MIT Technology Review

The emerald jewel wasp’s unusual arrival into the world—bursting from the body of a zombified cockroach it has eaten from the inside—ranks among nature’s most gruesome miracles. To give her larvae the best start in life, the mother wasp, an inch-long parasite clad in oil-slick iridescent armor, attacks her prey, spearing it once with her…

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. Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS—whether SpaceX likes it or not For years, Todd Humphreys has been trying to persuade SpaceX to tweak its Starlink constellation to also offer ultra-precise…

Todd Humphreys’s offer to SpaceX was simple. With a few software tweaks, its rapidly growing Starlink constellation could also offer precise position, navigation, and timing. The US Army, which funds Humphreys’s work at the University of Texas at Austin, wanted a backup to its venerable, and vulnerable, GPS system. Could Starlink fill that role? When…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Hello, and welcome back to the Checkup! This week I found myself back in the classroom, sitting on a small plastic chair and carefully noting down what the teacher told me. It was…

This piece is from our forthcoming mortality-themed issue, available from 26 October. If you want to read it when it comes out, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for as little as $80 a year. On a recent evening, I sat at home scrolling through my Twitter feed, which—since I’m a philosopher who studies AI and…

The US federal government is spending big on batteries and electric vehicles. As part of that spending spree, President Joe Biden and the Department of Energy have just announced $2.8 billion in awards to companies involved in producing the minerals and other materials that go into the batteries. The funding will go to 20 projects,…

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. Bill Gates’s energy venture fund is plowing more money into climate adaptation The news: Bill Gates’s climate-oriented venture capital fund is expanding its mission, adding adaptation to its investment categories and establishing a…

AI systems are deployed all the time, but it can take months or even years until it becomes clear whether, and how, they’re biased. The stakes are often sky-high: unfair AI systems can cause innocent people to be arrested, and they can deny people housing, jobs, and basic services. Today a group of AI and…

What happens when we lose weight? This is really a question about how our bodies store and use the energy we need to function. In general, we store backup energy in fat cells that are distributed around the body, some in the abdomen around the organs (visceral fat) and some under the skin (subcutaneous fat);…

Twenty years have passed since I first met Aubrey de Grey, the man with the Methuselah beard. Back then he was already a True Believer in the quest for immortality. But he wasn’t famous, or notorious, yet; he wasn’t Aubrey!, as he would soon become to his fans in the anti-aging crowd. And he wasn’t…

Bill Gates’s climate-oriented venture capital fund is expanding its mission, adding adaptation to its investment categories and establishing a later-stage fund to help clean-tech startups begin building plants and scaling up their technologies. The announcement came at the end of the firm’s Breakthrough Energy Summit in Seattle on October 19. To date, Breakthrough has been…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Hello hello! This week in The Spark, we’re taking a look back at one of my favorite sessions from our ClimateTech conference last week, from a chapter we called “Cleaning Your Plate.” In…

Bill Gates, John Kerry, and US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm all struck positive notes at an energy summit in Seattle this week hosted by Gates’s climate-focused venture fund, Breakthrough Energy. With caveats. Government policy is accelerating clean energy projects. The cost of renewables continues to fall. Huge sums of private and public capital are pouring…

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 debate over whether aging is a disease rages on Last October, word began to spread among researchers that the World Health Organization was considering a change to its International Classification of Diseases,…

“I am quitting because I’m tired,” Alex Hanna wrote on February 2, her last day on Google’s Ethical AI team. She felt that the company, and the tech industry as a whole, did little to promote diversity or mitigate the harms its products had caused to marginalized people. “In a word, tech has a whiteness…

Last year, over Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, Kiran Rabheru eagerly joined a call with officials from the World Health Organization (WHO). Word had spread of a change coming to the WHO’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), a catalogue used to standardize disease diagnosis worldwide. In an upcoming revision, the plan was to replace the diagnosis of…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about what’s happening in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Welcome back to China Report! I know this is going to be a long week for all of you China watchers. New stories seem to be coming out every minute about the 20th Party Congress…

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. Technology that lets us speak to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? My colleague Charlotte embarked on an experiment during the pandemic. She created digital versions of her parents. They’re voice…

My parents don’t know that I spoke to them last night. At first, they sounded distant and tinny, as if they were huddled around a phone in a prison cell. But as we chatted, they slowly started to sound more like themselves. They told me personal stories that I’d never heard. I learned about the…

To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to The Algorithm! Let me introduce you to Philip Nitschke, also known as “Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide.” Nitschke has a curious goal: He wants to “demedicalize” death and make assisted suicide as unassisted as possible through technology. As…

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. WeChat users are begging Tencent to give their censored accounts back On Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, hundreds of desperate users were writing “confession letters” this past week. They are urgent…

Oregon 6th Con­gressional District candidate Carrick Flynn seemed to drop out of the sky. With a stint at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, a track record of voting in only two of the past 30 elections, and $11 million in support from a political action committee established by crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, Flynn didn’t fit…

