MIT Technology Review

Construction of solar farms, wind turbines, and other sources of renewable power will soar over the next five years as nations set stricter climate policies and more ambitious emissions targets. New renewable electricity capacity will set another record this year, at 290 gigawatts, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. That’s roughly…

The discovery of the omicron variant of covid-19 in southern Africa shows how sequencing the genes of a virus can give an early alert to dangerous-looking changes in its genome. Omicron has more than 30 mutations in the important “spike” gene, some of which have previously been seen in other variants and are thought to…

The news: A US Food and Drug Administration panel has voted by 13 to 10 to recommend that the government authorize Merck’s antiviral pill for patients with early covid-19 who are at high risk for severe infection. The drug, called molnupiravir, has been shown to reduce the risk of hospitalization and death, although by less…

The news: Just five days ago, South African scientists informed the World Health Organization that they’d identified a new covid-19 variant. The situation has escalated rapidly since then. The variant, known as B.1.1.529, has already been found in many countries across the world. On Friday it was designated a variant of “concern” by the WHO, which…

When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August, Mohammad Yasin had to make some difficult decisions very quickly. As the country reeled from the shock of the insurgent takeover, the 21-year-old—whose name has been changed to protect his safety—snuck into his small place of business and got to work. He began erasing some of the…

In August 2022, a NASA probe called Psyche will set out to explore a giant metallic asteroid called Psyche 16, to help scientists learn more about how planets form. The way Psyche reaches its target, though, will be different from typical NASA missions. Building on technology used in previous missions, including Dawn and Deep Space 1, solar power will help propel Psyche into deep space. If that proves successful, it could be the start of a…

Thanks to advancements in speech and natural language processing, there is hope that one day you may be able to ask your virtual assistant what the best salad ingredients are. Currently, it is possible to ask your home gadget to play music, or open on voice command, which is a feature already found in some…

Nations are poised to begin building an international carbon market, after finally adopting the relevant rules at the UN climate conference in Glasgow earlier this month. Under the COP26 agreement, countries should soon be able to buy and sell UN-certified carbon credits from one another, and use them as a way to achieve greenhouse gas…

Defining what is, or isn’t artificial intelligence can be tricky (or tough). So much so, even the experts get it wrong sometimes. That’s why MIT Technology Review’s Senior AI Editor Karen Hao created a flowchart to explain it all. In this bonus content our host and her team reimagined Hao’s original reporting, gamifying it into…

The story has been updated to include the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ denial that it was in the process of purchasing NSO Group tools. In July, accusations emerged that spyware from NSO Group had targeted French president Emmanuel Macron, causing a major controversy. The company denied the claims—part of a string of allegations about…

Hackers around the globe are smart: they know that it isn’t just good code that helps them break into systems; it’s also about understanding—and preying upon—human behavior. The threat to businesses in the form of cyberattacks is only growing—especially as companies make the shift to embrace hybrid work. But John Scimone, senior vice president and…

Myanmar, March 2021. A month after the fall of the democratic government. In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which recently rebranded to Meta) offered global access to Instant Articles, a…

Michael Worobey hasn’t always been certain about where covid originated. During the pandemic, the University of Arizona professor has studied how the virus changes over time, and was among a group of 18 influential scientists who signed a letter in May calling for further investigation to help prove or disprove the theory that SARS-CoV-2 emerged…

From cars to planes, the future of transportation is already here—and is changing rapidly. Software engineering is increasingly central to both the development and maintenance of all kinds of vehicles. That means more people need to start thinking like systems engineers. Dale Tutt, vice president of aerospace and defense industry for Siemens Software, says this…

Our 35 Innovators Under 35 competition for 2022 is now open for nominations. You can nominate great candidates from now until 10 p.m. EST on January 24, 2022. We’ve been publishing a list of young innovators for more than two decades now. The list always includes fascinating stories of young people working to employ technology…

At long last, physicists from Harvard and MIT have found the killer application for quantum computing: a Mario Bros. GIF made from qubits. The qubits (quantum bits) can also be arranged in a Space Invaders design, or Tetris, or any other shape—your geometrical wish is the qubits’ command. The GIFs were offered up by QuEra…

