MIT Technology Review

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. Edits to a cholesterol gene could stop the biggest killer on earth The news: A volunteer in New Zealand has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in order to lower their…

A volunteer in New Zealand has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in order to lower their blood cholesterol, a step that may foreshadow wide use of the technology to prevent heart attacks. The experiment, part of a clinical trial by the US biotechnology company Verve Therapeutics, involved injecting a version of the…

PARIS — This is as close as you can get to a rock concert in AI research. Inside the supercomputing center of the French National Center for Scientific Research, on the outskirts of Paris, rows and rows of what look like black fridges hum at a deafening 100 decibels. They form part of a supercomputer…

Amazon, Hello Fresh, Stitch Fix. Click a button, and it’s there in three to five days—perhaps even one. Packages, packages, and more packages—goods from all over the world, delivered after just a couple of clicks. But this height of consumer convenience has been complicating urban life for years, giving rise to increased theft and traffic,…

US President Joe Biden has revealed the first image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), showcasing some of the most distant galaxies ever seen. Announced today from the White House with NASA, the image shows a small portion of the sky—comparable to the span of a grain of sand held at arm’s length—enhanced…

As companies struggle to process, store, and leverage ever-increasing amounts of structured and unstructured data, data governance is becoming a critical part of every company’s data management. Governance not only helps a company understand and use its data, but it ensures everyone has access to the data they need, when they need it. “Data doesn’t…

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. Doctors using AI catch breast cancer more often than either does alone The news: Radiologists assisted by an AI diagnose breast cancer more successfully than when they work alone, according to new research.…

Radiologists assisted by an AI screen for breast cancer more successfully than they do when they work alone, according to new research. That same AI also produces more accurate results in the hands of a radiologist than it does when operating solo. The large-scale study, published this month in The Lancet Digital Health, is the…

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. The secret police: A private security group regularly sent Minnesota police misinformation about protestors When US marshals shot and killed a 32-year-old Black man named Winston Boogie Smith Jr. in a parking garage…

Khatab Alrawhani, a Yemen-born journalist and activist, thought he could escape the persecution that journalists were experiencing in the Middle East when he left the region. But it followed him. While studying in Washington, DC, in 2015, he published posts denouncing the Houthi coup, in which an armed faction overthrew the Yemeni government. His father…

When US marshals shot and killed a 32-year-old Black man named Winston Boogie Smith Jr. in a parking garage in Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood on June 3, 2021, the city was already in a full-blown policing crisis. Around 300 officers had quit over the previous two years amid near-constant protests and public criticism in the wake…

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 business is booming for military AI startups Exactly two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics company Palantir, made his pitch to European leaders. With…

Exactly two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics company Palantir, made his pitch to European leaders. With war on their doorstep, Europeans ought to modernize their arsenals with Silicon Valley’s help, he argued in an open letter. For Europe to “remain strong enough to defeat the threat…

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. These simple changes can make AI research much more energy efficient What’s the news?: Deep learning is behind machine learning’s most high-profile successes. But this incredible performance comes at a cost: training deep-learning…

Deep learning is behind machine learning’s most high-profile successes, such as advanced image recognition, the board game champion AlphaGo, and language models like GPT-3. But this incredible performance comes at a cost: training deep-learning models requires huge amounts of energy. Now, new research shows how scientists who use cloud platforms to train deep-learning algorithms can…

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. No power, no fans, no AC: The villagers fighting to survive India’s deadly heatwaves The residents of Nagla Tulai, a farming village in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, have always had…

The UN’s climate panel warns that the world may need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year in the coming decades, on top of rapid emissions cuts, to prevent or pull the planet back from increasingly dangerous warming levels. A growing number of research groups and startups are working…

Suman Shakya wants me to touch the concrete wall of her bedroom, where her one-year-old son lies soaked with sweat. It burns my hand as if it were a hot pan. “Now imagine sitting in front of a hot pan in this weather for as long as it takes to make rotis for the whole…

