MIT Technology Review

Russia has sent more than 100,000 soldiers to the nation’s border with Ukraine, threatening a war unlike anything Europe has seen in decades. Though there hasn’t been any shooting yet, cyber operations are already underway. Last week, hackers defaced dozens of government websites in Ukraine, a technically simple but attention-grabbing act that generated global headlines.…

If you can recognize a dog by sight, then you can probably recognize a dog when it is described to you in words. Not so for today’s artificial intelligence. Deep neural networks have become very good at identifying objects in photos and conversing in natural language, but not at the same time: there are AI…

This story has been updated after charges were officially dismissed, and to include statements from Dr. Gang Chen, Rachael Rollins, the US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and MIT president L. Rafael Reif. A judge has approved the government’s motion to dismiss all charges against MIT mechanical engineering professor and nanotechnologist Gang Chen, nearly…

The internet can feel like a bottomless pit of the worst aspects of humanity. So far, there’s little indication that the metaverse—an envisioned virtual digital world where we work, play, and live—will be much better. As I reported last month, a beta tester in Meta’s virtual social platform, Horizon Worlds, has already complained of being…

Artificial intelligence helps build physical infrastructure like modular housing, skyscrapers, and factory floors. “…many problems that we wrestle with in all forms of engineering and design are very, very complex problems…those problems are beginning to reach the limits of human capacity,” says Mike Haley, the vice president of research at Autodesk. But there’s hope with…

Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai, an underwater volcano off the coast of Tonga, has erupted several times in the last 13 years, but the most recent, on January 15, was likely its most destructive. The blast has had global consequences: more than 6,000 miles away, waves caused by the eruption drowned two people in Peru. But the effect…

Biologists at several startups are applying the latest advances in genetic engineering to the age-old problem of baldness, creating new hair-forming cells that could restore a person’s ability to grow hair. Some researchers tell MIT Technology Review they are using the techniques to grow human hair cells in their labs and even on animals. A…

On January 14, federal prosecutors recommended that the US Department of Justice dismiss all three charges against MIT nanotechnology professor Gang Chen, ending a two-year ordeal stemming from accusations that he hid funding from Chinese entities on grant disclosure forms. Chen had pleaded not guilty to all charges, while his employer had indicated that the…

In December, researchers reported that huge and growing cracks have formed in the eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-size mass of ice that stretches 75 miles across western Antarctica. They warned that the floating tongue of the glacier—which acts as a brace to prop up the Thwaites—could snap off into the ocean…

“Workplace” used to be defined by physical location. Even when employees were hard at work elsewhere, from home or on the road, they were “out of the office.” When offices began to shut down in March 2020 to slow down the covid-19 pandemic, few realized that they were embarking on a fundamental and enduring transformation…

The news: A pig’s heart has been transplanted into a human being for the first time. David Bennett Sr., a man with terminal heart disease, received the genetically modified heart during an eight-hour operation on Friday January 7 at the University of Maryland Medical Center, which issued a statement last night. The operation was a…

When Zipline, the operator of the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery system, began building its logistics service to deliver medicines, vaccines, and medical supplies to health facilities across rural Africa, the company needed a development and manufacturing process that could quickly incorporate design improvements. It also needed to remain flexible so it could cater to…

Later next month, Maeghan Easler will have a box fan propped in the window, blowing cold February air into her apartment in Des Moines, Iowa. She’ll have cooling packs—tights filled with ice cubes—stuffed into her cycling kit. And she’ll be pedaling like crazy. Easler will compete with dozens of other e-cyclists from around the globe in…

Before reality, there’s simulation. A 2021 missile-inceptor test conducted by aerospace and US defense technology provider Raytheon Technologies held no surprises because the company had already tested almost every aspect of the launch in simulation. Siemens and space agency NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked together on a digital twin of the Mars Science Laboratory on…

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

Like clockwork, at the end of every year, people around the world sit down and make resolutions for the new one: lose weight, meditate, save money. Maybe this year it’s time to take stock of your tech life. Perhaps you’ve been getting a persistent note that your storage is full, or you simply want to feel less stressed by…

Four months after the Afghan government fell to the Taliban, 22-year-old Asad Asadullah had settled into a new routine. In his hometown in Afghanistan’s northern Samangan province, the former computer science student started and ended each day glued to his laptop screen. Since late October, Asadullah had been participating in a virtual coding bootcamp organized…

We’ve never relied more on technology to solve our problems than we do now. Sometimes it works. Vaccines against covid-19 have cut the death toll. We’ve got virus tests and drugs, too. But this isn’t the story about what worked in 2021. This is MIT Technology Review’s annual list of cases where innovation went wrong.…

A shock has reverberated inside Israel in the last few months. NSO Group, the billion-dollar Israeli company that has sold hacking tools to governments around the world for more than a decade, has drawn intense scrutiny after a series of public scandals. The company is in crisis. Its future is in doubt. But while NSO…

When Hongzhi Gao was young, he lived with his family in Gansu, a province located in the center of northern China by the Tengger Desert. Thinking back to his childhood, he recalls the constant, steady wind of dirt outside their house, and that during most months of the year it didn’t take more than a…

