MIT Technology Review

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. Roomba testers feel misled after intimate images ended up on Facebook When Greg unboxed a new robot vacuum cleaner in December 2019, he thought he knew what he was getting into. As a…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. How was your break? I spent mine back home in snowy Finland, extremely offline. Bliss! I hope you’re well-rested, because this year is going to be even wilder than 2022 for AI. Last…

When Greg unboxed a new Roomba robot vacuum cleaner in December 2019, he thought he knew what he was getting into. He would allow the preproduction test version of iRobot’s Roomba J series device to roam around his house, let it collect all sorts of data to help improve its artificial intelligence, and provide feedback…

A small biotech company claims it has used a technology called reprogramming to rejuvenate old mice and extend their lives, a result suggesting that one day older people could have their biological clocks turned back with an injection—literally becoming younger. The life-extension claim in rodents, made by Rejuvenate Bio, a San Diego biotech company, appears…

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. Introducing this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies Each year, MIT Technology Review’s reporters and editors pick 10 Breakthrough Technologies, all of which have the promise to fundamentally change the way we live and work.…

Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello may have met as graduate students in architecture at Columbia University, but it quickly became clear that “architecture” would prove an inadequate term to describe their eclectic body of work. As the pair started working together in 2002, they became increasingly aware that “sometimes the forces that enable architecture,…

It was December 14, 1972, the final day on the moon for the last Apollo mission. The Challenger lander was dusted in a fine coating of gray lunar dirt, called regolith, both inside and out. Geologist Jack Schmitt was packing the sample containers, securing 243 pounds of rocks to bring home. After passing Schmitt the…

For the past 22 years, we’ve been publishing an annual list of the 10 biggest breakthrough technologies. In 2018, we defined a breakthrough as “a technology, or perhaps even a collection of technologies, that will have a profound effect on our lives.” That’s pretty broad! But it gets at the heart of what we try to…

Every year, we pick the 10 technologies that matter the most right now. We look for advances that will have a big impact on our lives and break down why they matter.

Electric vehicles are transforming the auto industry. While sales have slowly ticked up for years, they’re now soaring. The emissions-free cars and trucks will likely account for 13% of all new auto sales globally in 2022, up from 4% just two years earlier, according to the International Energy Agency. They’re on track to make up…

High-value metals recovered from old laptops, corroded power drills, and electric vehicles could power tomorrow’s cars, thanks to recycling advances that make it possible to turn old batteries into new ones. Demand for lithium-ion batteries is skyrocketing as electric vehicles become more common. Greater use of electric vehicles is good news for the climate. But…

Scientists have long sought better tools to study teeth and bones from ancient humans. In the past, they’ve had to scour many ancient remains to find a sample preserved well enough to analyze. Now cheaper techniques and new methods that make damaged DNA legible to commercial sequencers are powering a boom in ancient DNA…

Ever wonder how your smartphone connects to your Bluetooth speaker, given they were made by different companies? Well, Bluetooth is an open standard, meaning its design specifications, such as the required frequency and its data encoding protocols, are publicly available. Software and hardware based on open standards—Ethernet, Wi-Fi, PDF—have become household names. Now an open…

Access to abortion care has narrowed dramatically in the US. But there’s been one big shift in the other direction: the ability to access care without leaving home. In 2021, during the pandemic, the US Food and Drug Administration temporarily allowed health-care providers to mail patients two pills—mifepristone and misoprostol—that, when taken together, can induce…

For two months last year, a 57-year-old man named David Bennett lived with a pig heart beating inside his chest. Surgeons at the University of Maryland had put it there to see: Could a gene-edited pig’s heart keep a person alive? Far more people need an organ transplant to live than can get one. There…

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 for quantum computing For years, quantum’s news cycle was dominated by headlines about record-setting systems. But this year, researchers are getting off the hype train and knuckling down to life in…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. We’ve got more than one biological clock. Beyond the one that marches onwards as we age, the circadian clock that sits in our brains keeps our bodies in rhythm. This clock helps…

This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, where we look across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future In 2023, progress in quantum computing will be defined less by big hardware announcements than by researchers consolidating years of hard work, getting chips to talk to…

Companies have contended with a deluge of data for years. And while most have not yet found a good way of managing it all, the challenges—diverse data sources, types, and structures and new environments and platforms—have grown ever more complex. At the same time, deriving value from data has become a business imperative, making 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. What’s next for mRNA vaccines As the covid pandemic began, we were warned that wearing face coverings, disinfecting everything we touched, and keeping away from other people were some of the only ways…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. If you stop to think about it for long enough, batteries start to sound a little bit like magic. Seriously, tiny chemical factories that we carry around to store energy and release it…

Cast your mind back to 2020, if you can bear it. As the year progressed, so did the impact of covid-19. We were warned that wearing face coverings, disinfecting everything we touched, and keeping away from other people were some of the only ways we could protect ourselves from the potentially fatal disease. Thankfully, 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. What’s next for batteries Every year the world runs more and more on batteries. Electric vehicles passed 10% of global vehicle sales in 2022, and they’re on track to reach 30% by the…

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. What’s better to do at this time than to indulge in some predictions for 2023? This morning, I published a story in MIT Technology Review’s “What’s Next in Tech” series, looking at what will happen…

Every year the world runs more and more on batteries. Electric vehicles passed 10% of global vehicle sales in 2022, and they’re on track to reach 30% by the end of this decade. Policies around the world are only going to accelerate this growth: recent climate legislation in the US is pumping billions into battery…

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 for the chip industry The year ahead was already shaping up to be a hard one for semiconductor businesses, which experience cycles of soaring and dwindling demand. The industry was already…

The year ahead was already shaping up to be a hard one for semiconductor businesses. Famously defined by cycles of soaring and dwindling demand, the chip industry is expected to see declining growth this year as the demand for consumer electronics plateaus. But concerns over the economic cycle—and the challenges associated with making ever more…

In the spring of 2022, before some of the most volatile events to hit the crypto world last year, an NFT artist named Micah Johnson set out to hold a new auction of his drawings. Johnson is well known in crypto circles for images featuring his character Aku, a young Black boy who dreams of…

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,…