MIT Technology Review

What do the people of the United States sound like? Census language data would give you one kind of answer. But numbers don’t capture all the factors in play—assimilation, the past and present of language, whose voices are prioritized. It’s this gap that multidisciplinary artist Ekene Ijeoma, who runs the Poetic Justice Group at the…

Over 2,000 years ago, Baiae was the most magnificent resort town on the Italian peninsula. Wealthy statesmen including Mark Antony, Cicero, and Caesar were drawn to its natural springs, building luxurious villas with heated spas and mosaic-tiled thermal pools. But over the centuries, volcanic activity submerged this playground for the Roman nobility—leaving half of it…

On a recent cool, sunny morning, Meg Caley could be found at Jack’s Solar Garden showing visitors a bed of kale plants. As executive director of Sprout City Farms, Caley has more than a decade of experience farming in unlikely urban spaces in the Denver area. Today, about an hour north of the city, she…

From the MIT Technology Review art team, here are some of our very favorite illustrations of the year:

The Netherlands is known internationally for its bicycle culture. Now it’s also home to another, more broadly accessible form of transportation: the Canta. For people with disabilities in the country, the compact four-wheeled, two-seat vehicle has become the primary form of micromobility—a term encompassing a range of small, lightweight vehicles typically operating at around 15…

A startup claims it has launched weather balloons that may have released reflective sulfur particles in the stratosphere, potentially crossing a controversial barrier in the field of solar geoengineering. Geoengineering refers to deliberate efforts to manipulate the climate by reflecting more sunlight back into space, mimicking a natural process that occurs in the aftermath of large…

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. Our favorite stories of 2022 We like to think we’ve had a great year here at MIT Technology Review. Our stories have won numerous awards (this story from our magazine won Gold in…

We like to think we’ve had a great year here at MIT Technology Review. Our stories have won numerous awards (this story from our magazine won Gold in the AAAS awards) and our investigations have helped shed light on unjust policies. So this year we asked our writers and editors to comb back through the…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Today, there are lots of neurotechnologies that can read what’s going on in our brains, modify the way they function, and change the wiring. This is the case for plenty of treatments…

In 2022, AI got creative. AI models can now produce remarkably convincing pieces of text, pictures, and even videos, with just a little prompting. It’s only been nine months since OpenAI set off the generative AI explosion with the launch of DALL-E 2, a deep-learning model that can produce images from text instructions. That was…

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. What’s next in space in 2023 We’re going back to the moon—again—in 2023. Multiple uncrewed landings are planned for the next 12 months, spurred on by a renewed effort in the US to…

Every 90 minutes on average, someone in the world is injured or killed by a landmine or other remnant of war, according to the Explosive Ordnance Risk Education Advisory Group. Even more sobering: there has been “a sharp increase” in the number of civilian casualties in recent years, says the group, which encompasses more than 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. The worst technology of 2022 We’re back with our latest list of the worst technologies of the year. Think of these as anti-breakthroughs, the sort of mishaps, misuses, miscues, and bad ideas that…

We’re back with our annual list of the worst technologies of the year. Think of these as anti-breakthroughs, the sort of mishaps, misuses, miscues, and bad ideas that lead to technology failure. This year’s disastrous accomplishments range from deadly pharmaceutical chemistry to a large language model that was jeered off the internet. One theme…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. A few weeks ago, at the peak of China’s protests against stringent zero-covid policies, people were shocked to find that searching for major Chinese cities on Twitter led to an endless stream of ads for…

Digital information has become so ubiquitous that some scientists now refer to it as the fifth state of matter. User-generated content (UGC) is particularly prolific: in April 2022, people shared around 1.7 million pieces of content on Facebook, uploaded 500 hours’ worth of video to YouTube, and posted 347,000 tweets every minute. Much of this…

People have always been fascinated with the question of human longevity. In this 1954 piece for Technology Review, James A. Tobey, author of more than a dozen books on public health, including Your Diet for Longer Life (1948), noted that despite a few frauds claiming to be older than 150, “the consensus of scientific opinion is that…

Last month’s sudden implosion of the popular cryptocurrency exchange FTX has intensified a political war for the soul of crypto that was already raging. In the coming year, we are likely to see that fight come to a head in US courtrooms and in Congress. The future of finance hangs in the balance. The battle…

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 Roomba recorded a woman on the toilet. How did screenshots end up on Facebook? In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This has been a wild year for AI. If you’ve spent much time online, you’ve probably bumped into images generated by AI systems like DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, or jokes, essays,…

In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet. In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a…

The all-new MIT Museum opened in Kendall Square this fall, welcoming more than 13,000 visitors in its first month. The 56,000-square-foot space next to the T station offers interactive exhibits and hands-on learning labs and makerspaces. As museum director John Durant told the Boston Globe, “We’re trying to turn MIT inside-out, so that things that…

When I tell people that I work on getting robots to cook and do household chores, they often ask me why this is so difficult. “A child can learn to make an omelet,” they say. “Why is it so hard for a robot?” I usually tell them that they think it’s so easy because they’re…

