MIT Technology Review

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),…

Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML) are key technologies that help organizations develop new ways to increase sales, reduce costs, streamline business processes, and understand their customers better. AWS helps customers accelerate their AI/ML adoption by delivering powerful compute, high-speed networking, and scalable high-performance storage options on demand for any machine learning project.…

There’s probably no such thing as perfect privacy and security online. Hackers regularly breach corporate firewalls to gain customers’ private information, and scammers constantly strive to trick us into divulging our passwords. But existing tools can provide a high level of privacy—if we use them correctly, says Mashael Al Sabah, a cybersecurity researcher at the…

In March 2020, companies large and small, across industries, and around the world, had to pivot nearly overnight to remote work because of pandemic-related shutdowns. In fact, over a third of US workers reported working remotely during that time, including nearly three-quarters of the highest-income workers. Digital meeting and collaboration tools such as Zoom, Microsoft…

A few years ago, a young man from California’s technology scene began popping up in the world’s leading developmental biology labs. These labs were deciphering the secrets of embryos and had a particular interest in how eggs are formed. Some thought if they discovered that recipe, they would be able to copy it and transmute…

Thousands of delegates will amass in Glasgow, Scotland, in the coming days for the annual UN climate conference, where they’ll spend two weeks squabbling over a lengthy list of action items that add up to a single question: How much faster will the world move to prevent catastrophic warming this century? If history is any…

Algorithms now determine how much things cost. It’s called dynamic pricing and it adjusts according to current market conditions in order to increase profits. The rise of e-commerce has propelled pricing algorithms into an everyday occurrence—whether you’re shopping on Amazon, booking a flight, hotel or ordering an Uber. In this continuation of our series on…

In the coming years, mobility solutions—or how we get from point A to point B—will bridge the gap between ground and air transportation—yes, that means flying cars. Technological advancements are transforming mobility for people and, leading to unprecedented change. Nand Kochhar, vice president of automotive and transportation for Siemens Software says this transformation extends beyond…

Mr. Fu, a driver in Beijing for the food delivery service Eleme, makes about a dozen deliveries per shift. But he could make more—and spill less—if he didn’t have to constantly get his phone out to update his status. “I have to log in every few minutes on the app to avoid being penalized if…

I’m Mat Honan, the new editor in chief of MIT Technology Review. This is the first issue of the magazine I’ve had the pleasure of working on. Maybe you have been reading Technology Review for years, like me. Or maybe this is your first issue. Either way, I’m excited by the opportunity to make this…

February 1969 From “Man, Machine, and Information Flight Systems”: The flight of Apollo 8 to the moon involved obtaining and processing more bits of data than were used by all fighting forces in World War II. The technological achievement in developing advanced rockets for flying to the moon is reasonably well known. Much less understood,…

In May 2020, two months after covid-19 shut down schools and public life around the world, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he was giving $10 million to California’s Oakland Unified School District to purchase 25,000 Chromebooks. Dorsey tweeted that his donation was intended “to give EVERY single child in Oakland access to a laptop…

Freshman year of high school, my boyfriend asked, “What’s it like having her around all the time?” He meant Kim. The bell for third period rang. I shifted against him, a combination lock pressed into my back, lockers slamming around us. Our mouths were still so close. I’d been wondering if he also felt hot…

The computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith cofounded both Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division and Pixar Animation Studios. For those achievements alone, he is one of the most important technological innovators in cinema since at least the end of the Second World War. But Smith is not a Hollywood guy, and his intriguing, foundational new book A…

Maybe it never truly went away. But these days techno-­optimism—the kind that raged in the late 1990s and early 2000s and then dried up and turned to pessimism during the last decade—is once again bubbling up. The pessimism over the real-world impacts of apps and social media has turned into unbounded hope—at least among the…

It’s time we began to “fixate on data” to solve our problems, says one of the world’s leading experts in data science. In 2006, Jeannette Wing, then the head of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, published an influential essay titled “Computational Thinking,” arguing that everyone would benefit from using the conceptual tools…

The awkward pause on a Zoom call. The brusque, ambiguous email. The context-free meeting invite. When online interactions are so easily misconstrued, effective communication is essential. As the author of the new book Digital Body Language, Erica Dhawan, MBA ’12, trains corporate leaders to connect fluently in this new era of remote work, with clients…

For Mia Heavener ’00, much of life revolves around water. As a senior civil engineer for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), she designs water systems for communities in her home state. And in her time off, she often works with her family’s commercial fishing business, which started with her great-grandmother. Nearly every summer…

