MIT Technology Review

When Jesse Solomon ’91 first started teaching at a middle school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, he was overwhelmed. “I had 25 students working at eight different grade levels—some that were learning English, some that were on individual education plans,” he says. “I wasn’t prepared for that level of complexity.” Luckily, a veteran teacher…

Julian Adams remembers clearly the first time he saw a bonsai. He was wandering a botanical garden as a young man when, among the orchids, cacti, and acres of vegetables, he stumbled on a room full of the diminutive and ancient trees. Adams had always felt a respect for older things, he says. Something about…

In 1982, when Lynn Best ’69 joined the public utility Seattle City Light, her team faced an immediate challenge: evaluating the environmental, cultural, and financial impacts of its three dams generating electricity on the Skagit River in northwest Washington State. As acting director, she was able to persuade City Light to allow the environmental team…

Editor’s Note: In 2020, an MIT Task Force produced a comprehensive report on the Work of the Future. Since then, the global pandemic has had a significant effect on work and businesses, providing the impetus for The Work of the Future, by the same authors. The book, from which the following excerpt is adapted, will be published…

“At MIT, we believe that public service can be—and should be—as intense, meaningful, and intellectually rigorous as academic work. MIT alumni help convey this philosophy … that serving others is not an activity separate from academic and professional pursuits; it is a vital element of a wise, creative life.” Institute president L. Rafael Reif shared…

When Mike Koval, the police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, abruptly resigned on a Sunday in September 2019, the community’s relationship with its men and women in blue was already strained. Use-of-force issues hung over the department after the killing of a Black teenager in 2015. Then, months before Koval left, another Black teenager, in the…

Julius Mutero has harvested virtually nothing in the past six years. For his entire adult life, he has farmed a three-hectare plot in Mabiya, a farming community in eastern Zimbabwe. There he grows maize and groundnuts to feed himself, his wife, and their three children. He sells whatever’s left for cash. But over a decade…

Right now, Volkan Yazici is working 22 hour days for free. Yazici is a member of the Log4J project, an open-source tool used widely to record activity inside various types of software. It helps run huge swaths of the internet, including applications ranging from iCloud to Twitter, and he and his colleagues are now desperately…

By midnight on December 1, 2015, when Eric Wastl first launched his annual Santa-themed puzzle-a-day programming challenge Advent of Code, 81 people had signed up. That pretty much matched his capacity planning for 70 participants. Wastl figured this amusement might be of interest to a few friends, friends of friends, and maybe some of their…

Private, mercenary-style surveillance and hacking groups have used Facebook and Instagram to target 50,000 people in over 100 countries, according to a newly published investigation by Meta, Facebook’s parent company. The existence of private companies that use sophisticated digital tools to pry secrets from people’s work and private lives—sometimes as part of legitimate law enforcement…

Ahmad Fawad Yusufi, 31, was sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a San Francisco playground around 5 a.m. on November 28 when someone walked up to the car, attempted to steal his wallet, and shot him to death. Yusufi, an Afghan immigrant who had arrived in the United States on a special visa…

The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our getaway. But the distance is no more. With all those dead pine trees in thrall to wildfire, the…

Last week, Meta (the umbrella company formerly known as Facebook) opened up access to its virtual-reality social media platform, Horizon Worlds. Early descriptions of the platform make it seem fun and wholesome, drawing comparisons to Minecraft. In Horizon Worlds, up to 20 avatars can get together at a time to explore, hang out, and build…

Next-generation solutions and products are hitting a wall with wi-fi: it’s not fast enough, and latency and connectivity issues mean it’s not reliable enough. What’s an innovator to do? Focus on what’s next: 5G and software-defined networking. Nick McKeown, senior vice president and general manager of the network and edge group at Intel Corporation says…

You can find Dubna, a small town three hours away from Moscow by train, both on a map and in the periodic table: dubnium, element number 105, was discovered at a research center there, and named after the town. A hasteless town, Dubna is defined as much by the surrounding forests as by the water:…

