MIT Technology Review

The supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy has been photographed for the first time, giving astronomers invaluable insight into how black holes interact with their surroundings. The object, known as Sagittarius A*, was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, the same global team that took the famous first-ever picture…

Google Search displays advertisements for stalkerware services that boast real-time monitoring of romantic partners and spouses, despite the company’s self-imposed ban on such ads. According to research by mobile security firm Certo Software and confirmed by MIT Technology Review, Google Search queries related to tracking partners such as a wife or girlfriend commonly return ads…

Just an hour before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Russian government hackers targeted the American satellite company Viasat, officials from the US, EU, and UK said today. The operation resulted in an immediate and significant loss of communication in the earliest days of the war for the Ukrainian military, which relied on Viasat’s services for command…

A few years ago, Jamie Gravell needed help. She was working full time as a research assistant while finishing her dissertation, her son had just turned two, and the housework was piling up, even after she’d repeatedly asked her husband to do more. So she downloaded Cozi. It’s one example of an increasingly popular solution:…

Ubiquitous computing has triggered an avalanche of data that is beyond human processing capabilities. AI technologies have emerged as the only viable way to turn this data into information. As more computing produces more data, more computing power is needed to power AI. Next generation AI will soon look to planetary-scale computing systems to further…

There are 3 common challenges that organizations face while transforming AI aspirations into scalable and intelligent solutions. Get an insider’s view of use case scenarios that illustrate real business and functional value through a proven framework and process toward sustainable digital transformation. About the speaker Vishal Kapoor, Vice President, Data and AI, Kyndryl Vishal Kapoor…

The pig heart transplanted into an American patient earlier this year in a landmark operation carried a porcine virus that may have derailed the experiment and contributed to his death two months later, say transplant specialists. David Bennett Sr. was near death in January when he received a genetically edited pig heart in a pioneering…

Meta’s AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the remarkable abilities and the harmful flaws of OpenAI’s pioneering neural network GPT-3. And in an unprecedented move for Big Tech, it is giving it away to researchers—together with details about how it was built and trained. “We strongly believe that the…

In the quest to find a better way to store power for the grid, an Italian startup is turning to an unlikely source: carbon dioxide. The company, called Energy Dome, has built a test facility to put the greenhouse gas to work in energy storage. Renewable power has been growing worldwide, but sources like wind…

Research shows that businesses, governments, and consumers around the world are increasingly concerned about the environment. But despite our apparent concern, we seem to be doing very little about it. Per a recent report, material extraction and use has nearly quadrupled in the last 50 years, outpacing even population growth. The current economy is built…

Midnight, 6 a.m., 8 a.m., 8:30 a.m., 9 a.m.: these times are ingrained in Queeny Song’s mind. For over a week in April, the 24-year-old Shanghai resident had to get her phone out at these five points every day to refresh a different grocery delivery app in hopes of grabbing a hard-to-get delivery slot. During…

Heat waves are scorching India and Pakistan this week, breaking records as the region enters the hottest time of the year. Some states in India have seen temperatures top 43 °C (110 °F), with northwest India likely to see even higher temperatures in the coming days, according to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD). Extreme heat…

The Minneapolis Police Department violated civil rights law through a pattern of racist policing practices, according to a damning report published today by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights. The report, which is the result of a two-year inquiry, found that officers stop, search, arrest, and use force against people of color at a much…

Just hours after Twitter announced it was accepting Elon Musk’s buyout offer, the SpaceX CEO made his plans for the social network clear. In a press release, Musk outlined the sweeping changes he intended to make, including opening up the algorithms that determine what users see in their feed. Musk’s ambition to open-source Twitter’s algorithms…

Memory contextualizes our emotions and deepens our identities. But illnesses such as dementia can wipe out decades of experiences without a trace. In her debut book, The Memory Thief, science journalist Lauren Aguirre ’86 explores how opioids can contribute to this loss. The book chronicles an unusual form of amnesia initially identified in a group…

It’s a familiar suburban problem: landscapers with gas-powered tools generate a terrible din. For Jamie Banks, SM ’79, who was running a business out of her house in 2010, the problem was no minor disruption: “I was surrounded by multifamily homes and commercial properties and subjected to loud landscape maintenance noise hours a day, several…

When Manuel Moreu, SM ’78, was a child, his father was an officer in the Spanish navy, and Moreu wanted nothing more than to be an officer himself. At age five, however, side effects of antibiotics left him deaf in one ear, which meant that the navy would never take him. “Rather than operate the…

Grad students Tara Boroushaki (left) and Laura Dodds of the Media Lab’s Signal Kinetics group calibrate a robotic system called RFusion that can find and retrieve objects, even if the items are hidden under a pile.

