MIT Technology Review

A record-breaking total of more than 5,000 alumni and friends attended this year’s MIT Tech Reunions, held online June 4–6. There were special events for reunion-year classes, and the entire MIT community was invited to watch the online Tech Night at Pops, learn from faculty during Technology Day, and take virtual campus tours. Symphony Hall…

On February 11, I got a call from MIT’s executive director of Institute events and protocol, Gayle Gallagher. President Reif had just announced that MIT would again be conducting commencement online—and to open the ceremony, we needed a compelling piece of music that would evoke renewal as we began to emerge from the pandemic. After…

The Boston genetic engineering company Ginkgo Bioworks and its CEO, Jason Kelly, have been spectacularly successful selling a story: that synthetic biology will transform the manufacture of physical products. What computers did for information, Kelly says, biology will do for the physical world. Instead of making a chemical from petroleum, why not have Ginkgo’s multi-floor…

Despite their terrible human costs—or perhaps because of them—wars are often times of technological innovation. The Napoleonic Wars brought us canned goods; the American Civil War drove the development of submarines. The Second World War, meanwhile, began with biplanes, cavalry charges, and horse-drawn wagons but ended with radar, V2 rockets, jet fighters, and atomic bombs.…

In the coming weeks, Congress may pass one of the most important climate policies in US history. The $3.5 trillion budget plan includes a provision known as the Clean Electricity Payment Program, which would use payments and penalties to encourage utilities to increase the share of electricity they sell from carbon-free sources each year. If…

Thanks mainly to the rise of satellite megaconstellation projects like OneWeb and SpaceX’s Starlink, the American Astronomical Society suggests, it’s possible we may see more than 100,000 satellites orbiting Earth by 2030—a number that would simply overwhelm our ability to track them all. Experts have repeatedly called for a better framework for managing space traffic and preventing…

Over the past several years, our world has been confronted with a range of unprecedented and, at times, deadly challenges—from the covid-19 pandemic to severe weather conditions, and a concurrent rise of societal issues including aging population, urban congestion, and unequal access to health care. But as the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and its…

Afghanistan’s banking system is in a state of collapse, and people throughout the country are running out of money. And this cash crisis—partly due to the international community’s efforts to starve the Taliban of resources—is having an outsized effect on everyday Afghan citizens, leaving many without access to important services as the UN warns of…

The world’s best astronomical observatories are mainly located in the Western Hemisphere, in high-altitude places like the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, La Palma in the Canary Islands, and the Cerro Paranal summit in the Atacama Desert in Chile. But there are pristine locations with clear views of the sky in the East, too.…

Millions of solar panels have been installed in the last two decades—and since they typically last between 25 and 30 years, many will soon be ready for retirement and probably headed to a landfill. But new efforts to recycle these panels could reduce both the amount of waste and the new material that needs to…

The world has already banded together to enact an international treaty that prevented significant global warming this century—even though that wasn’t the driving goal. In 1987, dozens of nations adopted the Montreal Protocol, agreeing to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and other chemicals used in refrigerants, solvents, and other industrial products that were breaking…

The sudden collapse of Afghanistan’s government has led to a frantic attempt to accelerate online relief and evacuation efforts. These attempts, organized largely via Google Forms, WhatsApp and private social media groups, are trying to fill the void left by the US government’s failure to protect vulnerable Afghans. It could be the only lifeline for many…

When Apple announced new technology that will check its US iCloud service for known child sexual abuse material, it was met with fierce criticism over worries that the feature could be abused for broad government surveillance. Faced with public resistance, Apple insisted that its technology can be held accountable. “Security researchers are constantly able to…

With the rise of ransomware attacks and cybercrime in the headlines week after week, fighting cybercriminals takes a multi-faceted approach that’s not just the realm of the CTO, but of every business leader. There is no time to waste in ensuring that your organization’s cyber-resiliency strategy is on the right path. Join us at CyberSecure, MIT Technology Review’s…

Like millions of Americans, Ryan Steward was afraid of getting the covid-19 vaccine. “I’m generally distrusting of the government,” he says. “I’m not the foil-hat-wearing type, but I’m the type of fellow that wants to verify facts. The vaccine came out quickly after the pandemic had started, too, and there was a lot of new…

Artificial intelligence holds an enormous promise, but to be effective, it must learn from massive sets of data—and the more diverse the better. By learning patterns, AI tools can uncover insights and help decision-making not just in technology, but also pharmaceuticals, medicine, manufacturing, and more. However, data can’t always be shared—whether it’s personally identifiable, holds…

