MIT Technology Review

Every decade or so, we achieve a new generation of communication technology. Many of us remember 2G phones and about 10 years later 3G, then 4G. Now, we are watching the rollout of 5G, which is going to usher in a paradigm shift in the way we use and think about communication technology at both…

Thermo Fisher Scientific is known for its equipment used in a variety of industries—from biosciences to environmental—but the company is also an application developer. An increasing number of instruments can be remotely monitored and managed through the company’s Connect platform, while data is collected and analyzed through more than 40 different modules and applications. Managing…

Manufacturers of all kinds share similar challenges when moving to the cloud. When your mission is to create the most advanced technology independently, regardless of what you’re developing, it’s only possible when you team up with the right partners. Mate Rimac, CEO of Bugatti Rimac and Rimac Technology, builder of the fastest electric hypercars in…

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. Western officials are increasingly worried that Russia is preparing to use chemical weapons to attack Ukraine, then spread disinformation that the attack came from the Ukrainians themselves. On NBC’s ‘Meet the…

Today, March 11, 2022, marks two years since covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. We’ve had lockdowns, vaccines, and arguments about how to move forward and live with this virus. We’ve watched the pandemic through numbers and data and memorials to the many lives lost, officially now over six million. It…

Deep in the ocean, below the reach of wind-driven currents but well above the seafloor, lies an in-between world—the eerily still midwaters, dominated by alien-looking, gelatinous life forms. Here ctenophores swim about using glittering comb-legs, colonies of siphonophore clones stretch a hundred feet long, and giant larvaceans secrete elaborate mucus structures. These strange inhabitants of the…

Running a healthcare system is like juggling bees. Millions of moving pieces—from mobile clinics to testing kits—need to be in the right places at the right time. That’s even harder to do in countries with limited resources and endemic disease. But getting stuff where it’s needed is a problem big companies deal with all the…

Fueled by innovations in AI, IoT, and blockchain, digital transformation has been accelerating rapidly across industries. But as the world’s data is growing at the edge, the stark differences in digital equity and inclusion have become clear. Access to technology, underrepresentation within tech companies, and bias within technology itself contribute to this stark digital divide,…

Russia’s war on Ukraine’s cities, civilians, and critical infrastructure has exposed a troubling vulnerability in the escalating conflict: the aging and isolated Ukrainian power sector. The nation is effectively an energy island after disconnecting from the Belarusian and Russian electricity systems as the invasion began, requiring it to generate nearly all its own electricity. The…

Across industries and geographies, the pandemic has triggered a paradigm shift in the way companies—and their employees—conduct day-to-day business. The move to work-from-home and hybrid work models has increased the need for collaboration to facilitate communication and innovation from remote locations, and to keep teams connected and engaged when in-person meetings are difficult or impossible.…

Targeted ads follow us around the internet, pitching us everything from meme-based T-shirts to Mahabis slippers wherever we go. Now the power of tracking pixels and pop-up ads is being used to try to tell ordinary Russians what’s really happening during the invasion of Ukraine. “We’ve seen the powerful role that civil society can play…

The market for NFTs—tokens that represent digital art, music, videos, and the like—soared last year to $44 billion. This brought a lot of attention to Ethereum, the blockchain network where most NFTs are bought and sold. It also brought a lot of attention to something else: the massive energy wastefulness of cryptocurrency mining. Blockchains don’t…

Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Run under a consortium known as Operation Safety Net, the program was set up a year ago, ostensibly to maintain public order as…

As Russia poured troops into Ukraine, the besieged country’s government was already thinking about a different way to strike back. On February 26, Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov launched the “IT Army of Ukraine”—an unprecedented invitation to the world’s hackers to go on the offensive against Russia for his country. The IT Army is…

A variety of researchers have highlighted the potential to leverage nature to combat climate change, by planting trees or growing crops to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. But a bleak new report from the UN’s climate panel stresses that relying heavily on these approaches could present real risks as well. The nearly 4,000-page…

The “most advanced piece of malware” that China-linked hackers have ever been known to use was revealed today. Dubbed Daxin, the stealthy back door was used in espionage operations against governments around the world for a decade before it was caught. But the newly discovered malware is no one-off. It’s yet another sign that a…

Russia has stunned the world with the speed of its advance through Ukraine this week. Part of the reason it’s overwhelmed its neighbor so quickly, beyond the shock timing, is the vast imbalance between the two countries’ military resources. At $6 billion, Ukraine’s defense budget is just 10% of Russia’s, according to the Stockholm International…

The fast-paced online coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday followed a pattern that’s become familiar in other recent crises that have unfolded around the world. Photos, videos, and other information are posted and reshared across platforms much faster than they can be verified. The result is that falsehoods are mistaken for truth…

The US Justice Department is ending its controversial China Initiative and will pivot to a new strategy to counter threats from nation states, it announced February 24. The program began under the Trump administration as an effort to root out economic espionage, but drew criticism for falling short of that stated goal while increasingly focusing…

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to send troops into Ukraine spooked energy markets this week, amid fears that the escalating conflict and ensuing sanctions could disrupt global fossil-fuel supplies. Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of petroleum, natural gas, and coal, so any actions that curtail exports could have global ripple effects, pushing…

Composer Nina C. Young felt the tug of music from a young age, listening to church bells outside her home in New York. She wrote letters to Santa begging for a synthesizer and later balanced violin lessons with listening to the rock band Radiohead. When she was 16, she recalls, an accompanist told her, “You’ve…