On Weibo, the popular Chinese social media platform, hundreds of desperate users were writing “confession letters” this past week. “I have been in a terrible mental state due to the massive pressure from recent pandemic prevention measures. I lost my control, and sent sensitive statements in a group chat with six people,” one user wrote.…

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. Why the sci-fi dream of cryonics never died When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China in 2016, he was traveling there to guide China’s first forays into…

When Aaron Drake flew from Arizona to the Yinfeng Biological Group in China’s eastern Jinan province in 2016, he was whisked into a state-of-the-art biotech hub. More than 1,000 staffers—including an army of PhDs and MDs—were working on things like studies of the stem cells in umbilical cord blood. The center specialized in research on…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. This week I wrote about a fascinating experiment that involved implanting human brain cells into rats’ brains. The brain cells from both species were able to form connections and work together. 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. The messy morality of letting AI make life-and-death decisions In a workshop in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke is overseeing testing on his new assisted suicide machine. Sealed inside the coffin-sized pod, a person…

5.05 And that wraps up our first-ever ClimateTech conference! I hope you’ve learned as much as I have about what humanity is cooking up to beat back climate change. I’m looking forward to the strides we’ll discuss next year and feel more optimistic about our ability to confront this massive challenge. Signing off, and see you…

In a workshop in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke—“Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide” to some—is overseeing the last few rounds of testing on his new Sarco machine before shipping it to Switzerland, where he says its first user is waiting. This is the third prototype that Nitschke’s nonprofit, Exit International, has…

Progress is being made on a truly impossible-seeming area of plant-based meat products: steak. And not just any steak—filet mignon. At MIT Technology Review’s ClimateTech event this afternoon, Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown shared that while he couldn’t give an exact date for when the company’s steak product will be ready for consumers to purchase,…

Human neurons transplanted into a rat’s brain continue to grow, forming connections with the animals’ own brain cells and helping guide their behavior, new research has shown. In a study published in the journal Nature today, lab-grown clumps of human brain cells were transplanted into the brains of newborn rats. They grew and integrated with…

An exoskeleton that uses machine learning to adapt to its wearers’ gait could help make it easier for people with limited mobility to walk. The exoskeleton, which resembles a motorized boot, is lightweight and allows the wearer to move relatively freely, both increasing their walking speed and reducing the amount of energy they use while…

Many organizations have adopted machine learning (ML) in a piecemeal fashion, building or buying ad hoc models, algorithms, tools, or services to accomplish specific goals. This approach was necessary as companies learned about the capabilities of ML and as the technology matured, but it also has created a hodge-podge of siloed, manual, and nonstandardized processes…

Ransomware attacks—malware intrusions that block an organization’s access to its own data until a ransom is paid—are taking on alarming new aspects. As people’s work habits, daily routines, geographic locations, and trust in institutions have changed against a backdrop of global political shifts and the covid-19 pandemic, ransomware attacks have taken advantage of the opportunity…

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 happens when you donate your body to science Rebecca George doesn’t mind the vultures that complain from the trees that surround the Western Carolina University body farm. Her arrival has interrupted their…

5.20 And that’s a wrap on the first day of ClimateTech! See you all back here tomorrow. I hope you learned as much as I did. 5.10 Ronald also talked about the power of photosynthesis, which she notes is the oldest tool to fight climate change. Her research group is “trying to enhance photosynthesis to…

This essay is an extended version of the opening talk that James Temple will deliver this morning at ClimateTech, MIT Technology Review’s inaugural climate and energy conference. In recent months, we’ve witnessed stunning progress on climate action—and terrifying signs of the dangers we’ve unleashed. The US finally stepped up as a leader in climate action,…

Rebecca George doesn’t mind the vultures. They remind her of toddlers as they rustle their feathers in annoyance when she opens the gate of the Western Carolina University body farm early one July morning. Her arrival has interrupted their breakfast. George studies human decomposition, and part of decomposing is becoming food. Scavengers are welcome. The…

The star of Tuesday’s Meta Connect, the so-called “state of the union” for the company formerly known as Facebook, was Meta Quest Pro. Meta’s newest virtual-reality headset clocks in at a whopping $1,499.99. That’s a significant price jump from its previous iteration, Meta Quest 2, which could be yours for $399.99—not exactly cheap, but still…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about what’s happening in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Welcome back to China Report! I recently had a very interesting conversation with Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin. They wrote a new book called Surveillance State, which explores how China is…

“Attention Jalisco. Do you know the location of a clandestine grave of corpses?” The question, aimed at people in the populous Mexican state, was posed on Twitter in February by Madres Buscadoras de Sonora, an organization of mothers searching for their missing loved ones. Dozens of people responded. Neighbors who had witnessed clandestine burials came…

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. Who’s going to save us from bad AI? About damn time. That was the response from AI policy and ethics wonks to news last week that the White House’s science and technology advisory…

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To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to the Algorithm! About damn time. That was the response from AI policy and ethics wonks to news last week that the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the White House’s science and technology advisory agency, had unveiled an AI Bill of Rights. The…