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. China wants to control how its famous livestreamers act, speak, and even dress For Zeng, a young Chinese woman, an hour scrolling Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok, has become a daily ritual.…

For Zeng, a young Chinese woman, an hour scrolling Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok, has become a daily ritual. Among its broad range of videos and livestreams, she particularly likes one creator: “Lawyer Longfei.” Every day, Longfei answers her 9 million followers’ legal inquiries live. Many deal with how women should approach tricky divorce…

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. The US Supreme Court just gutted the EPA’s power to regulate emissions The news: The Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions has been dealt a massive blow…

The White House is developing a research plan that would guide and set standards for how scientists study one of the more controversial ways of counteracting climate change: solar geoengineering. The basic idea is that we might be able to deliberately tweak the climate system in ways that release more heat into space, cooling an…

As soon as Roe v. Wade was overturned on Friday, June 24, calls for people to delete their period-tracking apps were all over social media. These apps gather extremely personal data that could pinpoint a missed period. The fear is that in the hands of law enforcement, this data could be used to bolster a…

In March 2020, when corporate offices shuttered in the face of the coronavirus pandemic and employees began working from home, companies were forced to find more efficient ways to do business. Call it “The Great Digital Transformation.” Before the pandemic, the average company estimated that transitioning to remote work would take 454 days, according to…

The Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions was dealt a massive blow by the US Supreme Court today. Coming less than a week after it overturned the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade, the court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA could have far-reaching results for US climate policy…

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. How algorithms trap us in a cycle of shame Working in finance at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis, mathematician Cathy O’Neil got a firsthand look at how much people trusted algorithms—and…

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. Introducing: Our TR35 list of innovators for 2022 Spoiler alert: our annual Innovators Under 35 list isn’t actually about what a small group of smart young people have been up to (although that’s…

All too often, the work of developing global disaster and climate resiliency happens when disaster—such as a hurricane, earthquake, or tsunami—has already ravaged entire cities and torn communities apart. But Elizabeth Petheo, MBA ’14, says that recently her work has been focused on preparedness. It’s hard to get attention for preparedness efforts, explains Petheo, a…

Especially for people of color, the road to MIT often begins with advice and encouragement from a teacher or guidance counselor. That was the case for Michael Dixon ’88, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He’d long been interested in outer space, reading science texts and science fiction as well as watching…

“My focus has always been on social change,” says Steven Lewis Yaffee, PhD ’79, a professor of natural resources and environmental policy at the University of Michigan. “On training practitioners to go out and effect change in the real world.” Yaffee caught the eco bug in middle school in Maryland when he read Rachel Carson’s…

Joseph “Pepe” Fields ’67 has an MIT degree in chemistry, but he’s spent his career working all over the world in international management. And recently, he’s been driving a recreational vehicle around the US to build affordable housing with a Habitat for Humanity program called RV Care-A-Vanners. RV owners who join the program drive to…

On July 1, Stephen D. Baker ’84, MArch ’88, begins his one-year term as president of the MIT Alumni Association, succeeding Annalisa Weigel ’94, ’95, SM ’00, PhD ’02. Baker’s long history with MIT began with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture. He is currently president and senior principal of BWA Architecture, a 27-person firm…

On March 23, 1912, the very day the subway connecting Boston and Cambridge opened to the public, another event took place that would change Kendall Square even more profoundly than the new, state-of-the-art transit system. As fate would have it, that was the day when a large swath of property adjacent to the square was…

Secreted beneath MIT’s Killian Court and accessible only through a subterranean labyrinth of tunnels, a clandestine lab conducts boundary-pushing research, fed by money siphoned from a Department of Defense grant. In these shadowed, high-tech halls, astrophysicist and astronaut Valentina Resnick-Baker, who is experiencing strange phenomena after an encounter with a planet-threatening asteroid, discovers she has…