As the youngest of four girls, Rosalie Phillips ’21 looked up to her sisters, and everywhere they went, she went. As early as fifth grade, she recalls, she was joining her oldest sister at robotics meetings in the machine shop of a local college, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “They would hand me…

Three members of the MIT community have been honored with some of the world’s biggest awards. In October, Ben S. Bernanke, PhD ’79, shared the Nobel Prize in economics with Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig. Bernanke, who chaired the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, was honored for his work showing how bank…

Cyberinsurance Policy: Rethinking Risk in an Age of Ransomware, Computer Fraud, Data Breaches, and CyberattacksBy Josephine Wolff, SM ’12, PhD ’15 MIT PESS, 2022, $35 Introduction to Linear Algebra (6th edition*)By Gilbert Strang ’55, professor of mathematics WELLESLEY-CAMBRIDGE PRESS, 2022, $74*Text goes with OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) videos for Math 18.06 Houdini’s Fabulous Magic (new edition; first published in…

MIT researchers have developed a battery-­free, wireless underwater camera that is about 100,000 times more energy efficient than other undersea cameras. It takes color photos, even in dark underwater environments, and transmits image data wirelessly through the water, with a 40-meter range that they are working to improve. The autonomous camera uses piezoelectric materials to…

MIT researchers have developed a way to map an asteroid’s interior structure, or density distribution, by analyzing how the asteroid’s spin changes as it makes a close encounter with more massive objects like Earth. The technique could improve the aim of future missions to deflect an asteroid headed for us, as demonstrated in NASA’s Double…

A new study by researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School maps out many of the cells, genes, and cellular pathways that are modified by exercise or a high-fat diet, shedding light on exactly how exercise can help prevent obesity. The scientists studied mice fed either high-fat or normal diets; in each case, some mice were sedentary…

A California startup is pursuing a novel, if simple, plan for ensuring that dead trees keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for thousands of years: burying their remains underground. Kodama Systems, a forest management company based in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Sonora, has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. There’s been a fusion breakthrough. No, for real this time. There are plenty of quips about fusion power, and there’s a reason that the technology has a bit of a “boy who cried…

People don’t die in an instant. Death is, instead, a process of shutting down. You stop breathing; your organs stop working, bit by bit. Your brain ceases to function. Brain death is permanent, but your heart can still keep beating on its own for a time. The state of Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover feels…

Technological advances are transforming everything from transportation and manufacturing to financial services and healthcare. These advances make digital transformation imperative for organizations to adapt to shifting marketplace realities. Nine out of 10 executives surveyed by Accenture see accelerating digital transformation as essential to success. “Digital transformation is redefining how companies operate across all areas of…

The World Bank Group has a massive mission to “help developing countries escape poverty and share prosperity,” says Vijay Yellai, program manager for enterprise resource planning transformation at the World Bank Group. For example, it provides an wide array of financial products and technical know-how in a complex and ever-changing global setting. Therefore, for an…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The big news in China this week is how the country is reacting to a surge of coronavirus infections as it abandons most of its zero-covid measures. There are spiking infections in Beijing, fever relief…

John’s life changed forever when he broke up with his girlfriend. The breakup sent him into a downward spiral, and led to his first depressive episode when he was 27 years old. “At first it’s just extreme sadness … then you start losing sleep,” says John (not his real name), who spoke on condition of…

After many decades of trying, scientists have reached a milestone in fusion research, finally running a reaction that created more energy than was put in to start it. US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced today that researchers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved what’s known as net energy gain, 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. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent When Melissa Heikkilä, our senior AI reporter, tried the new viral AI avatar app Lensa, she was hoping to get results similar to…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. My social media feeds this week have been dominated by two hot topics: OpenAI’s latest chatbot, ChatGPT, and the viral AI avatar app Lensa. I love playing around with new technology, so…

When I tried the new viral AI avatar app Lensa, I was hoping to get results similar to some of my colleagues at MIT Technology Review. The digital retouching app was first launched in 2018 but has recently become wildly popular thanks to the addition of Magic Avatars, an AI-powered feature which generates digital portraits…

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. DNA that was frozen for two million years has been sequenced What’s happened: After an eight-year effort to recover DNA from Greenland’s frozen interior, researchers say they’ve managed to sequence gene fragments from…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Wind power is one of the world’s fastest-growing renewable energy sources, and soon its reach might expand even further. This week, California held an auction for five sites off its coast that could…

From security to quantum, AI and edge to cloud, our digital world is evolving and expanding more quickly than ever. With so much “noise,” it can be hard to concentrate, let alone figure out where to start beyond the bits and bytes, speeds and feeds. I hear this from everyone I meet with, and it’s…

After an eight-year effort to recover DNA from Greenland’s frozen interior, researchers say they’ve managed to sequence gene fragments from ancient fish, plants, and even a mastodon that lived 2 million years ago. It’s the oldest DNA ever recovered, beating the mark set only last year when a different team recovered genetic material from a…