US climate deal, Senator Joe Manchin announced on Wednesday that he and Senator Chuck…

Two weeks after blowing up hopes of a US climate deal, Senator Joe Manchin announced on Wednesday that he and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, had struck a compromise agreement that would provide nearly $400 billion for climate and energy projects. It remains to be seen whether the sprawling spending package proposed by…

When Twitter introduced a new feature called Trends in mid-2008, the company’s cofounder Jack Dorsey described it as an evolution of the morning media diet. Where he might once have gained a sense of what was important in the world by reading newspapers or online media, Dorsey wrote in a short blog post, Trends, “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. DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science The news: DeepMind says its AlphaFold tool has successfully predicted the structure of nearly all proteins known to science. From today,…

DeepMind says its AlphaFold tool has successfully predicted the structure of nearly all proteins known to science. From today, the Alphabet-owned AI lab is offering its database of over 200 million proteins to anyone for free. When DeepMind introduced AlphaFold in 2020, it took the science community by surprise. Scientists had spent decades trying to…

The blistering heat waves that set temperature records across much of the US in recent days have strained electricity systems, threatening to knock out power in vulnerable regions of the country. The electricity has largely stayed online so far this summer, but there have been scattered problems and close calls already. Heavy use of energy-sucking…

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. A day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driver When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: “I instinctively went for…

When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car. “I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself,” says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021…

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. We’re starting to understand the mysterious surge of hepatitis in children The news: Hundreds of young children around the world have developed severe cases of hepatitis with no obvious cause, leaving doctors baffled.…

There have been so many recent multimillion-dollar cryptocurrency thefts that it’s easy to lose track. Organized crime, bad cybersecurity, financially motivated spies, and colorful criminals of all kinds have made so many headlines that even huge heists can go mostly unnoticed by the public. But sometimes the government is able to get it back. Last…

Hundreds of young children around the world have developed severe cases of hepatitis with no obvious cause, leaving doctors baffled. But two new studies reveal the potential culprits: a combination of genetic factors, lockdowns, and at least two viruses working together. Doctors first noticed a strange cluster of hepatitis cases in young children in Scotland…

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. Wastewater could help us more accurately detect monkeypox The news: Last month, Stanford’s Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, added monkeypox to the suite of viruses it checks wastewater for daily. Since then,…

Last month, Stanford’s Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, added monkeypox to the suite of viruses it checks wastewater for daily. Since then, monkeypox has been detected in 10 of the 11 sewer systems that SCAN tests, including those in Sacramento, Palo Alto, and several other cities in California’s Bay Area. As of July 21,…

If you have been on Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming platform, you might have noticed an anomaly on the chart of the top 20 most popular apps: Wallpaper Engine. The software is pretty cool—it lets you download animated and interactive wallpapers for your machine’s monitor—but it’s hard to explain why an obscure wallpaper app…

When one of China’s biggest celebrities, Simon Gong—also known as Gong Jun—released a new music video in June 2022, it quickly attracted 15 million views on the country’s Twitter-like microblogging site Weibo. But the event also stood out for a different reason—one that only eagle-eyed fans might have noticed. The singer in the video was not…

Millions of people are now experiencing the effects of climate change firsthand. Blistering heat waves have smashed temperature records around the globe this summer, scorching crops, knocking out power, fueling wildfires, buckling roads and runways, and likely killing thousands across Europe alone. The dizzyingly quick shift from an abstract threat to an era of tumbling…

Europe is sweltering in record-breaking temperatures this week, and across the continent, people are largely trying to cope without air conditioning. Fewer than 10% of households in Europe are air-conditioned. But as temperatures rise, that figure is set to climb. Rising AC use may present new challenges, as most systems are inefficient and produce emissions…

OpenAI will now sell its image-making program DALL-E 2 to the million people on its waiting list, MIT Technology Review can reveal. Around 100,000 people have played with DALL-E 2 since its invite-only launch in April. Today, the San Francisco–based company is opening the gates to 10 times as many as it turns the AI…

Alice Moon couldn’t stop throwing up. She had made a name for herself as an online cannabis influencer, but after a weed-infused dinner in a Malibu home in 2018, she spent more than two weeks constantly puking—unable to keep down food or water, going back and forth to urgent care for IVs, and at one…

“Wait, what? How?” Emily Jones wasn’t used to being left behind. A top sim-racing driver with multiple wins to her name, Jones jerked the steering wheel in the e-sports rig, eyes fixed on the screen in front of her: “I’m pushing way too hard to keep up— How does it do that?” Her staccato commentary…

If digital transformation was a strategic business priority in the pre-2020 era, the pandemic propelled it to an existential imperative. Consumers witnessed the results of this enforced experiment in myriad ways. Their favorite clothing brand launched virtual try-on services. Their doctor became accessible via telehealth appointments. Even their local government—not an entity typically associated with…

The robot dog is waving its legs in the air like an exasperated beetle. After 10 minutes of struggling, it manages to roll over to its front. Half an hour in, the robot is taking its first clumsy steps, like a newborn calf. But after one hour, the robot is strutting around the lab with…

Imagine you are working on your novel on your home computer. It’s nearly finished; you have already written approximately one million words. All of a sudden, the online word processing software tells you that you can no longer open the draft because it contains illegal information. Within an instant, all your words are lost. This…

“We’re dealing with a crisis here, folks.” The warning from John Kerry, the US president’s top climate envoy, to global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos in May 2022 couldn’t have been clearer. And Asia Pacific—home to 60% of the global population and responsible for more than half of the world’s greenhouse gas…

Nancy Vera was awakened suddenly at midnight on July 12 by the sound of a single gunshot fired into her yard. She looked at a security camera just in time to see a truck speed away. Vera was shocked but not surprised. The president of the Corpus Christi, Texas, branch of the American Federation of…