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by Sandeep Ravindran on (#62GYJ)
Sabra Klein is deeply aware that sex matters. During her PhD research at Johns Hopkins University, Klein learned how sex hormones can influence the brain and behavior. “I naively thought: Everybody knows hormones can affect lots of physiological processes—our metabolism, our heart, our bone density. It must be affecting the immune system,” she says. But…
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MIT Technology Review
| Link | https://www.technologyreview.com/ |
| Feed | https://www.technologyreview.com/stories.rss |
| Updated | 2025-09-14 22:47 |
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by Jessica Hamzelou on (#62GXM)
Matt Kaeberlein is what you might call a dog person. He has grown up with dogs and describes his German shepherd, Dobby, as “really special.” But Dobby is 14 years old—around 98 in dog years. “I’m very much seeing the aging process in him,” says Kaeberlein, who studies aging at the University of Washington in…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#62EE3)
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. Deep learning can almost perfectly predict how ice forms The news: Researchers have used deep learning to model more precisely than ever before how ice crystals form in the atmosphere. Their paper, published…
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by Casey Crownhart on (#62EBS)
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which marks the US’s largest-ever investment in climate and clean energy at nearly $400 billion, is a clear environmental victory. But just how far that funding will go in cutting carbon emissions is yet to be seen, and the results are far less certain that some have claimed. Estimates…
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by Tammy Xu on (#62DCW)
Researchers have used deep learning to model more precisely than ever before how ice crystals form in the atmosphere. Their paper, published this week in PNAS, hints at the potential to significantly increase the accuracy of weather and climate forecasting. The researchers used deep learning to predict how atoms and molecules behave. First, models were…
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by Anthony Green on (#62DAH)
A conversation about equity and what it takes to make effective AI policy. This episode was taped before a live audience at MIT Technology Review’s annual AI conference, EmTech Digital. We Meet: Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology at the Brookings Institution Anthony Green, producer of the In Machines We Trust podcast…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#62DAJ)
A bioengineered cornea has restored vision to people with impaired eyesight, including those who were blind before they received the implant. These corneas, described in Nature Biotechnology today, could help restore sight to people in countries where human cornea transplants are in short supply, and for a lower price. Unlike human corneas, which must be…
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by Zeyi Yang on (#62D7A)
DXY is the latest victim of a polarized social media environment in China, where scientific debates are increasingly becoming ideological conflicts.
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#62D2M)
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 can’t tech fix its gender problem? Despite the tech sector’s great wealth and loudly self-proclaimed corporate commitments to the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and racial minorities, the industry remains mostly a…
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by Margaret O’Mara on (#62CXB)
A full decade has passed since Ellen Pao filed a sexual discrimination suit against her employer, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Two years later came the toxicity and misogyny of Gamergate, followed by #MeToo scandals and further revelations of powerful tech-business men behaving very badly. All catalyzed an overdue public reckoning…
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by Abby Ohlheiser on (#62CQR)
A habit called “lateral reading” is a core part of any good fact-checking routine. It means opening up a bunch of tabs and doing multiple searches to verify the facts, source, or claims made in a piece of online information. So it seemed like great news when a new study from Poynter, YouGov, and Google…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#62BRE)
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. Psychedelics are having a moment and women could be the ones to benefit Psychedelics are having a moment. After decades of prohibition and vilification, they are increasingly being employed as therapeutics. Drugs like…
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by Taylor Majewski on (#62BKX)
Nikhita Singhal’s breath still catches when she talks about how her life changed. A psychiatry resident at the University of Toronto, Singhal says it was using psychedelic drugs—ayahuasca, ketamine, and MDMA—that finally addressed the eating disorder she’d had since she was seven years old. “It was really emotionally and psychologically painful,” she says, recounting a…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#62AF4)
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. Social media is polluting society. Moderation alone won’t fix the problem We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to our opponents.…
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by Nathaniel Lubin, Thomas Krendl Gilbert on (#62ABD)
We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to our opponents. At the same time, we don’t want to be exposed to speech that is inappropriate or crosses a line. Technology companies address this conundrum by setting standards for free speech, a practice protected…
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by Melissa Gira Grant on (#62A9B)
I learned on a liveblog that I had lost the right to have an abortion. When the United States Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade on the morning of June 24, 2022, I was one of the nearly 16,000 people reading SCOTUSblog, a news site launched 20 years ago, which has no official relationship with…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#6295Y)
