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. How China’s biggest online influencers fell from their thrones No one had foreseen just how fast three of China’s most powerful influencers would fall. On June 3, Austin Li, a 30-year-old live-streamer with…

No one had foreseen just how fast three of China’s most powerful influencers would fall. On June 3, Austin Li, a 30-year-old livestreamer with over 60 million followers on the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform Taobao, abruptly cut off a stream after a tank-shaped ice cream dessert appeared on the screen. While he later posted that it…

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. Chinese hackers exploited years-old software flaws to break into telecom giants The news: Hackers employed by the Chinese government have broken into numerous major telecommunications firms around the world in a cyber-espionage campaign…

Cutting carbon emissions from planes is going to be difficult—but not impossible. With enough funding, policy support, and alternative fuel, aviation can make enough progress to help the world reach global climate targets by 2050, according to a new report. Today, aviation makes up about 3% of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide. Some airlines and industry groups…

Hackers employed by the Chinese government have broken into numerous major telecommunications firms around the world in a cyber-espionage campaign that has lasted at least two years, according to a new advisory from American security agencies. The hackers allegedly breached their targets by exploiting old and well-known critical vulnerabilities in popular networking hardware. Once they…

Cryptocurrency is fast gaining mainstream acceptance as consumers look for innovative ways to diversify their savings, protect against inflation, and save on transaction fees. Big-name brands are taking note: PayPal, Starbucks, AT&T, AMC Theatres, Microsoft, and Whole Foods are among a growing battalion of organizations that now accept payment in cryptocurrencies. In fact, nearly 16,000…

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. Meet the LGBTQ activists fighting to be themselves online in Malaysia Nur Sajat Kamaruzzaman has been a public figure in Malaysia for well over a decade. Classically beautiful, she has built a following…

Nur Sajat Kamaruzzaman has been a public figure in Malaysia for well over a decade. Classically beautiful, with long, dark hair and Marilyn Monroe-esque curves, she has built a following of hundreds of thousands on Instagram with a curated feed of immaculately arranged pictures, sales plugs, and inspirational quotes. Born in Selangor, an affluent state…

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. Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder…

Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it. Now the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has about as much money as all of them…

Third-party cookies might be going the way of the dinosaur, but organizations will still need data about their customers’ online behaviors to deliver the personalized experiences they expect. This means a shift in data strategy to focus on multiple types of first-party data, collected with customer consent. First-party data is data that customers agree to…

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. This startup wants to pack more energy into electric vehicle batteries Fully charged: Electric vehicles are becoming more popular, but they’re still constrained by how far they’re able to travel on a single…

While electric vehicles are rising in popularity, they are still limited in range—a Tesla Model 3 can go for about 350 miles before it needs to be recharged—and concerns about safety have plagued the lithium-ion batteries that dominate the market. In a quest to build batteries for electric vehicles that can take us farther safely,…

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. A new storage technique could vastly expand the number of livers available for transplant A patient who received a donated liver that had been stored for three days in a new type of…

A patient who received a donated liver that had been stored for three days in a new type of machine that mimics the human body is healthy one year on from surgery, according to a study in Nature Biotechnology. The technology could significantly increase the number of livers suitable for transplant, the authors claim, both…

The Supreme Court is shortly expected to issue its decision on a challenge to Roe v. Wade that will—if a leaked draft version of the opinion holds—end federal protection for abortion access across the US. If that happens, it will have far-reaching consequences for millions of people. One of those is that it could significantly…

On May 18, thousands of software developers in China woke up to find that their open-source code hosted on Gitee, a state-backed Chinese competitor to the international code repository platform GitHub, had been locked and hidden from public view. Later that day, Gitee released a statement explaining that the locked code was being manually reviewed,…

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 big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere Four years ago, Alex Kendall sat in a car on a small road in the British countryside and took his hands…

Four years ago, Alex Kendall sat in a car on a small road in the British countryside and took his hands off the wheel. The car, equipped with a few cheap cameras and a massive neural network, veered to the side. When it did, Kendall grabbed the wheel for a few seconds to correct it.…

A robotic shoulder that stretches, presses, and twists lab-grown human tendon tissue could pave the way for more successful tissue grafts. Though the field of tissue engineering is still mostly experimental, skin cells, cartilage, and even a windpipe grown from samples of human cells have been implanted in patients so far. But growing usable human…