On a Saturday morning in December of 2020, the RRS Discovery floated in calm waters just east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the massive undersea mountain range that runs from the Arctic nearly to the Antarctic. The team onboard the research vessel, mostly from the UK’s National Oceanography Centre, used an acoustic signaling system to trigger the…

In January of 2020, agents arrived at Harvard University looking for Charles Lieber, a renowned nanotechnology researcher who chaired the school’s department of chemistry and chemical biology. They were there to arrest him on charges of hiding his financial ties with a university in China. By arresting Lieber steps from Harvard Yard, authorities were sending…

Businesses that want to be digital leaders in their markets need to embrace automation, not only to augment existing capabilities or to reduce costs but to position themselves to successfully maneuver the rapid expansion of IT demand ushered in through digital innovation. “It’s a scale issue,” says John Roese, global chief technology officer at Dell…

Fae Saulenas does not want your sympathy. Saulenas, along with her 46-year-old daughter Lauren, spent last winter—their covid winter—in Saugus, Massachusetts, in a house without a working furnace. Saulenas is in her 70s. Lauren, because of brain injuries she experienced in the womb, is quadriplegic, blind, and affected by a seizure disorder, among other disabilities. In…

In a now-famous 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore introduced the business world to the concept of the experience economy. The theory went something like this: businesses had moved through various economic stages—agrarian, industrial, and service—in which the nature of what was sold continued to evolve.…

A double dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine can’t stop the omicron virus, according to labs tests done in in South Africa and Germany, and either a booster or a new vaccine will be needed. The omicron variant was detected in South Africa last month, and because it contains a large number of genetic changes,…

In the two years since OpenAI released its language model GPT-3, most big-name AI labs have developed language mimics of their own. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—as well as a handful of Chinese firms—have all built AIs that can generate convincing text, chat with humans, answer questions, and more. Known as large language models because of…

The global pandemic accelerated the trend toward a work-from-anywhere, distributed workforce. As we approach a post-pandemic world, companies—and employees—expect this trend to become the norm. While IT departments are rapidly configuring and deploying devices, infrastructure, and software to support the shift in a secure and productive way, employees are likewise having to reset priorities and…

There’s enough heat flowing from inside the earth to meet total global energy demand twice over. But harnessing it requires drilling deep underground and transforming that heat into a usable form of energy. That’s difficult and expensive, which is why geothermal power—sometimes called the forgotten renewable—makes up only about 0.3% of electricity generation worldwide. Now,…

NASA plans to launch a new x-ray telescope this week to help answer questions like what’s inside a black hole and how bright pulsars can get. On Thursday, December 9, the agency will launch the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, known as IXPE, on a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the first x-ray telescope capable of measuring polarization, a property of…

Voice technology is one of the biggest trends in the healthcare space. We look at how it might help care providers and patients, from a woman who is losing her speech, to documenting healthcare records for doctors. But how do you teach AI to learn to communicate more like a human, and will it lead…

If all goes to plan, next month SpaceX will launch the largest rocket in human history. Towering nearly 400 feet tall, the rocket – Starship – is designed to take NASA astronauts to the moon. And SpaceX’s CEO, Elon Musk, has bigger ambitions: he wants to use it to settle humans on Mars. Much has already…

Kevin Cowley remembers many things about April 15, 1989. He had taken the bus to the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield, England, to watch the semifinal championship game between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool. He was 17. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. The fans filled the stands. He remembers being pressed between people so tightly…

Countries are slamming their borders shut again. Since the omicron variant was discovered in southern Africa and reported to the World Health Organization last week, more than 50 countries have imposed border controls. They target mostly South Africa and Botswana, which reported the first cases, but also neighboring countries in the region. The aim was…

A visiting researcher at UCLA accused of hiding his connection to China’s People’s Liberation Army. A hacker indicted for breaking into video game company servers in his spare time. A Harvard professor accused of lying to investigators about funding from China. And a man sentenced for organizing a turtle-smuggling ring between New York and Hong…

Construction of solar farms, wind turbines, and other sources of renewable power will soar over the next five years as nations set stricter climate policies and more ambitious emissions targets. New renewable electricity capacity will set another record this year, at 290 gigawatts, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. That’s roughly…