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. Corruption is sending shock waves through China’s chipmaking industry The news: China’s chipmaking industry has descended into chaos, with at least four top executives associated with a state-owned semiconductor fund recently arrested on…
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by Hana Kiros on (#627J5)
Fifteen years ago, David Glowacki was walking in the mountains when he took a sharp fall. When he hit the ground, blood began leaking into his lungs. As he lay there suffocating, Glowacki’s field of perception swelled. He peered down at his own body—and, instead of his typical form, saw that he was made up…
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by Zeyi Yang on (#6274V)
China’s chipmaking industry descended into chaos last week, with at least four top executives associated with a state-owned semiconductor fund arrested on corruption charges. It’s an explosive turn of events that could force the country to fundamentally rethink how it invests in chip development, according to analysts and experts. On July 30, China’s top anticorruption…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#626JA)
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 startup wants to copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage…
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by Tammy Xu on (#626G7)
Machine-learning researchers make many decisions when designing new models. They decide how many layers to include in neural networks and what weights to give inputs at each node. The result of all this human decision-making is that complex models end up being “designed by intuition” rather than systematically, says Frank Hutter, head of the machine-learning…
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by Antonio Regalado on (#625E6)
In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage versions of people in order to harvest tissues for use in transplant treatments. The company, Renewal Bio, is pursuing recent advances in stem-cell technology and artificial wombs demonstrated by Jacob Hanna, a biologist at…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#62565)
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. Researchers repaired cells in damaged pig organs an hour after it died The news: A new system called OrganEx stopped the deterioration of cells in pig organs one hour after the animal’s death,…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#6243Q)
A new system stopped the deterioration of cells in pig organs one hour after the animal’s death, a finding that suggests cells don’t die as quickly as previously understood. The technology successfully restored blood circulation and repaired damaged cells in the pigs. The research, described in Nature today, could pave the way to making human…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#623VT)
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. Everything you need to know about the monkeypox vaccines The global outbreak of monkeypox has so far led to more than 24,000 cases in over 80 countries, and the World Health Organization has…
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by Jessica Hamzelou on (#623N3)
The global outbreak of monkeypox has so far led to more than 24,000 cases in over 80 countries, and the World Health Organization has warned that the window of opportunity to contain the disease and prevent it from becoming endemic outside Africa is rapidly closing. Vaccines represent a potentially crucial measure. Monkeypox vaccines are already…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#622JD)
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. Electric vehicle uptake in the US could be held back by a lack of batteries The news: The US Senate Democrats released a bill last week that could significantly cut the country’s carbon…
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by Casey Crownhart on (#622E9)
A tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 designed to spur adoption of EVs could fail to reach consumers because of the auto industry’s heavy reliance on battery materials and components from China. To qualify for the credit, which could effectively shave up to $7,500 off the price of a new EV, the…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#621AF)
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. Wildfires are raging across the US The news: Five large wildfires ignited across the US yesterday, with further outbreaks expected over the next few days, experts have warned. The new fires in California,…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#61YET)
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. Here are the biggest technology wins in the breakthrough climate bill Two weeks after blowing up hopes of a US climate deal, Senator Joe Manchin announced on Wednesday that he and Senator Chuck…
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by James Temple, Casey Crownhart on (#61XK2)
Two weeks after blowing up hopes of a US climate deal, Senator Joe Manchin announced on Wednesday that he and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, had struck a compromise agreement that would provide nearly $400 billion for climate and energy projects. It remains to be seen whether the sprawling spending package proposed by…
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by Abby Ohlheiser on (#61XK3)
When Twitter introduced a new feature called Trends in mid-2008, the company’s cofounder Jack Dorsey described it as an evolution of the morning media diet. Where he might once have gained a sense of what was important in the world by reading newspapers or online media, Dorsey wrote in a short blog post, Trends, “at…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#61X2X)
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. DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science The news: DeepMind says its AlphaFold tool has successfully predicted the structure of nearly all proteins known to science. From today,…
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by Melissa Heikkilä on (#61X15)
