MIT Technology Review

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet's resources For nearly as long as we've extracted materials from our planet, we've been trying to predict how long they will be...

Leaving aside meteorites that strike Earth's surface and spacecraft that get flung out of its orbit, the quantity of materials available on this planet isn't really changing all that much. That simple fact of our finite resources becomes clearer and more daunting as the pace of technological change advances and our society requires an ever...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How to fine-tune AI for prosperity Predictions abound on how the growing list of generative AI models will transform the way we work and organize our lives, providing instant advice on everything from...

When it comes to climate breakdown and the extinction crisis, the question I get most often is: How can we have hope? People ask me this in a range of contexts-in Q&A sessions, in emails, and on podcasts and radio shows, whether I'm doing outreach for my novels, like A Children's Bible or Dinosaurs, or...

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first,sign up here. If you follow drone news closely-and you're forgiven if you don't-you may have noticed over the last few months that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been quite busy. For decades, the agency had been...

When Chad Syverson loads the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website these days looking for the latest data on productivity, he does so with a sense of optimism that he hasn't felt in ages. The numbers for the last year or so have been generally strong for various financial and business reasons, rebounding from the...

Whether pursuing digital transformation, exploring the potential of AI, or simply looking to simplify and optimize existing IT infrastructure, today's organizations must do this in the context of increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. These complicated architectures are here to stay-2023 research by Enterprise Strategy Group, for example, found that 87% of organizations expect their applications to...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands...

There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands grabbing at the cool grass. It was taken in 2013, when she was almost one, on an aging Samsung digital camera. I originally stored it on a laptop before transferring it to a chunky...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. What the future holds for those born today Happy birthday, baby. You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your...

Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to paranormal dark cabaret afternoon" and synth space," and streaming has become the default. Radio DJs have been replaced by artificial intelligence, and the ritual of discovering something new is neatly...

MIT Technology Review's What's Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of themhere. Drones have been a mainstay technology among militaries, hobbyists, and first responders alike for more than a decade, and in that time the range available has skyrocketed....

A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death. His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain. Jean Hebert, a new hire with the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is expected to lead a major new initiative around functional...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week I came across research that suggests aging hits us in waves. You might feel like you're on a slow, gradual decline, but, at the molecular level,...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. DHS plans to collect biometric data from migrant children down to the infant" The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to collect and analyze photos of the faces of migrant children at...

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next. You can read more from the series here. On August 8, at 16:42 local time, a magnitude-7.1 earthquake shook southern Japan. The temblor, originating off the shores of mainland island of Kysh, was felt...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Friday marks two years since the US signed the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law. Now, I'm not usually one to track legislation birthdays. But this particular law is the exception,...

Happy birthday, baby. You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your parents listen in on your tiny heartbeat, track your gestation on an app, and post your sonogram on social media. Well before you were born, you were known to the...

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking into ways it might use facial recognition technology to track the identities of migrant children, down to the infant," as they age, according to John Boyd, assistant director of the department's Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), where a key part of his role is to...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. A new public database lists all the ways AI could go wrong What's new: Adopting AI can be fraught with danger. Systems could be biased, or parrot falsehoods, or even become addictive. And...

Adopting AI can be fraught with danger. Systems could be biased, or parrot falsehoods, or even become addictive. And that's before you consider the possibility AI could be used to create new biological or chemical weapons, or even one day somehow spin out of our control. To manage these potential risks, we first need to...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How the auto industry could steer the world toward green steel Steel scaffolds our world, undergirding buildings and machines. It also presents a major challenge for climate change, as steel production is currently...

Steel scaffolds our world, undergirding buildings and machines. It also presents a major challenge for climate change, since steel production largely relies on polluting fossil fuels. The automotive industry could be a key player in turning things around. Steel production is currently responsible for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. There's a growing array...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Here's how people are actually using AI When the generative AI boom started with ChatGPT in late 2022, we were sold a vision of superintelligent AI tools that know everything, can replace the...

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. When the generative AI boom started with ChatGPT in late 2022, we were sold a vision of superintelligent AI tools that know everything, can replace the boring bits of work, and supercharge productivity and...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis What's new: Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play table tennis at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has...

Do you fancy your chances of beating a robot at a game of table tennis? Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play the game at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has announced. It claims it's the first time a robot has been taught to play a sport with humans at a...

