| Link | https://www.technologyreview.com/ |
| Feed | https://www.technologyreview.com/stories.rss |
| Updated | 2026-05-18 09:49 |
 |
by Allison Arieff on (#6B5PQ)
When the designer and typographer Marcin Wichary stumbled upon a tiny museum just outside Barcelona five years ago, the experience tipped his interest in the history of technology into an obsession with a very particular part of it: the keyboard. “I have never seen so many typewriters under one roof. Not even close,” he shared…
|
 |
by Daliah Singer on (#6B5PP)
Atorrus Rainer, age 41, is standing in the center of a stuffy, fluorescent-lit room. A virtual-reality headset covers his eyes like oversize goggles. Every so often, he extends his arm, using the VR controller to pick up garbage bags, a toothbrush, and toilet paper during a simulated trip to the supermarket. The experience is limited—Rainer…
|
 |
by Mat Honan on (#6B5PN)
Welcome to the Education Issue. I cheated on my editor’s letter. This one that you are reading right now. I’m very sorry. Look, I didn’t set out to do this, but the thing about magazines is that they have very hard deadlines, and if you miss them, you’re left with blank pages. So when I…
|
 |
by Ariel Aberg-Riger on (#6B5PM)
Artist Ariel Aberg-Riger is author of America Redux: Visual Stories From Our Dynamic History.
|
 |
by John Williamson ’64, Tay McNamara on (#6B5XD)
Among the Ojibwe of North America, an older person is referred to as a “great person” and young people are taught not to answer back when chastised by their elders, out of respect for their wisdom. But some of the Chukchi people living in Siberia adhered to a custom based on a very different view…
|
 |
by Laura Bliss on (#6B59C)
If you think of Michelle Wu as the architect of Boston’s new city government, then Tiffany Chu ’10 might be the general contractor. As the chief of staff to Mayor Wu, Chu is in charge of figuring out how visions of urban transformation actually take shape. Take the Thursday afternoon in early February that found…
|
 |
by Michael Blanding on (#6B59A)
Lights, muscles, action Ritu Raman’s engineered muscle cells contract in response to light—and could lead to biologically based robots that adapt to their environment or repair themselves after a crash. Ritu Raman rubs her gloved hands with ethanol and reaches into an incubator the size of a mini-fridge to pull out a tray of petri…
|
 |
by Jennifer Chu on (#6B599)
No two hearts beat alike—and that can make it more complicated to treat heart disease. But a team of MIT engineers and others has developed a way to copy a patient’s unique heart in robotic form to help test different therapies more accurately. The procedure involves first converting medical images of a patient’s heart into…
|
 |
by Anne Trafton on (#6B597)
About 35 million Americans suffer from digestive issues such as constipation, gastroesophageal reflux disease, and gastroparesis (partial stomach paralysis). These so-called motility disorders, in which food fails to move through the system properly, are often diagnosed using endoscopy, nuclear imaging studies, or x-rays. But engineers at MIT and Caltech have come up with a less…
|
 |
by Melissa Heikkilä on (#6B4RJ)
Can you imagine a car company putting a new vehicle on the market without built-in safety features? Unlikely, isn’t it? But what AI companies are doing is a bit like releasing race cars without seatbelts or fully working brakes, and figuring things out as they go. This approach is now getting them in trouble. For…
|
 |
by Rhiannon Williams on (#6B4F8)
Joshua Bergen is a very productive person. His secret is the workspace app Notion. Bergen, a product manager living in Vancouver, uses it to plan trips abroad in meticulous detail, with notes and timelines. He uses it to curate lists of the movies and TV shows he’s watched, and records what he thought of them.…
|
 |
by Antonio Regalado on (#6B4F9)
Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one…
|
 |
by Nika Simovich Fisher on (#6B4FA)
One January afternoon last year, a bouquet of balloons arrived at Karen Rose’s residence in Delray Beach, Florida. She wasn’t expecting a delivery, since it wasn’t her birthday or wedding anniversary, and she thought someone had made a mistake until she noticed the words “AND NOW?” printed on each balloon. “AND NOW?” is the prompt…
|
 |
by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#6B3N1)
Commitments toward sustainability have become a greater priority in recent years as enterprises look to comply with environmental, social, and governance standards. However, many enterprises are finding that meeting sustainability goals not only aligns with compliance but also offers opportunities to drive new value, growth, and revenue streams. “Just as the digital revolution transformed how…
|
 |
by Michael Hathaway, Willoughby Arévalo on (#6B3GJ)
Although most of us think of fungi as “mushrooms,” these spore-producing bodies are just the reproductive organs of mycelium—decentralized, weblike bodies of branching tubes. Though usually microscopic, these structures can be enormous; the largest known example is a honey mushroom (Armillaria) that covers almost 10 square kilometers (3.7 square miles) and has lived for millennia. …
|
 |
by Tate Ryan-Mosley on (#6B3CW)
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Hello and welcome to The Technocrat! Bills ostensibly aimed at making the internet safer for children and teens have been popping up all over the…
|
 |
by Pradeep Niroula on (#6B3B6)
Mathematics has long been presented as a sanctuary from confusion and doubt, a place to go in search of answers. Perhaps part of the mystique comes from the fact that biographies of mathematicians often paint them as otherworldly savants—people who seem to pull nature’s deepest truths from thin air and transcribe them in prose so…
|
 |
by Rhiannon Williams on (#6B131)
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. Artificial intelligence is infiltrating health care. We shouldn’t let it make all the decisions. Would you trust medical advice generated by artificial intelligence? It’s a question raised by yet more headlines this week…
|
 |
by Valentine Benjamin on (#6B0XW)
Nigerians have become accustomed to long lines for gasoline and wild fluctuations in bus fares. Though the country is Africa’s largest producer of oil, its residents don’t benefit from a steady supply. Mustapha Gajibo, 30, is doing what he can to alleviate the problem: his startup, Phoenix Renewables Limited, is launching a homegrown electric-vehicle industry in the northeastern…