With its massive rings stretching out 175,000 miles in diameter, Saturn is a one-of-a-kind planet in the solar system. Turns out its insides are pretty unique as well. A new study published in Nature Astronomy on Monday suggests the sixth planet from the sun has a “fuzzy” core that jiggles around. It’s quite a surprising find. “The…

When Lise was a young teenager in Georgia, her classmates bullied her relentlessly. She had moved with her family from Haiti a few years earlier, and she didn’t fit in with the other students. They teased her about her accent, claimed she “smelled weird,” and criticized the food she ate. But most often they would…

If you’ve been worried by recent news stories about a strain of covid called “delta plus,” it may freak you out to hear that scientists just expanded the delta family from four variants to 13. Please take a deep breath. Scientists would really like you to understand that there’s no evidence delta has learned any…

In 2016, hoping to spur advancements in facial recognition, Microsoft released the largest face database in the world. Called MS-Celeb-1M, it contained 10 million images of 100,000 celebrities’ faces. “Celebrity” was loosely defined, though. Three years later, researchers Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace scoured the data set and found many ordinary individuals, like journalists, artists,…

The maps for US congressional and state legislative races often resemble electoral bestiaries, with bizarrely shaped districts emerging from wonky hybrids of counties, precincts, and census blocks. It’s the drawing of these maps, more than anything—more than voter suppression laws, more than voter fraud—that determines how votes translate into who gets elected. “You can take…

In recent weeks, every day that the weather permitted, a helicopter contracted by KoBold Metals flew over a remote part of northern Quebec carrying some unusual cargo. A 115-foot-wide copper coil dangled from the belly of the craft, sending electromagnetic waves into the earth and creating currents in rocks deep underground. Any good electrical conductors…

When hackers broke into computers across Israel’s government and tech companies in 2019 and 2020, investigators looked for clues to find out who was responsible. The first evidence pointed directly at Iran, Israel’s most contentious geopolitical rival. The hackers deployed tools normally associated with Iranians, for example, and wrote in the Farsi language. But after…

Chameleons have long been a symbol of adaptation because of their ability to adjust their iridophores—a special layer of cells under the skin—to blend in with their surroundings. In a new study published today in Nature Communications, researchers from South Korea have created a robot chameleon capable of imitating its biological counterpart, paving the way…

The UN’s long-awaited climate report, released on Monday, offered a stark reminder that removing massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be essential to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming. But it also underscored that the necessary technologies barely exist—and will be tremendously difficult to deploy. Global temperatures will continue to rise…

Covid cases in the US have doubled over the past two weeks, and scientists are now racing to understand the delta variant, which appears to account for the vast majority of new infections. Disturbingly, delta is more contagious than other variants and has also been causing some symptomatic “breakthrough” cases in vaccinated people. While vaccines…

Apple has boasted a few iconic ads during the company’s 45-year history, from the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad for Macs to the company’s combative 2019 ad campaign promising that “what happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” On Thursday, Apple announced new technologies to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) right on iPhones—and…

In the months before the first reports of covid-19 would emerge, a new kind of robot headed to work. Built on years of breakthroughs in deep learning, it could pick up all kinds of objects with remarkable accuracy, making it a shoo-in for jobs like sorting products into packages at warehouses. Previous commercial robots had…

Any effective plan to tackle climate change hinges on a basic technology: long wires strung across tall towers. The US needs to add hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines in the coming decades to weave together fragmented regional power systems into an interconnected grid capable of supporting a massive influx of renewables. A…

The World Health Organization has called for a halt to any booster shots until the end of September so that more people in low-income countries can get vaccinated first. The agency’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that more than 4 billion vaccine doses have now been administered globally, but 80% of those have gone to…

Even as climate change and urbanization make floods more frequent and their consequences more severe, a higher proportion of people are living in areas that experience them. In a new study published today in Nature, researchers used satellite images to map over 900 flood events that occurred between 2000 and 2018, affecting between 255 million…

Through job-matching platforms and AI-powered games and interviews, companies are relying more and more on artificial intelligence to streamline the hiring process. But some job seekers feel frustrated and misunderstood by these technologies. Malika Devaux is a student at the HOPE Program, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that provides job training. Devaux is looking for a job,…

