MIT Technology Review

Climate change is warping geological time, compressing the time scales of natural processes. In photographs taken around the world, Ian van Coller has documented these shifts, reflected in rocks, sediment, and the shrinking of glaciers. Van Coller collaborates with scientists who annotate his images, pointing out key geological features. He also uses historical photos to…

In 2017, MIT Technology Review honored Tracy Chou as one of our 35 Innovators Under 35. At the time, Chou was working to expose Silicon Valley’s diversity issues. As an engineer at Pinterest, she’d published a widely circulated blog post calling for tech companies to share data on how many women worked on their engineering…

Though we’ve called it the “Change” issue, this edition of the magazine is really about two things: reflection and empowerment. For far too many of us, the pandemic has been a study in feeling powerless, and we’ve had little time to reflect as we focus on keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe, employed, and…

In late 2007, less than 10 years into the company’s existence, Google came out swinging on the clean energy front. To a fanfare of plaudits up and down Silicon Valley and well beyond, it declared “RE<C” as its goal: make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The company invested tens of millions of dollars into R&D…

One day in late March, People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper, shared a pair of photos on Chinese social media. The first, in black and white, was of the signing of the Boxer Protocol, a 1901 treaty between the Qing empire, which ruled China at the time, and 11 foreign nations. Troops from…

The workers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, wanted a union. The center opened in March of last year, just as stay-at-home orders for covid-19 went into effect. While much of the world economy tanked, some sectors thrived, including tech—Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would add some $75 billion to his own net worth…

For Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet, covid-19 was an economic blessing. Even as the pandemic sent the global economy into a deep recession and cratered most companies’ profits, these companies—often referred to as the “Big Four” of technology—not only survived but thrived. Collectively, they now have annual revenue of well over a trillion dollars, and…

A year into the covid-19 pandemic, Apple commemorated the growing array of devices featuring its custom M1 chip with great fanfare, including a “Mission Implausible” ad on TV featuring a young man running across the rooftops of its “spaceship” campus in Cupertino and infiltrating the facility to “steal” the breakthrough microprocessor from a MacBook and…

As an MIT senior, Jerome “Jerre” Spurr had paid little attention to the articles in the Boston Globe about the new reservoir planned for Western Massachusetts. But in 1927, just a month before his graduation, he found himself in a face-to-face interview with Frank Winsor, the chief engineer of the massive construction project. Winsor had…

It‘s Ursula’s third time in the functional MRI machine. Heather Kosakowski, a PhD student in cognitive neuroscience, is hoping to get just two precious minutes of data from her session. Even though Ursula has been booked to have her brain scanned for two hours, it’s far from a sure thing. Her first two sessions, also…

Admissions applications in this pandemic year jumped 66% after MIT temporarily lifted the requirement to submit test scores. But for the 1,340 students who got good news from MIT on Pi Day, coming to Cambridge for the usual Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) was off the table. Instead, the Admissions Office invited them to CP*, a…

Last May, when we issued our Climate Action Plan for the Decade, we were mobilizing MIT to take on the climate problem as never before. The complexity and uncertainty of climate change make tackling it much more than a “moonshot.” Getting humans to the moon was difficult. But it was a well-​defined problem with a…

Which is more powerful: the urge for sex or the instinct to stay away from someone who’s sick? A new study suggests that at least in mice, it’s the latter. Researchers in the lab of Gloria Choi, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and a member of the Picower Institute for…

Arup K. Chakraborty and Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93, have been named Institute Professors, the highest honor for MIT faculty members. Chakraborty, the founding director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), is a pioneer in applying computational techniques to immunology. His work has led to discoveries about the functioning of T cells…

Early detection is key to surviving melanoma, a type of malignant tumor responsible for more than 70% of skin-cancer-related deaths worldwide, but “suspicious pigmented skin lesions” (SPLs) are so common it’s impractical for doctors to check them all out. Now MIT researchers have developed a tool that can analyze skin photos taken with a smartphone…

