MIT Technology Review

For transgender and nonbinary people like me, a society organized into only “male” and “female” makes us feel excluded. And it’s something that happens frequently, especially online. Take Gmail. There are three gender options when you register. If you choose “other,” you can write in any gender identity. But first you must choose how you’d…

We’ve often thought about muscle as a thing that exists separately from intellect—and perhaps that is even oppositional to it, one taking resources from the other. The truth is, our brains and muscles are in constant conversation with each other, sending electrochemical signals back and forth. In a very tangible way, our lifelong brain health…

For decades, lawmakers, researchers, journalists, and parents have worried that video games are bad for us: that they encourage violent behavior or harm mental health. These fears have spilled into policy decisions affecting millions of people. The World Health Organization added “gaming disorder” to its International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in 2019, while China restricts…

There’s a genre of video floating around TikTok, Facebook, Nextdoor, and countless other social apps that you’ve probably seen, or at least scrolled past. They’re characterized by their brevity, their fish-eye framing, and often their prominent logo placement—which typically reads “Ring.com.” This footage comes from Ring customers, who install the company’s camera devices to protect…

Erik Prince’s pitch to investors was simple—but certainly ambitious: pay just €5 million and cure the biggest cybersecurity and privacy plagues of our day. The American billionaire—best known for founding the notorious private military firm Blackwater, which became globally infamous for killing Iraqi civilians and threatening US government investigators—was pushing Unplugged, a smartphone startup promising…

At a table in the Berghoff German restaurant in downtown Chicago in 2012, Charlie Catlett feverishly drew software architecture on a napkin. A senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory at the time, Catlett had been working with scientists from the US Environmental Protection Agency to understand the effects of air pollution on residents’ health.…

In October 2021, Facebook announced a massive pivot, changing its name to Meta and going all in on augmented and virtual reality through a futuristic vision of the internet called the metaverse. In fact, the strategy had been taking shape gradually for years, with help from a seemingly frivolous product feature on Instagram. Face filters…

The US has moved to restrict export of EDA software. What is it, and how will the move affect China?

When Jay told his mom he was bisexual at 14, she was supportive. But when he came out as transgender a few years later, she pushed back. She felt blindsided by the news. YouTube videos and online forums soon convinced her that she was right to feel that way. To her, it was clear that…

Minuscule lab-grown models of human brains can be fitted with caps that measure their activity, just as electroencephalogram (EEG) caps record electrical signals produced by full-size human brains. The minibrains are examples of organoids—three-dimensional clusters of living cells, grown in a lab, that simulate the structure and function of human organs so that researchers can…

Startups are exploring how electric planes could clean up air travel, which accounts for about 3% of worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions. The problem is that today’s electric aircraft could safely carry you and about a dozen fellow passengers only around 30 miles, according to a recent analysis. The limiting factor is the battery, in particular the…

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article. In the late 1950s, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies—which the US Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains—worked well for holding…

Late one evening in June of 2016, John Barentine stood alone at Mather Point, an iconic and rarely empty overlook at Grand Canyon National Park. The moon slid away, leaving the darkness of a crisp, clear sky. The stars that make up our galaxy seemed to align overhead. The inky chasm of the ancient canyon…

Fertility treatments can be undesirable for transgender men, as they involve pausing gender-affirming hormone therapy and undergoing potentially distressing procedures such as female hormone treatments and vaginal exams. New evidence suggests combining two existing techniques for the first time could help sidestep those issues. The process involves removing pieces of a transgender man’s ovary, extracting…

A hacking group linked to China has spent the last three years targeting human rights organizations, think tanks, news media, and agencies of multiple foreign governments, according to a revealing new report from the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. The report, shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review, offers new clues about how private contractors and front…

Ransomware, hackers, and nation-state threat actors have long dominated security teams’ focus. These external threats often feel more urgent and more dangerous, carrying greater potential consequences for the business. There’s no question about intent—it’s malicious. From a psychological perspective, it’s straightforward for security teams to identify the enemy and prepare for a fight. But what…

When Ollie’s mother, Katie, was nine weeks pregnant, her obstetrician-gynecologist’s office in Boulder, Colorado, offered her a special $100 price on a new prenatal blood test that she was told could detect major chromosomal hiccups such as Down syndrome and trisomy 18. She and her husband agreed—who can say no to a deal?—with one caveat.…

A heritage financial services institution isn’t necessarily the first place a technologist looks to grow their career. But that hasn’t been a problem for JPMorgan Chase, which has made itself an appealing career destination for technologists. “Technology is not an afterthought,” says Gill Haus, chief information officer of consumer and community banking at JPMorgan Chase.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

DXY is the latest victim of a polarized social media environment in China, where scientific debates are increasingly becoming ideological conflicts.

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…