New York City will be the first city in the US to require proof of vaccination to enter a variety of indoor places, the city’s mayor announced yesterday. Mayor Bill de Blasio told a press conference that starting September 13, the city will start requiring the proof at indoor venues like bars, restaurants, and gyms. The…

When it comes to hiring, it’s increasingly becoming an AI’s world—we’re just working in it. In this, the final episode of Season 2 of our AI podcast “In Machines We Trust” and the conclusion of our series on AI and hiring, we take a look at how AI-based systems are increasingly playing gatekeeper in the…

In the middle of the night on May 24, TikTok changed its voice. The ubiquitous woman’s voice that could read your video’s text out loud in a slightly stilted, robotic cadence was suddenly replaced by one with an almost smirky, upbeat tone. Many users started calling the new one the “Uncanny Valley Girl” to express…

Neuroscientists have released the most detailed 3D map of the mammalian brain ever made, created from an animal whose brain architecture is very similar to our own—the mouse. The map and underlying data set, which are now freely available to the public, depict more than 200,000 neurons and half a billion neural connections contained inside…

Update 4/4/21: Following a problem with the valves in the propulsion system of Starliner, Boeing and NASA have postponed the launch of the spacecraft indefinitely. A new date has yet to be determined. December 20, 2019, was supposed to be a landmark moment for the US space program and the US space industry, Boeing in…

They were gold miners in French Guiana, revelers in Cape Cod, and Indian health-care workers. Even though they inhabit worlds apart, they ended up having two things in common. All were vaccinated against covid-19. And they all became part of infection clusters. In recent weeks, cases like these are proving that covid-19 transmission chains and…

DeepMind has developed a vast candy-colored virtual playground that teaches AIs general skills by endlessly changing the tasks it sets them. Instead of developing just the skills needed to solve a particular task, the AIs learn to experiment and explore, picking up skills they then use to succeed in tasks they’ve never seen before. It…

When covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, hospitals were plunged into a health crisis that was still badly understood. “Doctors really didn’t have a clue how to manage these patients,” says Laure Wynants, an epidemiologist at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who studies predictive tools. But there was data coming out of China, which had…

Free doughnuts. Tickets to see the Los Angeles Lakers. Video visits with loved ones for people in prison. The chance to win a million-dollar lottery. States, cities, and private companies are dangling anything they can think of to convince Americans to get a covid-19 vaccine. The idea is to nudge people who are open to…

The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in September 2020, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from an abridged version of her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook. Before she was fired, Zhang was officially employed as a low-level data scientist at the company. But she had become consumed by a task she deemed…

Israeli government officials visited the offices of the hacking company NSO Group on Wednesday to investigate allegations that the firm’s spyware has been used to target activists, politicians, business executives, and journalists, the country’s defense ministry said in a statement today. An investigation published last week by 17 global media organizations claims that phone numbers…

When gas falls into a black hole, it releases an enormous amount of energy and spews electromagnetic radiation in all directions, making these objects some of the brightest in the known universe. But scientists have only ever been able to see light and other radiation from a supermassive black hole when it’s shining directly toward our…

On Tuesday, July 27, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that vaccinated people wear masks in public indoor spaces in communities where covid cases are spiking. Along with the new policy, the CDC recommends that children in grades K–12 attend school in person while continuing to wear masks inside. Why is the CDC making this switch? The announcement comes on the heels of rising infections…

In March, when covid cases began spiking around India, Bani Jolly went hunting for answers in the virus’s genetic code. Researchers in the UK had just set the scientific world ablaze with news that a covid variant called B.1.1.7—soon to be referred to as alpha—was to blame for skyrocketing case counts there. Jolly, a third-year…

In May, the longtime coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric found himself at the center of the swirling debate over gain-of-function research, in which scientists engineer new properties into existing viruses. And during a congressional hearing, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky implied that the National Institutes of Health had been funding such research at both the Wuhan…

NASA’s InSight robotic lander has just given us our first look deep inside a planet other than Earth. More than two years after its launch, seismic data that InSight collected has given researchers hints into how Mars was formed, how it has evolved over 4.6 billion years, and how it differs from Earth. A set of three new studies, published in Science this week, suggests that Mars has a…

Oscar Maung-Haley, 24, was working a part-time job in a bar in Manchester, England, when his phone pinged. It was the UK’s NHS Test and Trace app letting him know he’d potentially been exposed to covid-19 and needed to self-isolate. The news immediately caused problems. “It was a mad dash around the venue to show…