MIT Technology Review

Back in December 2020, DeepMind took the world of biology by surprise when it solved a 50-year grand challenge with AlphaFold, an AI tool that predicts the structure of proteins. Last week the London-based company published full details of that tool and released its source code. Now the firm has announced that it has used its…

Mice: check. Lizards: check. Squid: check. Marsupials … check. CRISPR has been used to modify the genes of tomatoes, humans, and just about everything in between. Because of their unique reproductive biology and their relative rarity in laboratory settings, though, marsupials had eluded the CRISPR rush—until now. A team of researchers at Japan’s RIKEN Institute,…

Your ability to land your next job could depend on how well you play one of the AI-powered games that companies like AstraZeneca and Postmates are increasingly using in the hiring process. Some companies that create these games, like Pymetrics and Arctic Shores, claim that they limit bias in hiring. But AI hiring games can…

The Facebook engineer was itching to know why his date hadn’t responded to his messages. Perhaps there was a simple explanation—maybe she was sick or on vacation. So at 10 p.m. one night in the company’s Menlo Park headquarters, he brought up her Facebook profile on the company’s internal systems and began looking at her…

Increasingly, job seekers need to pass a series of tests in the form of artificial-intelligence games just to be seen by a hiring manager. In this third of a four-part miniseries on AI and hiring, we speak to someone who helped create these tests, and we ask who might get left behind in the process…

This time, there was a blastoff. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and three other civilians watched the sky turn from blue to black this morning as the company’s reusable rocket and capsule system New Shepard passed the Kármán line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. Around 9:25 a.m. US Eastern time, Bezos and his fellow passengers landed…

On June 29, former South African president Jacob Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in prison for corruption during his presidency. Zuma—the first ethnic Zulu to hold the country’s highest office—has a loyal following. He also has many detractors, who blame his administration’s corruption for a stagnant economy and weakened democracy. Zuma didn’t turn himself…

US cities are working to shore up their flood defenses in the face of climate change, building and upgrading pumps, storm drains, and other infrastructure. In many cases, their existing systems are aging and built for the climate of the past. And even upgrades can do only so much to mitigate the intense flooding that’s…

Over the weekend, a consortium of international news outlets published their findings from an investigation into the use of Pegasus, the marquee spyware product of the secretive billion-dollar Israeli surveillance company NSO Group. The reports from the Guardian, the Washington Post, and 15 other media organizations are based on a leak of tens of thousands…

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, a 25-year-old amateur astronomer, spied a small, dim object in the night sky. He’d been working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, for about a year when he used a blink comparator—a special kind of microscope that can examine and compare images—to glimpse what was for a time considered to be the ninth planet…

MIT Technology Review announced today that veteran tech editor Mat Honan has been hired as its new editor in chief. Honan joins from BuzzFeed News, where he and his teams have published impactful, hard-hitting journalism that asks important questions, captures attention, and has won multiple awards, including a 2021 Pulitzer Prize. In his new role, Honan will provide leadership, creative vision, and editorial direction for the entire MIT Technology Review portfolio, including the website, podcasts, newsletters, and print magazine, as well as new platforms and formats…

In an early May blog post, Google chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai shared the company’s vision for its workplace future—over a year after the covid-19 pandemic forced offices around the world to shutter almost overnight and employees suddenly shifted to working remotely using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and a host of other virtual collaboration tools.…

England is about to take a huge gamble. On Monday, July 19, the country is ditching all of its remaining pandemic-related restrictions. People will be able to go to nightclubs, or gather in groups as large as they like. They will not be legally compelled to wear masks at all, and can stop social distancing.…

The Greek mathematician Euclid may very well have proved, circa 300 BCE, that there are infinitely many prime numbers. But it was the British mathematician Christian Lawson-Perfect who, more recently, devised the computer game “Is this prime?” Launched five years ago, the game surpassed three million tries on July 16—or, more to the point, it…

Orgies are back. Or at least that’s what advertisers want you to believe. One commercial for chewing gum—whose sales tanked during 2020 because who cares what your breath smells like when you’re wearing a mask—depicts the end of the pandemic as a raucous free-for-all with people embracing in the streets and making out in parks. The reality is…

It’s nighttime on the streets of Ibaraki prefecture in Japan when the Olympic torch comes through. A viral video shows the torch bearer’s slow jog past spectators lining the road. Then, as the flame passes, a woman in the crowd shoots a water gun. “Extinguish the Olympic flame! Oppose the Tokyo Olympics!” she shouts. Security…