The discovery of the omicron variant of covid-19 in southern Africa shows how sequencing the genes of a virus can give an early alert to dangerous-looking changes in its genome. Omicron has more than 30 mutations in the important “spike” gene, some of which have previously been seen in other variants and are thought to…

The news: A US Food and Drug Administration panel has voted by 13 to 10 to recommend that the government authorize Merck’s antiviral pill for patients with early covid-19 who are at high risk for severe infection. The drug, called molnupiravir, has been shown to reduce the risk of hospitalization and death, although by less…

The news: Just five days ago, South African scientists informed the World Health Organization that they’d identified a new covid-19 variant. The situation has escalated rapidly since then. The variant, known as B.1.1.529, has already been found in many countries across the world. On Friday it was designated a variant of “concern” by the WHO, which…

When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August, Mohammad Yasin had to make some difficult decisions very quickly. As the country reeled from the shock of the insurgent takeover, the 21-year-old—whose name has been changed to protect his safety—snuck into his small place of business and got to work. He began erasing some of the…

In August 2022, a NASA probe called Psyche will set out to explore a giant metallic asteroid called Psyche 16, to help scientists learn more about how planets form. The way Psyche reaches its target, though, will be different from typical NASA missions. Building on technology used in previous missions, including Dawn and Deep Space 1, solar power will help propel Psyche into deep space. If that proves successful, it could be the start of a…

Thanks to advancements in speech and natural language processing, there is hope that one day you may be able to ask your virtual assistant what the best salad ingredients are. Currently, it is possible to ask your home gadget to play music, or open on voice command, which is a feature already found in some…

Nations are poised to begin building an international carbon market, after finally adopting the relevant rules at the UN climate conference in Glasgow earlier this month. Under the COP26 agreement, countries should soon be able to buy and sell UN-certified carbon credits from one another, and use them as a way to achieve greenhouse gas…

Defining what is, or isn’t artificial intelligence can be tricky (or tough). So much so, even the experts get it wrong sometimes. That’s why MIT Technology Review’s Senior AI Editor Karen Hao created a flowchart to explain it all. In this bonus content our host and her team reimagined Hao’s original reporting, gamifying it into…

The story has been updated to include the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ denial that it was in the process of purchasing NSO Group tools. In July, accusations emerged that spyware from NSO Group had targeted French president Emmanuel Macron, causing a major controversy. The company denied the claims—part of a string of allegations about…

Hackers around the globe are smart: they know that it isn’t just good code that helps them break into systems; it’s also about understanding—and preying upon—human behavior. The threat to businesses in the form of cyberattacks is only growing—especially as companies make the shift to embrace hybrid work. But John Scimone, senior vice president and…

Myanmar, March 2021. A month after the fall of the democratic government. In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which recently rebranded to Meta) offered global access to Instant Articles, a…

Michael Worobey hasn’t always been certain about where covid originated. During the pandemic, the University of Arizona professor has studied how the virus changes over time, and was among a group of 18 influential scientists who signed a letter in May calling for further investigation to help prove or disprove the theory that SARS-CoV-2 emerged…

From cars to planes, the future of transportation is already here—and is changing rapidly. Software engineering is increasingly central to both the development and maintenance of all kinds of vehicles. That means more people need to start thinking like systems engineers. Dale Tutt, vice president of aerospace and defense industry for Siemens Software, says this…

Our 35 Innovators Under 35 competition for 2022 is now open for nominations. You can nominate great candidates from now until 10 p.m. EST on January 24, 2022. We’ve been publishing a list of young innovators for more than two decades now. The list always includes fascinating stories of young people working to employ technology…

At long last, physicists from Harvard and MIT have found the killer application for quantum computing: a Mario Bros. GIF made from qubits. The qubits (quantum bits) can also be arranged in a Space Invaders design, or Tetris, or any other shape—your geometrical wish is the qubits’ command. The GIFs were offered up by QuEra…

The next wave of aerospace is just around the corner, and a lot of that innovation is happening thanks to new, faster methods of development. “What’s happening now is that companies are trying to understand how they take the lessons from Agile software development and apply those to Agile product development,” explains Dale Tutt, vice…