MIT Technology Review

Conservative Facebook groups that rate and review children’s books are being used as a way to campaign for restricting certain books in school libraries or removing them altogether. It’s the latest development in a debate tearing up the US in recent weeks as schools open for the new year. In October 2021, Matt Krause, a…

The covid-19 pandemic is still not over. And while injected vaccines provide good protection from severe disease, they don’t stop us from catching the virus or spreading it to others. Vaccines that you inhale through the nose or mouth, on the other hand, potentially could. In the last week, regulatory bodies in both India and…

As more business, shopping, and banking is done online and from, well, anywhere, customers increasingly expect high-quality digital-first services that remove the need to go into a physical store or bank. “People were working from home, shopping from home, banking from home, and are more tech and digital savvy than ever,” says Mike Dargan, group…

If you were just looking at his LinkedIn page, you’d certainly think Mai Linzheng was a top-notch engineer. With a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua, China’s top university, and a master’s degree in semiconductor manufacturing from UCLA, Mai began his career at Intel and KBR, a space tech company, before ending up at SpaceX in 2013.…

In today’s digital economy, people buy things differently. Customers expect interactions with companies to be thoughtful, customized, curated, and most importantly, quick. These experiences drive—and are driven by— technology’s constant progress. However, the advance of technology can cause headaches for the businesses delivering these interactions, even with the most talented product and delivery teams. Customization…

A unique form of brain stimulation appears to boost people’s ability to remember new information—by mimicking the way our brains create memories. The “memory prosthesis,” which involves inserting an electrode deep into the brain, also seems to work in people with memory disorders—and is even more effective in people who had poor memory to begin…

Long before Alexander Cohen—or anyone else—had heard of the alpha, delta, or omicron variants of covid-19, he and his graduate school advisor Pamela Bjorkman were doing the research that might soon make it possible for a single vaccine to defeat the rapidly evolving virus—along with any other covid-19 variant that might arise in the future. …

It’s a Thursday afternoon, and I should be at work. Instead, I’m chasing my toddler around the small, disheveled garden behind my doctor’s office, along with around 15 other parents. We’re all here for the same reason—to get our young children vaccinated against polio. “We’re doing about 200 children today,” the nurse tells me. My…

In his first month in office, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order calling for the nation to eliminate carbon pollution from the electricity sector by 2035 and achieve net-zero emissions across the economy by 2050. That move redefined the mandate of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy, the research agency…

After years of requests, Twitter is finally introducing an edit button, giving its users the ability to change their tweets up to 30 minutes after they’ve been sent. But the feature is unlikely to solve any of the biggest problems facing the company—and in some cases, it could worsen them. The feature will initially be…

During the covid-19 pandemic, antibodies played a front-and-center role. We used home tests to look for them, and we took vaccines so our bodies would make more. Less attention was paid to B cells, the immune-system cells that actually make antibodies, churning out as many as 10,000 a second—and which, after an infection, can persist…

For a reporter who covers AI, one of the biggest stories this year has been the rise of large language models. These are AI models that produce text a human might have written—sometimes so convincingly they have tricked people into thinking they are sentient. These models’ power comes from troves of publicly available human-created text…

Ammonia might seem like an unlikely fuel to help cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Best known for its odor, the gas can be dangerous and toxic. But it could also play a key role in decarbonizing global shipping, providing an efficient way to store the energy needed to power large ships on long journeys. The American Bureau…

Roger Nichols remembers sending his first e-mail using wireless networks in the early 1990s, from the back of a bus during his daily commute. That was 30 years ago, on a 1G network—at a data rate about fifteen thousand times slower than today. Now the 6G program manager at Keysight Technologies, Nichols sees the rapid…

As the covid pandemic raged in late 2020, all eyes turned briefly from our troubled planet to our planetary neighbor Venus. Astronomers had made a startling detection in its cloud tops: a gas called phosphine that on Earth is created through biological processes. Speculation ran wild as scientists struggled to understand what they were seeing. …

I Was There When is an oral history project that’s part of the In Machines We Trust podcast. It features stories of how breakthroughs and watershed moments in artificial intelligence and computing happened, as told by the people who witnessed them. In this episode we meet Dave Johnson, the chief data and artificial intelligence officer…

As a globally unprecedented 70-day heat wave continues to hold its grip on southern China, with the highest temperature as much as 113°F (45°C), severe droughts and shortages in the hydropower supply are wreaking havoc on the lives of residents. Electric vehicle owners are one group particularly feeling the heat. Since public charging posts are temporarily closed…