The next wave of aerospace is just around the corner, and a lot of that innovation is happening thanks to new, faster methods of development. “What’s happening now is that companies are trying to understand how they take the lessons from Agile software development and apply those to Agile product development,” explains Dale Tutt, vice…

Data is growing at a meteoric rate. In fact, the total amount of data generated by 2025 is set to accelerate exponentially to 175 zettabytes.1 And over the next two years, enterprise data is expected to increase at a 42% annual growth rate. Hidden within these vast volumes of data are insights into consumer behavior,…

In 2018, when Google employees found out about their company’s involvement in Project Maven, a controversial US military effort to develop AI to analyze surveillance video, they weren’t happy. Thousands protested. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” they wrote in a letter to the company’s leadership. Around a dozen…

In Facebook’s vision of the metaverse, we will all interact in a mashup of the digital and physical worlds. Digital representations of ourselves will eat, talk, date, shop, and more. That’s the picture Mark Zuckerberg painted as he rebranded his company Meta a couple of weeks ago. The Facebook founder’s typically awkward presentation used a…

Germany’s coronavirus case numbers have reached their highest levels since the early days of the pandemic, with warnings that covid is “spreading dramatically” and requires a “quick and unified response.” At the same time, the Netherlands is imposing partial restrictions to control rising case levels, including an 8 p.m. curfew on stores and restaurants, and…

Companies across all industries are faced with the urgent need to transform the way they do business, including financial services, but changes abound with governance, security, and culture. A shift in mindset and perspective away from “the way things have always been done” is key to a successful digital transformation and to providing the frictionless…

The draining 996 work schedule—named for the expectation that employees work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—has persisted in Chinese companies for years despite ongoing public outcry. Even Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma once called it a “huge blessing.” In early October this year, it seemed the tide might have been turning. After hopeful signs of increased government scrutiny in August, four aspiring…

Last month, the primary source for the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files, revealed her identity in an episode of 60 Minutes. Frances Haugen, a former product manager at the company, says she came forward after she saw Facebook’s leadership repeatedly prioritize profit over safety. She then appeared before lawmakers in the US and the UK to talk…

E. coli thrives in our guts, sometimes to unfortunate effect, and it facilitates scientific advances—in DNA, biofuels, and Pfizer’s covid vaccine, to name but a few. Now this multitalented bacterium has a new trick: it can solve a classic computational maze problem using distributed computing—dividing up the necessary calculations among different types of genetically engineered…

In the spring of 2021, MIT Technology Review announced a fellowship focused on exploring the different ways in which technology and data were being used to address issues of inequality during the pandemic. With the assistance of the Heising-Simons Foundation—a Los Altos and San Francisco, California-based family foundation that supports projects focused on climate and…

The increasing overlap between the world’s arms trade and the secretive surveillance industry risks damaging US national security and will create the potential for even more abuse unless more accountability is introduced, according to a new study. The research, from the American think tank the Atlantic Council, offers one of the most thorough accountings ever…

Every 10 years, US astronomers and astrophysicists release a new report to guide the next decade of astronomy and astrophysics research. Today the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published the latest, setting a new trajectory for modern space exploration. Dubbed Astro2020, the decadal survey draws from hundreds of white papers and several years…

India has officially joined the net-zero pledge club, and its 2070 target presents a reasonable, if challenging, timeline for the country. The commitment was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 1 at the COP26 UN climate conference. While the target date is still decades away, and later than the 2050 goal set by…

While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future. The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from…

NASA is exploring a concept for a new fleet of mini-rovers that can work together to solve problems and make decisions as a unit. If one fails or gets stuck somewhere, the others could carry on without it. As part of the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project, NASA engineers are designing compact, mobile…

This is the second article in a series of three. The first focused on the importance of making businesses more future-ready and how to work through common obstacles on the path to digitization. We also discussed how modernizing on-premises infrastructure as part of a hybrid cloud approach can best be managed via hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI),…