When water used in many industrial systems evaporates, salts and other dissolved minerals can be left behind on component surfaces, where they eventually degrade equipment, block pipes, and reduce the efficiency of important heat exchange processes. Now MIT researchers have discovered a phenomenon that could help solve this problem while potentially turning the contaminants into…

Many companies don’t know yet how climate change will change their business, but more are taking the inquiry seriously, signaling a new reality—one that calls any companies don’t yet know how for guarding against systemic risk while protecting customer relationships and corporate reputations. Recognizing that reducing carbon emissions is essential to combat climate change, AT&T…

Testing perovskite solar cells in the lab used to require a decent pair of running shoes. The materials fell apart so quickly that scientists would bolt from where they made the cells to where they tested them, trying to measure their performance before the cells degraded in their hands—usually within a couple of minutes. Perovskites…

In 2013, the American virologist Ralph Baric approached Zhengli Shi at a meeting. Baric was a top expert in coronaviruses, with hundreds of papers to his credit, and Shi, along with her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been discovering them by the fistful in bat caves. In one sample of bat guano,…

It was never going to be easy to challenge the market power of Facebook, the world’s largest social network and 34th-largest company, by revenue—and on Monday, a US judge further complicated efforts by dismissing two legal complaints against it brought by attorneys general around the country. Judge James Boasberg of the DC Circuit Court sided…

The record-breaking heat wave baking the Northwest US offers the latest example of how ill-prepared we are to deal with the deadly challenges of climate change. The triple-digit temperatures in many areas have created soaring energy demands and strained the grid as residents crank up fans and air conditioners—in many cases newly acquired units in…

It has long been thought that intense pressures and temperatures on Venus made life at the surface practically impossible. So last September, when scientists announced the possible discovery of phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus—a potential biosignature of life—some wondered whether microbial life might be living in the planet’s clouds. They may want to…

The global effort to develop vaccines against covid-19 has been a scientific triumph. The search for new therapies, however, has had far less success. More than a year and a half into the pandemic, few treatment options for covid-19 exist, and those that are available seem to have only modest impact on the course of…

In April 2018, Anming Hu, a Chinese-Canadian associate professor at the University of Tennessee, received an unexpected visit from the FBI. The agents wanted to know whether he’d been involved in a Chinese government “talent program,” which offered overseas researchers incentives to bring their work back to Chinese universities. Not too long ago, American universities…

Alina Chan started asking questions in March 2020. She was chatting with friends on Facebook about the virus then spreading out of China. She thought it was strange that people were saying it had come out of a food market. If that was so, why hadn’t anyone found any infected animals? She wondered why no…

When oxygen supplies ran out in several municipalities across the Brazilian state of Amazonas in January, 61 premature babies grabbed the headlines. The tiny infants didn’t have covid-19, but the Amazonas State Secretariat of Health (SES-AM) was worried that the strain the pandemic was putting on the health-care system had left them in danger. Things…

A pair of companies have begun designing what could become Europe’s largest direct-air-capture plant, capable of capturing as much as a million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year and burying it deep beneath the floor of the North Sea. The sequestered climate pollution will be sold as carbon credits, reflecting the rising demand for…

For over a week now, a corner of YouTube frequented by Kazakh dissidents and close observers of human rights in Xinjiang has been only intermittently available. On June 15, the YouTube channel Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights went dark, its feed of videos replaced by a vague statement that the channel had been “terminated for violating…

If you drive in the United States, chances are you can’t remember the last time you bought a paper map, printed out a digital map, or even stopped to ask for directions. Thanks to Global Positioning System (GPS) and the mobile mapping apps on our smartphones and their real-time routing advice, navigation is a solved…

For billions of years, Earth has been playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. New research published today in Nature posits that roughly 1,700 stars are in the right position to have spotted life on Earth as early as 5,000 years ago. These stars, within 100 parsecs (or about 326 light-years) of the sun, were found…