More people are traveling to space, but the International Space Station can only hold 11 people at a time. Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit space architecture lab based in Cambridge, MA, has an approach that may help: a habitat that can be launched in compact stacks of flat tiles and self-assemble in orbit. Building large space...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. What does a thought look like? We can think about thoughts resulting from shared signals between some of the billions of neurons in our brains. Various chemicals are...

For many years now, cloud solutions have helped organizations streamline their operations, increase their scalability, and reduce costs. Yet, enterprise cloud investment has been fragmented, often lacking a coherent organization-wide approach. In fact, it's not uncommon for various teams across an organization to have spun up their own cloud projects, adopting a wide variety of...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Your AC habits aren't unique. Here's why that's a problem. -Casey Crownhart When I get home in the evening on a sweltering summer day, the first thing I do is crank up my...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How covid conspiracies led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that party drugs" were an important factor in AIDS." His...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. There's a decent chance you've heard of hydrogen-powered vehicles but never seen one. Over 18,000 are in the US, almost exclusively in California. On the outside they look just like traditional vehicles,...

Several million people were listening in February when Joe Rogan falsely declared that party drugs" were an important factor in AIDS." His guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, the former evolutionary biology professor turned contrarian podcaster Bret Weinstein, agreed with him: The evidence" that AIDS is not caused by HIV is, he said, surprisingly compelling."...

Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the godfathers" of modern AI, is throwing his weight behind a project funded by the UK government to embed safety mechanisms into AI systems. The project, called Safeguarded AI, aims to build an AI system that can check whether other AI systems deployed in...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Your future air conditioner might act like a battery Cooling represents 20% of global electricity demand in buildings, a share that's expected to rise as the planet warms and more of the world...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It's the Taylor Swifts of the world that are going to save us. In January,nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift went viralon X, which caused public outrage. Nonconsensual explicit deepfakes are one...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. We need to prepare for addictive intelligence' -By Robert Mahari, a joint JD-PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab and Harvard Law School whose work focuses on computational law, and Pat Pataranutaporn, a...

AI concerns overemphasize harms arising from subversion rather than seduction. Worries about AI often imagine doomsday scenarios where systems escape human control or even understanding. Short of those nightmares, there are nearer-term harms we should take seriously: that AI could jeopardize public discourse through misinformation; cement biases in loan decisions, judging or hiring; or disrupt...

If you are in China and looking to ride a shared bike in the city, you might find something on the bike that looks a little different: a water-bottle-size hydrogen tank. At least a dozen cities in China now have some kind of hydrogen-powered shared bikes for their residents. They offer an easier ride than...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. A personalized AI tool might help some reach end-of-life decisions-but it won't suit everyone -Jessica Hamzelou This week, I've been working on a piece about an AI-based tool that could help guide end-of-life...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. End of life decisions are difficult and distressing. Could AI help? End-of-life decisions can be extremely upsetting for surrogates-the people who have to make those calls on behalf of another person. Friends or...

A few months ago, a woman in her mid-50s-let's call her Sophie-experienced a hemorrhagic stroke. Her brain started to bleed. She underwent brain surgery, but her heart stopped beating. Sophie's ordeal left her with significant brain damage. She was unresponsive; she couldn't squeeze her fingers or open her eyes when asked, and she didn't flinch...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Talking about money can be difficult, but it's a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to climate tech. I've been thinking more about the financial piece of climate innovation since...

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing, and computer vision has sparked lofty predictions: AI will revolutionize business operations, transform the nature of knowledge work, and boost companies' bottom lines and the larger global economy by trillions of dollars. Executives and technology leaders are eager to see these promises realized, and many...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The US physics community is not done working on trust -Frances Houle, Kate Kirby, Laura Greene & Michael Marder In April 2024, Nature released detailed information about investigations into claims made by Ranga...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Back in 2018, it was my colleague Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine, who broke the story that a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui had used CRISPR to edit the genes of...

In April 2024, Nature released detailed information about investigations into claims made by Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, in two high-profile papers the journal had published about the discovery of room-temperature superconductivity. Those two papers, which showed evidence of fabricated data, were eventually retracted, along with other papers from the Dias...

OpenAI is rolling out an advanced AI chatbot that you can talk to. It's available today-at least for some. The new chatbot represents OpenAI's push into a new generation of AI-powered voice assistants in the vein of Siri and Alexa, but with far more capabilities to enable more natural, fluent conversations. It is a step...

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. How the US and its allies can rebuild economic security -Edlyn V. Levine is CEO and co-founder of a stealth-mode technology start up and an affiliate at MIT Sloan School of...