New data shows that the polarization of political discourse online has remained largely unchanged since the end of 2020. That’s probably not surprising if you’ve looked at the internet at all in the past year. But the data also shows an underlying pattern in which individual topics—like abortion and immigration—took turns driving divisiveness. While people…

The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year. We asked our writers and editors to look back over all the stories we published in 2021 and tell us which…

Less than three hours after a jury in Boston began deliberating the fate of Harvard chemistry professor Charlies Lieber, the verdict was in: he was found guilty on Tuesday of six felony counts, including false statements and tax fraud, that stemmed from his failure to disclose affiliations and funding from a Chinese university and talent…

It might sound strange to think of storytelling as a climate solution, but after spending five years documenting 1,001 voices on climate change in 20 countries, I believe one of the most powerful forms of climate action is to listen deeply to people already affected by the crisis. To ensure that solutions actually help communities…

The Sulphur Springs Valley is a windswept desert in southeastern Arizona, bounded on three sides by forest-­topped mountain ranges known as the sky islands. It can take an hour or more to drive between inhabited places in the valley, but the community there is tight-knit—many of the farmers went to the same high school (as…

In the world of water, 2021 was yet another year for the record books. Parts of Western Europe reeled from deadly floods that sent rivers surging to levels not seen in 500 to 1,000 years. Destructive floods hit central China as well, displacing more than a quarter of a million people from their homes. Meanwhile,…

When Ahsan Rehman graduated from one of Pakistan’s top engineering universities in 2016, he knew he wanted a job that would help people. He did not have to look far for ideas. At his home in Karachi, his family often went days without getting any water from the city’s pipes. Initially, they had dug a…

The comings and goings of water define Mexico City, a mile-high metropolis sprawled across three dry lake beds. The city floods in the wet season and thirsts during regular droughts. CDMX, as the city of 21 million styles itself, pumps more water from the aquifer below it than it replenishes: the city sank some 12…

Every day, the Linggiu Reservoir does quiet battle with the ocean, feeding rainwater into the Johor River in southern Malaysia to keep its salt levels low enough to treat. Singapore, which built the reservoir in 1995, had been entitled to extract some 250 million gallons per day from the 123-kilometer-­long river, meeting more than half…

In the waning weeks of 2017, many residents of Cape Town, South Africa, lined up day and night to fill old jugs with water from the city’s few natural springs. Palpable angst hung in the air. After months of warnings through an anomalously long drought, Cape Town was on the verge of becoming the world’s…

As we were closing this issue, I came across a video on Twitter of a highway just outside Vancouver, submerged in water. It wasn’t the only one. The densely populated urban heart of British Columbia was cut off from the rest of Canada by flooding and mudslides after an atmospheric river barreled through. The country’s…

In 2021 we saw images from the deep reaches of geologic time, to visionaries working on today’s pressing issues, to a glimpse into a transhuman future.

The Congo River is the world’s second-largest river system after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and animals that live in the swamps and peatlands it supports. The massive tropical rainforest sprawled across its middle helps regulate the entire Earth’s…

It’s been a year of supersized AI models. When OpenAI released GPT-3, in June 2020, the neural network’s apparent grasp of language was uncanny. It could generate convincing sentences, converse with humans, and even autocomplete code. GPT-3 was also monstrous in scale—larger than any other neural network ever built. It kicked off a whole new trend in…

This story has been adapted from Erica Gies‘ book Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, available for preorder at slowwater.world. For years, Beijing landscape architect Yu Kongjian was ridiculed by his fellow citizens as a backward thinker. Some even called him an American spy—a nod to his doctorate from Harvard’s…

While the covid-19 pandemic upended workplaces and ushered in rapid digital transformation, the turmoil around cybercrime has remained constant: attackers are always changing tactics to evade detection. Flexible, customer-first solutions have emerged to meet ever-changing circumstances to keep organizations secure and confident against cyber threats. In the new year and beyond, as technology and workplace…

Being on social media can feel a bit like living in a new kind of city. It’s the greatest city in the world. Millions of people can do things their parents never dreamed of. They can live together, play together, learn together. The city is a marvel. But it’s also rotten. Raw sewage runs in the streets.…

About 20 miles outside El Paso, Texas, on a warm afternoon just before the fall harvest, Ramon Tirres Jr. turns his truck between two fields covered in nothing but dirt. Both should be lush with cotton by now, but these 70 acres—a fraction of the nearly 1,000 that Tirres left unplanted this year—are bare. All…

Cassandria Campbell, MCP ’11, traces her interest in food to her first summer job working with the Food Project on farms in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and Roxbury, the Boston neighborhood where she grew up. “I really enjoyed that experience of seeing things grow,” she recalls, “and I appreciated how much change it was creating in Roxbury…

Geothermal power is a promising energy source limited by factors including the need to locate plants in areas where reservoirs of hot water deep below the earth’s surface are easily accessible. Carlos Araque is looking to change that through his company, Quaise, using a groundbreaking technology developed at MIT. “We need to go deeper and…