Daryl J. Carter, MArch ’81, SM ’81 grew up in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Core City on Detroit’s west side during the ’60s and ’70s, when redlining practices that reinforced segregated housing were still commonplace. The Federal Housing Authority and private banks denied low-interest loans to buyers in such neighborhoods, solidifying economic hardship for…

Organic chemistry classes can create all sorts of memories, but few as lasting and meaningful as those of Alfred Singer ’68 and Dinah (Schiffer) Singer ’69. Since meeting while taking 5.41 in 1965—and graduating from MIT with degrees in biology (Dinah) and philosophy with a minor in biology (Al)—they have built an enduring marriage and…

While working toward his PhD in sociotechnical studies at Stanford University in the 1980s, William Rifkin ’78 examined how a water quality control board in California handled disputes over pollution cleanup costs. The board was entirely Republican, while its technical staff seemed to be primarily Democratic—yet 99% of the time, the sides reached mutually agreeable…

A labyrinth of rooms stretches across the third floor of N51, the weathered gray building that has long housed the MIT Museum. The rooms look more like a handyperson’s workshop than a scientist’s lab. There’s woodworking equipment, metalworking equipment, hammers, wrenches, and dozens of boxes just for storing bike parts. Cookstoves line a windowsill. Pots…

The corridors of WMBR are quiet—empty of the DJs who should be combing the shelves in search of the perfect song, the engineers ensuring that the equipment is broadcasting to the whole Boston area. MIT’s campus radio station closed its doors in the basement of Walker Memorial in March 2020, when the Institute sent staff…

In 1976, Alan Grodzinsky ’71, ScD ’74, was feeling a little frustrated. He had spent two years teaching a basic course on semiconductor physics and circuits in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, learning the material in the fast-moving field as he went along. That didn’t leave him any time for research. Then…

Reihaneh Irani-Famili knows a little about the fault line running through just about every business today: the IT/OT divide. Now vice president of emergency planning and business resiliency at gas and electricity company National Grid, Irani-Famili was in previous jobs a translator of sorts between information technology, which manages data and applications, and operational technology,…

People can be your most important catalyst for digital transformation—or the greatest obstacle. When people-related challenges to transformation progress emerge, the problems are usually very easy to identify but much harder to solve. The challenge is not awareness. Organizations realize that cloud transformations are hard and that they need highly skilled, motivated staff to carry…

On Tuesday, a panel of experts at the FDA will meet to discuss whether Pfizer’s covid vaccine should be approved for 5-to-11-year-olds in the US. If that group says yes, the decision will go to the CDC’s immunization advisory board, known as ACIP, which meets next week. According to Anthony Fauci, if both those groups…

With the supply-chain disruptions of the past two years showing no signs of easing anytime soon, businesses are turning to a new generation of AI-powered simulations called digital twins to help them get goods and services to customers on time. These tools not only predict disruptions down the line, but suggest what to do about…

Katherine D. Morgan was “super burnt out” on dating apps. She’d seen people using services like Tinder and Bumble—but they didn’t make a lot of sense to her. “A lot of my friends were talking about how they had had success, and I was just like, ‘I wish there was another way,’” she says. So…

Fall 2021: the season of pumpkins, pecan pies, and peachy new phones. Every year, right on cue, Apple, Samsung, Google, and others drop their latest releases. These fixtures in the consumer tech calendar no longer inspire the surprise and wonder of those heady early days. But behind all the marketing glitz, there’s something remarkable going…

Around the world, citizens, governments, and corporations are mobilizing to reduce carbon emissions. The unprecedented and ongoing climate disasters have put the necessity to decarbonize into sharp relief. In 2021 alone these climate emergencies included a blistering “heat dome” of nearly 50 °C in the normally temperate Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada,…

The world has changed dramatically in a short amount of time—changing the world of work along with it. The new hybrid remote and in-office work world has ramifications for tech—specifically cybersecurity—and signals that it’s time to acknowledge just how intertwined humans and technology truly are. Enabling a fast-paced, cloud-powered collaboration culture is critical to rapidly…

The news: Surgeons have successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a human patient and watched it start to work, the AP reported today. The pig had been genetically engineered so that its organ was less likely to be rejected. The feat is a potentially huge milestone in the quest to one day use animal organs…

An endless variety of virtual creatures scamper and scuttle across the screen, struggling over obstacles or dragging balls toward a target. They look like half-formed crabs made of sausages—or perhaps Thing, the disembodied hand from The Addams Family. But these “unimals” (short for “universal animals”) could in fact help researchers develop more general-purpose intelligence in…