Is it time to start thinking about booster shots? Pfizer seems to think so. In a private meeting with top US scientists and regulators on July 12, the firm’s representatives argued that the US should move to authorize a third shot. Last week, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced that they had observed waning…

The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech’s campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk’s new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people’s brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that…

A few lonely academics have been warning for years that solar power faces a fundamental challenge that could halt the industry’s breakneck growth. Simply put: the more solar you add to the grid, the less valuable it becomes. The problem is that solar panels generate lots of electricity in the middle of sunny days, frequently…

One of the most prolific ransomware gangs in the world suddenly disappeared from the internet on Tuesday morning. The unexplained exodus comes just one day before senior officials from the White House and Russia are scheduled to meet to discuss the global ransomware crisis. The ransomware crew known as REvil has existed for years in…

Debates about technology and progress are often framed in terms of “optimism” vs. “pessimism.” For instance, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Johan Norberg, Max Roser, and the late Hans Rosling have been called the “New Optimists” for their focus on the economic, scientific, and social progress of the last two centuries. Their opponents, such as David…

Ziggi Tyler is part of TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, a private platform where brands can connect with the app’s top creators. And last week, he noticed something pretty disturbing about how the creator bios there were being automatically moderated. When he tried to enter certain phrases in his bio, some of them—“Black lives matter,” “supporting black…

When it comes to covid, kids have largely been spared. They can get infected and spread the virus, but they have little risk of becoming seriously ill or dying. Yet, just like adults, they can have symptoms that persist well beyond the initial infection. This condition, officially known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC),…

Advanced cybersecurity capabilities are essential to safeguard software, systems, and data in a new era of cloud, the internet of things, and other smart technologies. In the real estate industry, for example, companies are concerned about the potential for hijacked elevators, as well as compromised building management and heating and cooling systems. According to Greg…

The timing could have been better. Yesterday, July 11, British entrepreneur and billionaire Richard Branson shot to the edge of space in a vehicle made by his own company, Virgin Galactic – at a time when much of the world is still battling a deadly pandemic. Yet while receiving a fair amount of criticism, Branson’s flight…

Climate change is making extreme heat more common and more severe, as we’ve seen in the heat waves that have swept the western US for the past two weeks. Some climate models predict that swaths of the globe will become inhospitable to humans in the next century. But what makes a place unlivable isn’t as…

Whether you call them semis, tractor-trailers, or 18-wheelers, heavy-duty trucks keep the economy (literally) moving. And at least some of them might be ready to go electric. These workhorses have an outsize climate impact. Globally, heavy-duty vehicles, including trucks and buses, make up about 10% of all motor vehicles but produce around half of their…

On April 21, Ashley Delaney brought his father-in-law to the Goa Medical College and Hospital, the largest public hospital in the small southwestern Indian state. The hospital was in chaos and the wards were packed, with all 708 covid beds occupied—so 69-year-old Joseph Paul Alvares, a cancer survivor, had to lie on a gurney for…

The computer scientist Marijn Heule is always on the lookout for a good mathematical challenge. An associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Heule has an impressive reputation for solving intractable math problems with computational tools. His 2016 result with the “Boolean Pythagorean triples problem” was an enormous headline-grabbing proof: “Two hundred terabyte maths proof is…

Shale gas and oil extraction, also known as fracking, is often credited by conservatives with creating hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of US manufacturing jobs. As the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas,” Pennsylvania has been the poster child for the fracking industry. But far fewer jobs were created there and in neighboring states like…

The big data era has created valuable resources for public interest outcomes, like health care. In the last 18 months, the speed with which scientists were able to respond to the covid-19 pandemic—faster than any other disease in history—demonstrated the benefits of gathering, sharing, and extracting value from data for a wider good. Access to…

A year ago, vaccines to tackle the covid pandemic seemed like a far-off idea. Today, though, doses have been delivered to almost one-quarter of the world’s people—and some are being asked to prove they’re among them, leading to the rise of so-called vaccine passports. The details of these credentials vary from place to place, but…

Not all astronauts start off as test pilots. I spoke with David Saint-Jacques, a Canadian astronaut with a medical degree who’s spent 203 days aboard the ISS, and learned some of the career twists and turns one can take on the way into orbit. Most people would think being an engineer and astrophysicist is enough.…