The MIT Morningside Academy for Design, an interdisciplinary center that aims to build on the Institute’s leadership in design-­focused education and become a global hub for design research, thinking, and entrepreneurship, will launch in September 2022, President L. Rafael Reif announced in March. The academy, which will be housed in the Metropolitan Warehouse with the…

MIT will be taking several new measures to support its Indigenous community and advance scholarship on the history of Native Americans and the Institute, President L. Rafael Reif announced in April. In the spring of 2021, the Institute launched 21H.283 (The Indigenous History of MIT), a class that explores the ways MIT’s history intersects with the…

There are still parts of Philadelphia’s SEPTA transportation system that accept tokens. But today, in nearly every major American city, you’ll see transit riders tapping their way onto buses and subway platforms using their phones. The shift has been swift. Like so many things consumers brushed off as needlessly complicated before the pandemic—QR codes, order…

In February, the city of Toronto announced plans for a new development along its waterfront. They read like a wish list for any passionate urbanist: 800 affordable apartments, a two-acre forest, a rooftop farm, a new arts venue focused on indigenous culture, and a pledge to be zero-carbon. The idea of an affordable, off-the-grid Eden…

In 2015, Brooklyn resident Shabazz Stuart regularly biked to his job at a local business improvement district. Then his bicycle was stolen—the third case of two-wheeled larceny he’d experienced in five years. The theft sent him back to mass transit while he saved up money to buy a replacement. It also put him on a…

One evening last summer, my family was enjoying a picnic in the park near our house in London when two dogs attacked our blind 15-year-old Jack Russell terrier, Zoey. They pounced on her, locking their jaws. As my husband threw himself on the dogs, I begged the owner to intervene. He refused—until he realized I…

In the 24 years I’ve worked as a materials scientist, I’ve always been inspired by hierarchical patterns found in nature that repeat all the way down to the molecular level. Such patterns induce remarkable properties—they strengthen our bones without making them heavy, give butterfly wings their color, and make a spiderweb silk both durable and…

The term “artificial intelligence” really has two meanings. AI refers both to the fundamental scientific quest to build human intelligence into computers and to the work of modeling massive amounts of data. These two endeavors are very different, both in their ambitions and in the amount of progress they have made in recent years. Scientific…

Have you heard? The tech in biotech is nailing it. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) can now figure out who has a condition (perhaps better than your doctor can), establish a medical checklist to diagnose you, and help target likely treatments. AI models can help design drugs or find a new purpose for…

In less than a century, computing has transformed our society and helped spur countless innovations. We now carry in our back pockets computers that we could only have dreamed of a few decades ago. Machine-learning systems can analyze scenes and drive vehicles. And we can craft extraordinarily accurate representations of the real world—models that can…

We’re living in a pivotal decade. By 2030, global emissions must fall by half, mostly through massive deployment of commercial solutions such as wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. But emerging climate technologies must come to market during this decade too, even if they don’t make much of a dent in emissions right away.…

An online influence campaign carried out by a group that promotes China’s political interests is targeting Western companies that mine and process rare-earth elements, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Mandiant. The campaign, which is playing out in Facebook groups and micro-targeted tweets, is trying to stoke environmentalist protests against the companies 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. Big Tech remains silent on questions about data privacy in a post-Roe world In the days after the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, tech companies rushed to show their…

When you climb up a set of stairs to look over Boston Metal’s newest project, it becomes clear just how big a job it is to cut steel’s climate impact. The impressive new installation is a pilot reactor that the startup will use to make emissions-free steel. It’s about the size of a school bus,…

The United States has around 150,000 fuel stations to refill its fleet of fossil-fuel-burning vehicles. Despite the rapid growth of all-electric vehicles in America—400,000 of them were sold in 2021, up from barely 10,000 in 2012—the country has only 6,000 DC fast electric charging stations, the kind that can rapidly juice up a battery-powered car. (It…

In the hours and days after the US Supreme Court announced its ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion, tech companies rushed to show their support for employees living in states where the procedure is now outlawed. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, promised to pay expenses for staffers who need to travel out of their home…