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. Inside Charm Industrial’s big bet on corn stalks for carbon removal In recent weeks, a crew of staffers from a company called Charm Industrial have been working on the edge of Kansas corn…

Charm Industrial has gained attention for its unusual approach to storing away carbon dioxide: converting plant matter into bio-oil that it then pumps into deep wells and salt caverns. (See related story.) But the San Francisco startup is now exploring whether that oil could be used to cut emissions from iron and steelmaking as well,…

In recent weeks, a crew of staffers from a company called Charm Industrial have been working on the edge of Kansas corn fields, moving rolled bales of stalks, leaves, husks, and tassels up to a white semi-trailer. Inside, a contraption called a pyrolyzer uses high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to break down 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 dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images Another month, another flood of weird, wonderful and cute images generated by an artificial intelligence. In April, OpenAI showed off its new picture-making neural…

Another month, another flood of weird and wonderful images generated by an artificial intelligence. In April, OpenAI showed off its new picture-making neural network, DALL-E 2, which could produce remarkable high-res images of almost anything it was asked to. It outstripped the original DALL-E in almost every way. Now, just a few weeks later, Google…

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 walls are closing in on Clearview AI Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI has been fined more than $10 million by the UK’s data protection watchdog for collecting the faces of UK…

Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI has been fined almost $10 million by the UK’s data protection watchdog for collecting the faces of UK citizens from the web and social media. The firm was also ordered to delete all of the data it holds on UK citizens. The move by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office…

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 hype around DeepMind’s new AI model misses what’s actually cool about it Earlier this month, DeepMind presented a new “generalist” AI model called Gato. The model can play the video game Atari, caption…

Earlier this month, DeepMind presented a new “generalist” AI model called Gato. The model can play Atari video games, caption images, chat, and stack blocks with a real robot arm, the Alphabet-owned AI lab announced. All in all, Gato can do 604 different tasks. But while Gato is undeniably fascinating, in the week since its…

The carbon impact of the world’s manufacturing industries has held the imagination of climate change activists for decades. The belching factory smokestack was one of the first salient targets of the decarbonization movement, beginning with the passage of the US Clean Air Act in 1970. Today, with ever-dire projections of the impact that global warming…

The world is rapidly moving from human-directed manufacturing using computerized assembly lines to largely automated smart factories that manufacture more efficiently using real-time data. Considered by many to be the fourth industrial revolution, or “Industry 4.0,” this transformation requires a bevy of technologies to deliver on its promise of ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). From smart devices…

In a one-minute video that went viral in China in early May, three government workers in hazmat suits spray disinfectant all over someone’s home: inside the fridge, under the television, over the couch. On social media, Chinese people worried about whether their home would experience the same treatment if they were unlucky enough to catch…

Money is weird now. When we were settling in on the theme for our May/June issue, I decided to buy an NFT of an Olive Garden for my friend Katie, who really loves Olive Garden. It was also an attempt to try to better understand NFTs. Each of the “Non-Fungible Olive Gardens,” really just a…

Solar panels are basically synonymous with silicon. The material is used in about 95% of the panels in today’s market. But silicon solar cells are limited in how much energy they can harness from the sun, and they are still relatively expensive to make. For many, compounds called perovskites have long held promise as potentially…

After Ashley Diaz had her baby in early April, she faced a setback. She wasn’t producing enough breast milk. Her newborn son needed formula to supplement his nutrition. So she sent her mother to Target to stock up. She came back with only two boxes—the maximum allowed. Now, many of those store shelves are empty,…

Covid-19 is far more likely to kill you if you’re old. One reason is that aged immune systems struggle to cope with infections and recover from them. So why not try drugs that make bodies young again? That’s the bold idea now being explored in clinical trials around the world, which are testing drugs that…

One shiny premise of DeFi, or decentralized finance—a catch-all term for cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects related to the exchange of value—is that by spreading out and automating operations, and removing power from middlemen like banks, it can offer a system more resilient to global forces, able to survive events like war and economic downturns that…

Last month, a video went viral that showed a San Francisco police officer, at night, stopping a car that didn’t have its headlights on. Except that this was no ordinary car. As the cop approaches the vehicle, someone off-camera shouts, “Ain’t nobody in it!” The car, operated by Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, is…