The most viewed post on Facebook last quarter was a 69 joke, featuring reposted footage from an episode of the TV show Family Feud. The post, originally an Instagram Reel, had more than 52 million views on Facebook, according to Meta’s quarterly report on the most widely viewed content on the platform in the US.…

In the coming weeks, a volunteer in Boston, Massachusetts, will be the first to trial a new treatment that could end up creating a second liver in their body. And that’s just the start—in the months that follow, other volunteers will test doses that could leave them with up to six livers in their bodies.…

Mouse embryos recently generated from stem cells in a lab show more brain development than any synthetic mouse embryos created previously. While other researchers had created mouse embryos from stem cells, none had reached the point where the entire brain, including the anterior portion at the front, began to develop, according to the researchers from…

The Inflation Reduction Act, which US President Joe Biden signed into law last week, will steer tens of billions of dollars into projects designed to capture carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released from power plants and industrial facilities. That provision is proving to be one of the more controversial climate items in the sweeping…

In 2019, Amazon committed to achieving “net-zero carbon” across its businesses by 2040. The online retail behemoth’s company-wide emissions have soared by 40% since then, topping 70 million metric tons of carbon dioxide last year. It’s a glaring example of the gulf between corporate pledges and climate progress, but far from the only one. Numerous…

Doctors can’t tell a person’s race from medical images such as x-rays and CT scans. But a team including MIT researchers was able to train a deep-learning model to identify patients as white, Black, or Asian (according to their own description) just by analyzing such images—and they still can’t figure out how the computer does…

The MIT inventors of tiny artificial muscles that flap the wings of robotic insects have now added electroluminescent particles that enable them to emit colored light during flight, similar to fireflies. The artificial muscles, called actuators, are made by alternating ultrathin layers of elastomer and carbon nanotube electrode material and then rolling the stack of…

In April, design major Karyn Nakamura ’23 transformed Simmons Hall into an interactive art project. Her piece, titled “116 x 31” after the number of squares in Simmons’s façade, converted audio into dynamically projected color patterns evocative of vintage video games.

After two years of virtual celebrations, MIT welcomed back more than 9,800 alumni and guests to celebrate the anniversaries of their graduation from the Institute. The festivities included an on-campus graduation celebration featuring a key-note address from Kealoha Wong ’99 for the classes of 2020 and 2021, whose commencement ceremonies were held online. In addition…

The first director of the White House’s National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, Lynne Parker, has just stepped down. The NAIIO launched in January 2021 to coordinate the different federal agencies that work on artificial-intelligence initiatives, with the goal of advancing US development of AI. Its goals are to ensure that the US is a leader…

Messy coils of plastic tubing sprawl across the gallery’s concrete floor. The liquid inside—opaque, white with a yellowish tinge—pulses once, twice, and the eye tracks its progress thanks to the air bubbles cycling through the loops. Could that be … milk? Follow the tubing back to an unassuming rectangular box. If it is milk, a…

Last year the Unicode Consortium—the group responsible for the selection and design of emoji—released a new series that reflected the multiplicity of gender identities. That’s thanks to Paul D. Hunt, who since 2016 has been a key advocate for making emoji more inclusive, less sexist, and a better reflection of the human experience. Fighting to…

The way we make babies could be about to change. Maybe. An embryo forms when sperm meets egg. But what if we could start with other cells—if a blood sample or skin biopsy could be transformed into “artificial” sperm and eggs? What if those were all you needed to make a baby? That’s the promise…

Many of us will struggle to remember things as we get older. A gentle form of brain stimulation might help, according to new research. The approach appears to boost the memories of older people and help them remember lists of words. The technique can be adapted to improve either long-term or short-term memory, and the…

For transgender and nonbinary people like me, a society organized into only “male” and “female” makes us feel excluded. And it’s something that happens frequently, especially online. Take Gmail. There are three gender options when you register. If you choose “other,” you can write in any gender identity. But first you must choose how you’d…

We’ve often thought about muscle as a thing that exists separately from intellect—and perhaps that is even oppositional to it, one taking resources from the other. The truth is, our brains and muscles are in constant conversation with each other, sending electrochemical signals back and forth. In a very tangible way, our lifelong brain health…

For decades, lawmakers, researchers, journalists, and parents have worried that video games are bad for us: that they encourage violent behavior or harm mental health. These fears have spilled into policy decisions affecting millions of people. The World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in 2019, while China restricts…