MIT Technology Review

“Vivian, we might leave Taiwan and move back to the US next year,” my mom told me as she helped me get ready for the middle school candlelight dance. I knew that my family would return to the US at some point; we were in Taiwan only because of my dad’s work with a pharmaceutical…

Driving the gold-plated rivet into steel, Charles Hayden, Class of 1890, marked a new phase for New York City’s storied Waldorf Astoria hotel. It was the morning of Monday, March 24, 1930, just five months after the stock market crash of October 1929. The previous Waldorf had been razed to make room for the Empire…

When she was approached by the MIT Press with a list of people being considered for a biography, Maia Weinstock says, Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus stood out from the rest. “I felt I could really dig into her story, and I was very curious about what made her tick,” says Weinstock, a science writer and deputy…

January 1972 From “The Quest for Fusion Power”: In the case of fusion power, the potential long-term societal rewards are so enticing and the possibility of success so high that a major, truly international, research effort has developed over the last two decades. The United States has allocated over $400 million for research in controlled…

The malaria parasite, a notoriously deadly foe, has evolved countless ways to evade immune detection and thrive in human hosts. Mainly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for roughly 95% of cases, malaria kills more than 600,000 people a year, a majority of them children younger than five years old. Last October, after years of…

Last year, researchers at Data Science Nigeria noted that engineers looking to train computer-vision algorithms could choose from a wealth of data sets featuring Western clothing, but there were none for African clothing. The team addressed the imbalance by using AI to generate artificial images of African fashion—a whole new data set from scratch. Such…

For a few seconds on a sunny afternoon last April, renewables broke a record for California’s main electric grid, providing enough power to supply 94.5% of demand. The moment was hailed as a milestone on the path to decarbonization. But what happens when the sun sets and the breeze stops? Handling the fluctuating power production…

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin use huge amounts of electricity. In 2021, the Bitcoin network consumed upwards of 100 terawatt-hours, more than the typical annual energy budget of Finland. Proof of stake offers a way to set up such a network without requiring so much energy. And if all goes as planned, Ethereum, which runs all…

By the end of 2020, DeepMind, the UK-based artificial-intelligence lab, had already produced many impressive achievements in AI. Still, when the group’s program for predicting protein folding was released in November of that year, biologists were shocked by how well it worked. Nearly everything your body does, it does with proteins. Understanding what individual proteins do…

In the early 1960s, MIT professor Fernando Corbató was developing a new kind of shared computer system and wanted a way for people to be able to protect their private files. His solution was a password. Over the years, Corbató’s fix won out over other means of authentication and became the standard way we log…

In his speech to the COP26 climate summit, Tuvalu foreign minister Simon Kofe showed the world what was at stake if it failed to decarbonize. He delivered his United Nations address in a suit, behind a lectern, knee deep in ocean water that was flooding his island as a result of rising sea levels. The…

Scott Sinclair wants to debunk two myths associated with cloud computing. The first is that cloud is a zero-sum game in which apps that once ran in the data center are simply relocated to the public cloud, says Sinclair, senior analyst at market research outfit Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). The second is the idea that…

For the entirety of my adult life, I have been intricately involved in researching the basis of new technologies. At AT&T Bell Laboratories, I conducted research that contributed to the understanding of electronic and optoelectronic materials used in semiconductor lasers that are now part of many devices. As a professor of physics at Rutgers University,…

Just 48 hours after banks and government websites crashed in Ukraine under the weight of a concerted cyberattack on February 15 and 16, the United States pointed the finger at Russian spies. Anne Neuberger, the White House’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said that the US has “technical information that links…

Qurat-Ul-Ain Rehbar, a journalist based in Indian-administered Kashmir, was traveling when a friend called to tell her that she had been put up for sale. She was told that someone had taken a publicly available picture and created a profile, describing her as the “deal of the day” in a fake auction.  Rehbar was one…

Private citizens have been buying their way into the heavens for decades. In the 1980s, McDonnell Douglas engineer Charles Walker became the first nongovernment individual to fly in space when his company bought him a seat on three NASA space shuttle missions. In 2001, American entrepreneur Dennis Tito dished out a reported $20 million to…

Building driverless cars is a slow and expensive business. After years of effort and billions of dollars of investment, the technology is still stuck in the pilot phase. Raquel Urtasun thinks she can do better. Last year, frustrated by the pace of the industry, Urtasun left Uber, where she led the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving research…

In May 11, 1997, Garry Kasparov fidgeted in his plush leather chair in the Equitable Center in Manhattan, anxiously running his hands through his hair. It was the final game of his match against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer—a crucial tiebreaker in the showdown between human and silicon—and things were not going well. Aquiver with self-recrimination…