|
|
by Jessica Hamzelou on (#6B0XV)
This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Would you trust medical advice generated by artificial intelligence? It’s a question I’ve been thinking over this week, in view of yet more headlines proclaiming that AI technologies can diagnose a range…
|
 |
by Rhiannon Williams on (#6AZV0)
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 your iPhone 17 might come with a recycled battery Lithium-ion batteries power most of our personal electronics today. Mining the metals that make up those batteries can mean a lot of pollution,…
|
|
by Casey Crownhart on (#6AZQW)
My phone is basically an extension of my arm at this point. To be honest, I have some mixed feelings about that, and not just because I worry about what being online 24/7 is doing to my brain cells. As you might know, lithium-ion batteries power most of our personal electronics today. Mining the metals…
|
 |
by Joy Lisi Rankin on (#6AZPH)
A decade ago, tech powerhouses the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon helped boost the nonprofit Code.org, a learn-to-code program with a vision: “That every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science as part of their core K–12 education.” It was followed by a wave of nonprofits and for-profits alike dedicated…
|
 |
by Tanya Basu on (#6AZ3G)
Snap is planning to launch augmented-reality mirrors that allow shoppers in stores to instantly see how clothes look on them without physically trying them on, the company announced today. The mirrors are going to appear in some US Nike stores later this year, and in the Men’s Wearhouse in Paramus, New Jersey. The mirrors are…
|
 |
by Rhiannon Williams on (#6AYMS)
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. OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it OpenAI has just over a week to comply with European data protection laws following a temporary ban in Italy, and a slew of…
|
|
by Melissa Heikkilä on (#6AYHA)
OpenAI has just over a week to comply with European data protection laws following a temporary ban in Italy and a slew of investigations in other EU countries. If it fails, it could face hefty fines, be forced to delete data, or even be banned. But experts have told MIT Technology Review that it will…
|
 |
by Holly Korbey on (#6AYFR)
Linus Merryman spends about an hour a day on his laptop at his elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, mostly working on foundational reading skills like phonics and spelling. He opens the reading app Lexia with ease, clicking straight through to lessons chosen specifically to address his reading needs. This week Linus, who’s in second grade,…
|
 |
by Rhiannon Williams on (#6AXEB)
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 quest to build wildfire-resistant homes With each devastating wildfire in the US West, officials consider new methods or regulations that might save homes or lives the next time. In the parts of…
|
|
by Susie Cagle on (#6AX9D)
The first sparks that ignited in the Montecito hills above Santa Barbara, California, on November 13, 2008, were stoked by ferocious sundowner winds gusting at up to 85 miles per hour, pushing the flames down into the densely populated canyon. Troy Harris, then the director of institutional resilience at Westmont College in Montecito, rushed from…
|
 |
by Melissa Heikkilä on (#6AX9E)
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. If regulators don’t act now, the generative AI boom will concentrate Big Tech’s power even further. That’s the central argument of a new report from research institute AI Now. And it makes sense. To…
|
 |
by Rhiannon Williams on (#6AW7J)
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. This technology could alter the entire planet. These groups want every nation to have a say. Picture two theoretical futures: one in which nations counteract climate change by reflecting sunlight back into space,…
|
|
by James Temple on (#6AW5T)
Picture two theoretical futures: one in which nations counteract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere, and another where the world continues heating up. There are big differences between the two, but a lot of smaller, more subtle changes too. Take malaria, for example—the sixth-largest killer in low-income countries. By 2070, the overall…
|
 |
by Tate Ryan-Mosley on (#6AW48)
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. For years, the US has struggled to process all the people who want to come and live here. It’s a slow-rumbling problem that has become…
|
 |
by Arian Khameneh on (#6AW2N)
In a Copenhagen suburb, a fifth-grade classroom is having its weekly cake-eating session, a common tradition in Danish public schools. While the children are eating chocolate cake, the teacher pulls up an infographic on a whiteboard: a bar chart generated by a digital platform that collects data on how they’ve been feeling. Organized to display…
|
 |
by Rhiannon Williams on (#6ASV1)
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. Bacteria can be engineered to fight cancer in mice. Human trials are coming. The news: There are trillions of microbes living in and on our bodies—and we might be able to modify them…
|
 |
by Jessica Hamzelou on (#6ASQ7)
This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. It’s spring here in the Northern Hemisphere. There are daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths in full bloom in parks and window boxes where I live in London. I even saw some lambs on…
|
 |
by Rohan Mehta on (#6ASNY)
The release of ChatGPT has sent shock waves through the halls of higher education. Universities have rushed to release guidelines on how it can be used in the classroom. Professors have taken to social media to share a spectrum of AI policies. And students—whether or not they’ll admit it—have cautiously experimented with the idea of allowing…
|
|
by Jessica Hamzelou on (#6AS30)
There are trillions of microbes living in and on our bodies—and we might be able to modify them to help us treat diseases. Scientists have altered the genomes of some of these bacteria that live on skin, essentially engineering microbes that can prevent or treat cancer. It appears to work in mice, and human trials…
|
 |
by Rhiannon Williams on (#6ARKH)
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. EVs just got a big boost. We’re going to need a lot more chargers. The US government is pushing for many more electric vehicles to hit the roads in the next few years.…
|