After 27 years as an aviation officer in the US Army, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pedro Almeida believes that all we need to know about leadership can be learned in kindergarten. “Be kind, treat people with respect,” says Almeida, who retired as a colonel in 2015 and is now chief operations officer of…

n April 2020, with covid-19 infection rates surging across the northeastern United States, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont tapped Albert Ko ’81 to cochair the advisory group that would ultimately draft the state’s pandemic response. Ko, chair of the epidemiology department at the Yale School of Public Health, had already served on pandemic committees at the…

How do you create a visual and messaging identity that not only reflects more than 150 years of MIT graduates but is also forward-thinking enough to represent the generations of alumni to come? That was the question the Alumni Association asked itself when beginning a rebranding process in 2019, aiming to deliver on one of…

Art and Sandy Reidel say the personal connections they have made at MIT inspire their ongoing support for the Institute, specifically for programs that instill leadership skills in students. “MIT is an incredible collection of wonderful individuals,” Art says. “We support MIT because we are confident it is a way to maximize the positive impact…

“Vivian, we might leave Taiwan and move back to the US next year,” my mom told me as she helped me get ready for the middle school candlelight dance. I knew that my family would return to the US at some point; we were in Taiwan only because of my dad’s work with a pharmaceutical…

Driving the gold-plated rivet into steel, Charles Hayden, Class of 1890, marked a new phase for New York City’s storied Waldorf Astoria hotel. It was the morning of Monday, March 24, 1930, just five months after the stock market crash of October 1929. The previous Waldorf had been razed to make room for the Empire…

When she was approached by the MIT Press with a list of people being considered for a biography, Maia Weinstock says, Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus stood out from the rest. “I felt I could really dig into her story, and I was very curious about what made her tick,” says Weinstock, a science writer and deputy…

January 1972 From “The Quest for Fusion Power”: In the case of fusion power, the potential long-term societal rewards are so enticing and the possibility of success so high that a major, truly international, research effort has developed over the last two decades. The United States has allocated over $400 million for research in controlled…

The malaria parasite, a notoriously deadly foe, has evolved countless ways to evade immune detection and thrive in human hosts. Mainly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for roughly 95% of cases, malaria kills more than 600,000 people a year, a majority of them children younger than five years old. Last October, after years of…

Last year, researchers at Data Science Nigeria noted that engineers looking to train computer-vision algorithms could choose from a wealth of data sets featuring Western clothing, but there were none for African clothing. The team addressed the imbalance by using AI to generate artificial images of African fashion—a whole new data set from scratch. Such…

For a few seconds on a sunny afternoon last April, renewables broke a record for California’s main electric grid, providing enough power to supply 94.5% of demand. The moment was hailed as a milestone on the path to decarbonization. But what happens when the sun sets and the breeze stops? Handling the fluctuating power production…

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin use huge amounts of electricity. In 2021, the Bitcoin network consumed upwards of 100 terawatt-hours, more than the typical annual energy budget of Finland. Proof of stake offers a way to set up such a network without requiring so much energy. And if all goes as planned, Ethereum, which runs all…

By the end of 2020, DeepMind, the UK-based artificial-intelligence lab, had already produced many impressive achievements in AI. Still, when the group’s program for predicting protein folding was released in November of that year, biologists were shocked by how well it worked. Nearly everything your body does, it does with proteins. Understanding what individual proteins do…

In the early 1960s, MIT professor Fernando Corbató was developing a new kind of shared computer system and wanted a way for people to be able to protect their private files. His solution was a password. Over the years, Corbató’s fix won out over other means of authentication and became the standard way we log…

In his speech to the COP26 climate summit, Tuvalu foreign minister Simon Kofe showed the world what was at stake if it failed to decarbonize. He delivered his United Nations address in a suit, behind a lectern, knee deep in ocean water that was flooding his island as a result of rising sea levels. The…

Scott Sinclair wants to debunk two myths associated with cloud computing. The first is that cloud is a zero-sum game in which apps that once ran in the data center are simply relocated to the public cloud, says Sinclair, senior analyst at market research outfit Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). The second is the idea that…

For the entirety of my adult life, I have been intricately involved in researching the basis of new technologies. At AT&T Bell Laboratories, I conducted research that contributed to the understanding of electronic and optoelectronic materials used in semiconductor lasers that are now part of many devices. As a professor of physics at Rutgers University,…

Just 48 hours after banks and government websites crashed in Ukraine under the weight of a concerted cyberattack on February 15 and 16, the United States pointed the finger at Russian spies. Anne Neuberger, the White House’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said that the US has “technical information that links…

Qurat-Ul-Ain Rehbar, a journalist based in Indian-administered Kashmir, was traveling when a friend called to tell her that she had been put up for sale. She was told that someone had taken a publicly available picture and created a profile, describing her as the “deal of the day” in a fake auction.  Rehbar was one…

Private citizens have been buying their way into the heavens for decades. In the 1980s, McDonnell Douglas engineer Charles Walker became the first nongovernment individual to fly in space when his company bought him a seat on three NASA space shuttle missions. In 2001, American entrepreneur Dennis Tito dished out a reported $20 million to…

Building driverless cars is a slow and expensive business. After years of effort and billions of dollars of investment, the technology is still stuck in the pilot phase. Raquel Urtasun thinks she can do better. Last year, frustrated by the pace of the industry, Urtasun left Uber, where she led the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving research…