Climate change is warping geological time, compressing the time scales of natural processes. In photographs taken around the world, Ian van Coller has documented these shifts, reflected in rocks, sediment, and the shrinking of glaciers. Van Coller collaborates with scientists who annotate his images, pointing out key geological features. He also uses historical photos to…

In 2017, MIT Technology Review honored Tracy Chou as one of our 35 Innovators Under 35. At the time, Chou was working to expose Silicon Valley’s diversity issues. As an engineer at Pinterest, she’d published a widely circulated blog post calling for tech companies to share data on how many women worked on their engineering…

Though we’ve called it the “Change” issue, this edition of the magazine is really about two things: reflection and empowerment. For far too many of us, the pandemic has been a study in feeling powerless, and we’ve had little time to reflect as we focus on keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe, employed, and…

In late 2007, less than 10 years into the company’s existence, Google came out swinging on the clean energy front. To a fanfare of plaudits up and down Silicon Valley and well beyond, it declared “RE<C” as its goal: make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The company invested tens of millions of dollars into R&D…

One day in late March, People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, shared a pair of photos on Chinese social media. The first, in black and white, was of the signing of the Boxer Protocol, a 1901 treaty between the Qing empire, which ruled China at the time, and 11 foreign nations. Troops from…

The workers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, wanted a union. The center opened in March of last year, just as stay-at-home orders for covid-19 went into effect. While much of the world economy tanked, some sectors thrived, including tech—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would add some $75 billion to his own net worth…

For Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet, covid-19 was an economic blessing. Even as the pandemic sent the global economy into a deep recession and cratered most companies’ profits, these companies—often referred to as the “Big Four” of technology—not only survived but thrived. Collectively, they now have annual revenue of well over a trillion dollars, and…

A year into the covid-19 pandemic, Apple commemorated the growing array of devices featuring its custom M1 chip with great fanfare, including a “Mission Implausible” ad on TV featuring a young man running across the rooftops of its “spaceship” campus in Cupertino and infiltrating the facility to “steal” the breakthrough microprocessor from a MacBook and…

As an MIT senior, Jerome “Jerre” Spurr had paid little attention to the articles in the Boston Globe about the new reservoir planned for Western Massachusetts. But in 1927, just a month before his graduation, he found himself in a face-to-face interview with Frank Winsor, the chief engineer of the massive construction project. Winsor had…

It‘s Ursula’s third time in the functional MRI machine. Heather Kosakowski, a PhD student in cognitive neuroscience, is hoping to get just two precious minutes of data from her session. Even though Ursula has been booked to have her brain scanned for two hours, it’s far from a sure thing. Her first two sessions, also…

Admissions applications in this pandemic year jumped 66% after MIT temporarily lifted the requirement to submit test scores. But for the 1,340 students who got good news from MIT on Pi Day, coming to Cambridge for the usual Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) was off the table. Instead, the Admissions Office invited them to CP*, a…

Last May, when we issued our Climate Action Plan for the Decade, we were mobilizing MIT to take on the climate problem as never before. The complexity and uncertainty of climate change make tackling it much more than a “moonshot.” Getting humans to the moon was difficult. But it was a well-​defined problem with a…

Which is more powerful: the urge for sex or the instinct to stay away from someone who’s sick? A new study suggests that at least in mice, it’s the latter. Researchers in the lab of Gloria Choi, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a member of the Picower Institute for…

Arup K. Chakraborty and Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93, have been named Institute Professors, the highest honor for MIT faculty members. Chakraborty, the founding director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), is a pioneer in applying computational techniques to immunology. His work has led to discoveries about the functioning of T cells…

Early detection is key to surviving melanoma, a type of malignant tumor responsible for more than 70% of skin-cancer-related deaths worldwide, but “suspicious pigmented skin lesions” (SPLs) are so common it’s impractical for doctors to check them all out. Now MIT researchers have developed a tool that can analyze skin photos taken with a smartphone…

When water used in many industrial systems evaporates, salts and other dissolved minerals can be left behind on component surfaces, where they eventually degrade equipment, block pipes, and reduce the efficiency of important heat exchange processes. Now MIT researchers have discovered a phenomenon that could help solve this problem while potentially turning the contaminants into…

Many companies don’t know yet how climate change will change their business, but more are taking the inquiry seriously, signaling a new reality—one that calls any companies don’t yet know how for guarding against systemic risk while protecting customer relationships and corporate reputations. Recognizing that reducing carbon emissions is essential to combat climate change, AT&T…