Mundane tasks suddenly become extremely complex in space. I spoke with former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin, who flew two missions to space, to learn about how astronauts handle the day-to-day. Here are a few of the highlights. When it comes to everyday, mundane tasks you needed to relearn to do in space, what are some…

Years ago, LinkedIn discovered that the recommendation algorithms it uses to match job candidates with opportunities were producing biased results. The algorithms were ranking candidates partly on the basis of how likely they were to apply for a position or respond to a recruiter. The system wound up referring more men than women for open…

It was August 2017, and pleasant and breezy in the central mountains of Madagascar. The passengers loading their bags into the minibus leaving Ankazobe, a small town in the highlands, were grateful for the morning coolness. It would be warm and sticky on the trip they were taking to Antananarivo, the island’s million-person capital 100…

If you’ve applied for a job lately, it’s all but guaranteed that your application was reviewed by software—in most cases, before a human ever laid eyes on it. In this episode, the first in a four-part investigation into automated hiring practices, we speak with the CEOs of ZipRecruiter and CareerBuilder, and one of the architects…

Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company’s sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. While high-tech surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, it is rare for companies or individuals to face legal consequences for selling such…

The news: China’s intensifying crackdown has sent cryptocurrency prices tumbling. China has been upping its regulatory squeeze on cryptocurrencies for some time, but it now looks likely that over 90% of Bitcoin mining capacity in the country will shut down, according to a report in the Global Times, which is published by the Chinese state.…

Venus might be hell, but don’t call it a dead planet. Amid surface temperatures of up to 471 °C and surface pressures 100 times greater than those on Earth, new research suggests the planet might still be geologically active. That’s encouraging news to people who think it could once have hosted life (or that it might still…

Amid the many business disruptions caused by covid-19, here’s one largely overlooked: artificial intelligence (AI) whiplash. As the pandemic began to upend the world last year, businesses reached for every tool at their disposal—including AI—to solve challenges and serve customers safely and effectively. In a 2021 KPMG survey of US business executives conducted between January…

Throughout the pandemic, there has been serious tension between what the public wants to know and what scientists have been able to say for certain. Scientists have been able to learn more about covid, faster, than about any other disease in history—but at the same time, the public has been shocked when doctors can’t answer…

In America, at least 17 people a day die waiting for an organ transplant. But instead of waiting for a donor to die, what if we could someday grow our own organs? Last week, six years after NASA announced its Vascular Tissue Challenge, a competition designed to accelerate research that could someday lead to artificial…

We already knew that biased data and biased algorithms skew automated decision-making in a way that disadvantages low-income and minority groups. For example, software used by banks to predict whether or not someone will pay back credit-card debt typically favors wealthier white applicants. Many researchers and a slew of start-ups are trying to fix the…

If you want to believe, now is the time: the hope that we might one day stumble upon alien life is greater than it ever was. No, it’s not going to be little green men speeding through space in flying disks—more likely microbes or primitive bacteria. But a discovery like that would nevertheless be a…

Smart data integration can help to increase the quality of data-based decision-making, especially in scenarios where clinical decision-makers face multiple barriers and challenges along the patient pathway. And this is critically important in today’s digitized health-care environment where the quality of decision-making depends on the quality and availability of the underlying data. In medicine, decision-making…

In the spring of 2020, the first versions of covid-19 exposure notification systems were released to the public. These systems promised to slow the disease’s spread by providing automated warnings to people who came into contact with the virus. Now, over a year later, residents in over 50 countries—including half of US states—can opt into…

Mustafa Aksu had a bad track record with therapists. Growing up in China, he was bullied by his Han Chinese classmates for being Uyghur. This made him constantly anxious, and his stomach often hurt, so much that sometimes he threw up. A concerned teacher referred him to counseling, but Aksu was skeptical it could help.…

While businesses in every sector have been working toward a digital transformation for the past several years, covid-19 accelerated this shift across industries. New technologies are advancing at a pace that requires employers to continuously retrain their workforce to stay current. Organizations must become places of learning if they are to prepare workers for jobs…