DeepMind says its AlphaFold tool has successfully predicted the structure of nearly all proteins known to science. From today, the Alphabet-owned AI lab is offering its database of over 200 million proteins to anyone for free. When DeepMind introduced AlphaFold in 2020, it took the science community by surprise. Scientists had spent decades trying to…
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by James Temple on (#61WVS)
The blistering heat waves that set temperature records across much of the US in recent days have strained electricity systems, threatening to knock out power in vulnerable regions of the country. The electricity has largely stayed online so far this summer, but there have been scattered problems and close calls already. Heavy use of energy-sucking…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#61VQA)
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. A day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driver When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: “I instinctively went for…
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by Zeyi Yang on (#61VHD)
When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car. “I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself,” says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#61TCQ)
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. We’re starting to understand the mysterious surge of hepatitis in children The news: Hundreds of young children around the world have developed severe cases of hepatitis with no obvious cause, leaving doctors baffled.…
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by Patrick Howell O'Neill on (#61TAW)
There have been so many recent multimillion-dollar cryptocurrency thefts that it’s easy to lose track. Organized crime, bad cybersecurity, financially motivated spies, and colorful criminals of all kinds have made so many headlines that even huge heists can go mostly unnoticed by the public. But sometimes the government is able to get it back. Last…
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by Jessica Hamzelou on (#61SNT)
Hundreds of young children around the world have developed severe cases of hepatitis with no obvious cause, leaving doctors baffled. But two new studies reveal the potential culprits: a combination of genetic factors, lockdowns, and at least two viruses working together. Doctors first noticed a strange cluster of hepatitis cases in young children in Scotland…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#61S9H)
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. Wastewater could help us more accurately detect monkeypox The news: Last month, Stanford’s Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, added monkeypox to the suite of viruses it checks wastewater for daily. Since then,…
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by Hana Kiros on (#61QG9)
Last month, Stanford’s Sewer Coronavirus Alert Network, or SCAN, added monkeypox to the suite of viruses it checks wastewater for daily. Since then, monkeypox has been detected in 10 of the 11 sewer systems that SCAN tests, including those in Sacramento, Palo Alto, and several other cities in California’s Bay Area. As of July 21,…
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by Charlotte Jee on (#61PD7)
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. Chinese gamers are using a Steam wallpaper app to get porn past the censors If you have been on Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming platform, you might have noticed an anomaly on…
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by Zeyi Yang on (#61N7V)
If you have been on Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming platform, you might have noticed an anomaly on the chart of the top 20 most popular apps: Wallpaper Engine. The software is pretty cool—it lets you download animated and interactive wallpapers for your machine’s monitor—but it’s hard to explain why an obscure wallpaper app…
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by Charlotte Jee on (#61N3A)
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. Do these heatwaves mean climate change is happening faster than expected? Blistering heat waves have smashed temperature records around the globe this summer, scorching crops, knocking out power, fueling wildfires, buckling roads and…
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by Baidu on (#61N1K)
When one of China’s biggest celebrities, Simon Gong—also known as Gong Jun—released a new music video in June 2022, it quickly attracted 15 million views on the country’s Twitter-like microblogging site Weibo. But the event also stood out for a different reason—one that only eagle-eyed fans might have noticed. The singer in the video was not…
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by James Temple on (#61MWA)
Millions of people are now experiencing the effects of climate change firsthand. Blistering heat waves have smashed temperature records around the globe this summer, scorching crops, knocking out power, fueling wildfires, buckling roads and runways, and likely killing thousands across Europe alone. The dizzyingly quick shift from an abstract threat to an era of tumbling…
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by Casey Crownhart on (#61M5G)
Europe is sweltering in record-breaking temperatures this week, and across the continent, people are largely trying to cope without air conditioning. Fewer than 10% of households in Europe are air-conditioned. But as temperatures rise, that figure is set to climb. Rising AC use may present new challenges, as most systems are inefficient and produce emissions…
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by Will Douglas Heaven on (#61M5H)
OpenAI will now sell its image-making program DALL-E 2 to the million people on its waiting list, MIT Technology Review can reveal. Around 100,000 people have played with DALL-E 2 since its invite-only launch in April. Today, the San Francisco–based company is opening the gates to 10 times as many as it turns the AI…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#61M0H)
Cybersecurity professionals are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to stay one step ahead of attackers. Yet in the first quarter of 2022 alone, there were 404 publicly reported data breaches in the U.S.—a 14% increase compared to the first quarter of 2021, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. Of particular concern is…