In 2005, years before Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa came on the scene, two startups—ScanSoft and Nuance Communications—merged to pursue a burgeoning opportunity in speech recognition. The new company developed powerful speech-processing software and grew rapidly for almost a decade—an average of 27% per year in sales. Then suddenly, around 2014, it stopped growing. Revenues…

DeepMind’s streak of applying its world-class AI to hard science problems continues. In collaboration with the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL—a university in Lausanne, Switzerland—the UK-based AI firm has now trained a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to control the superheated soup of matter inside a nuclear fusion reactor. The breakthrough, published in the journal Nature,…

A dementia diagnosis can instantly change how the world sees someone. The stigma has a long reach, too: family and friends of those with dementia might also find that the world has retreated from them. The internet, at its best, can help make the reality of living with dementia more visible. And for some, the…

A startup plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide. The facility, developed by Mote of Los Angeles, would rely on the mounds of agricultural waste produced on the state’s sprawling almond orchards and other types…

Areas of New York City with higher rates of “stop-and-frisk” police searches have more closed-circuit TV cameras, according to a new report from Amnesty International’s Decode Surveillance NYC project. Beginning in April 2021, over 7,000 volunteers began surveying New York City’s streets through Google Street View to document the location of cameras; the volunteers assessed…

Over the past few weeks, convoys of truckers and sympathizers protesting vaccination mandates and covid restrictions have cut off Ottawa’s busiest border with the US. The sounds of air and truck horns have filled the air at all hours, to the point where an injunction has been required. Some protesters are camping in parks and…

On February 4, a geomagnetic storm caused by the sun knocked up to 40 new SpaceX Starlink satellites out of orbit. Now experts are worried about whether mega-constellations planned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others will be resilient to such events in the future. SpaceX had launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites on…

I have spent a lot of my career, both in Silicon Valley and beyond, insisting that all our technologies have histories and even pre-histories, and that far from being neat and tidy, those stories are in fact messy, contested, and conflicted, with competing narrators and meanings. The metaverse, which graduated from a niche term to…

Something has changed for the tech giants. Even as they continue to hold tremendous influence in our daily lives, a growing accountability movement has begun to check their power. Led in large part by tech workers themselves, a movement seeking reform of how these companies do business, treat their employees, and conduct themselves as global…

In the early days of the pandemic, all eyes were on potential vaccines. In May 2020, the US announced Operation Warp Speed, a plan to spend billions on vaccine development. But mostly out of sight of the news media, quieter efforts to custom-design a covid-19 pill were moving forward with similar urgency and hope. Chemists…

The news: People who’ve caught covid become infectious far more quickly than previously believed, according to the world’s first “human challenge” study in which healthy young volunteers were deliberately infected with the virus. The study, carried out by a team led by researchers at Imperial College London, is the first to watch what happens from…

It’s one thing to know whether an individual customer is intrigued by a new mattress or considering a replacement for their sofa’s throw pillows; it’s another to know to how to move these people to go ahead and make a purchase. When deployed strategically, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a marketer’s trusted customer experience ally—transforming…

For someone with a deeply scientific job, Gil Herrera has a nearly mystical mandate: Look into the future and then shape it, at the level of strange quantum physics and inextricable math theorems, to the advantage of the United States. Herrera is the newly minted leader of the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate. The directorate,…

A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives. Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victim’s jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, and the case goes cold. …

OpenAI has built a new version of GPT-3, its game-changing language model, that it says does away with some of the most toxic issues that plagued its predecessor. The San Francisco-based lab says the updated model, called InstructGPT, is better at following the instructions of people using it—known as “alignment” in AI jargon—and thus produces less offensive…

Lisa Levy is a housing case manager at Columbus House in New Haven, Connecticut, where she oversees residents in a complex of 25 apartments. Each of her clients has a dual diagnosis of severe mental illness and a substance use disorder, and all have been homeless. “They’re among the most vulnerable people,” Levy says, “and…

Last month, I attended the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, where 26,000 geoscientists convened in person and virtually to share the latest Earth and climate science. Maybe a hundred of those people were there to talk about research on solar geoengineering—the idea of reflecting a fraction of incoming sunlight to cool a warming…

Moving to the cloud is all the rage. According to an IDC Survey Spotlight, Experience in Migrating Databases to the Cloud, 63% of enterprises are actively migrating their databases to the cloud, and another 29% are considering doing so within the next three years. This article discusses some of the risks customers may unwittingly encounter…

For organizations in today’s complex business environment, data is like water—essential for survival. They need to process, analyze, and act on data to drive business growth—to predict future trends, identify new business opportunities, and respond to market changes faster. Not enough data? Businesses die of thirst. Dirty data? Projects are polluted by “garbage in/garbage out.”…