At MIT, momentum is a phenomenon we understand. It also defines us as a community. Earlier in the year, when I announced I would step down as president, one crucial responsibility was especially clear to me: sustaining the Institute’s momentum through the transition to its next president. Fortunately, a group of more than 200 MIT…

Oncologists often turn to chemo​therapy, an aggressive treatment that often relies on trial and error. It can be difficult to tell how many cancer cells chemotherapy has destroyed—let alone why different tumors may respond to the same treatment in different ways. Hadley Sikes, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT…

Dense, lush rainforests in the Amazon. Rivers and streams running through Appalachia’s green hills and mountains. Rocky coasts of the Hawaiian islands battered by seas. Each of these landscapes poses mysteries that inspire Taylor Perron’s research. What he sees as “whodunits” about the Earth itself require investigations into how past climate, erosion, and plate tectonics…

April 1969 From “Computer-Based Services in Personal Transactions”: The challenge thrown down by the computer for the future is to transmit information without the paper. This challenge leads to speculation about a “checkless society,” a phrase that has captured the imagination of journalists to the point of popularizing a concept long before economic, social, and…

Payu Harris wanted to create a cryptocurrency for his grandma. For all grandmas, he would say, or uncis in Lakota—especially the impoverished ones living on the outskirts of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, with little access to electricity or the internet. He’d argue that MazaCoin could be called a success if she used…

Last summer, a special subcommittee of the US Senate met remotely to weigh the benefits of launching a central-bank digital currency, or CBDC—something that could, if optimally designed, transform the US financial system, making it more accessible to more citizens. For senators staring intently at their laptops, this was basically the first day of digital-currency…

Ovaries contain hundreds of thousands of underdeveloped eggs, held in a kind of suspended animation. Each month, one matures and is released—potentially to be fertilized by sperm and create an embryo. For the first time, scientists say they have managed to take eggs from the ovaries of transgender men and get them ready for fertilization…

The US hosts more child sexual abuse content online than any other country in the world, new research has found. The US accounted for 30% of the global total of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) URLs at the end of March 2022, according to the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based organization that works to spot…

The day I spoke to Jennifer Doudna was a tough day: the US Patent Office had just ruled against her university on CRISPR’s most important uses, handing the commercial rights to her rivals at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Doudna is the co-discoverer of CRISPR editing, the revolutionary method for engineering genes that,…

Last summer, investors gathered in the parking lot of a converted warehouse in Santa Cruz, California. Rob McGinnis, the founder and chief executive of Prometheus Fuels, was ready to show off his “Maxwell Core.” The pipe-shaped device is packed with a membrane riddled with carbon nanotubes, forming pores that separate alcohols from water. That day,…

Robin Kim graduated from New York University in 2015 with a degree in economics. He borrowed more than $100,000 from the US government and quickly became locked in to high interest rates. He has been trying to pay off his student loans ever since. Eventually, Kim refinanced through a private lender to lower the interest…

On the night of April 22, millions of people in China watched the same video on their phones: a six-minute montage of audio clips from the covid-19 lockdown in Shanghai, titled “The Voice of April.” Its emphasis on the lockdown’s human toll struck a chord, and people shared it widely on WeChat and other messaging…

While NFT traders in the US fret over their tax responsibilities for selling big-ticket digital assets, their peers in China are faced with a very different problem: the Chinese industry is headed to a future where NFTs can’t be traded at all. On April 13, three national financial industry associations in China—which collectively cover almost…

Shortly after midnight on May 4, 2018, Jane Manchun Wong tweeted her first “finding” ever. “Twitter is working on End-to-End Encrypted Secret DM!” she wrote. A young woman of color, then just 23, exposing the plans of a Big Tech firm without any tools apart from her own ability to reverse-engineer code was (and is)…

In the back room of an old and graying building in the northernmost region of New Zealand, one of the most advanced computers for artificial intelligence is helping to redefine the technology’s future. Te Hiku Media, a nonprofit Māori radio station run by life partners Peter-Lucas Jones and Keoni Mahelona, bought the machine at a…