MIT Technology Review

The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech’s campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk’s new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people’s brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that…

A few lonely academics have been warning for years that solar power faces a fundamental challenge that could halt the industry’s breakneck growth. Simply put: the more solar you add to the grid, the less valuable it becomes. The problem is that solar panels generate lots of electricity in the middle of sunny days, frequently…

One of the most prolific ransomware gangs in the world suddenly disappeared from the internet on Tuesday morning. The unexplained exodus comes just one day before senior officials from the White House and Russia are scheduled to meet to discuss the global ransomware crisis. The ransomware crew known as REvil has existed for years in…

Debates about technology and progress are often framed in terms of “optimism” vs. “pessimism.” For instance, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Johan Norberg, Max Roser, and the late Hans Rosling have been called the “New Optimists” for their focus on the economic, scientific, and social progress of the last two centuries. Their opponents, such as David…

Ziggi Tyler is part of TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, a private platform where brands can connect with the app’s top creators. And last week, he noticed something pretty disturbing about how the creator bios there were being automatically moderated. When he tried to enter certain phrases in his bio, some of them—“Black lives matter,” “supporting black…

When it comes to covid, kids have largely been spared. They can get infected and spread the virus, but they have little risk of becoming seriously ill or dying. Yet, just like adults, they can have symptoms that persist well beyond the initial infection. This condition, officially known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC),…

Advanced cybersecurity capabilities are essential to safeguard software, systems, and data in a new era of cloud, the internet of things, and other smart technologies. In the real estate industry, for example, companies are concerned about the potential for hijacked elevators, as well as compromised building management and heating and cooling systems. According to Greg…

The timing could have been better. Yesterday, July 11, British entrepreneur and billionaire Richard Branson shot to the edge of space in a vehicle made by his own company, Virgin Galactic – at a time when much of the world is still battling a deadly pandemic. Yet while receiving a fair amount of criticism, Branson’s flight…

Climate change is making extreme heat more common and more severe, as we’ve seen in the heat waves that have swept the western US for the past two weeks. Some climate models predict that swaths of the globe will become inhospitable to humans in the next century. But what makes a place unlivable isn’t as…

Whether you call them semis, tractor-trailers, or 18-wheelers, heavy-duty trucks keep the economy (literally) moving. And at least some of them might be ready to go electric. These workhorses have an outsize climate impact. Globally, heavy-duty vehicles, including trucks and buses, make up about 10% of all motor vehicles but produce around half of their…

On April 21, Ashley Delaney brought his father-in-law to the Goa Medical College and Hospital, the largest public hospital in the small southwestern Indian state. The hospital was in chaos and the wards were packed, with all 708 covid beds occupied—so 69-year-old Joseph Paul Alvares, a cancer survivor, had to lie on a gurney for…

The computer scientist Marijn Heule is always on the lookout for a good mathematical challenge. An associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Heule has an impressive reputation for solving intractable math problems with computational tools. His 2016 result with the “Boolean Pythagorean triples problem” was an enormous headline-grabbing proof: “Two hundred terabyte maths proof is…

Shale gas and oil extraction, also known as fracking, is often credited by conservatives with creating hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of US manufacturing jobs. As the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas,” Pennsylvania has been the poster child for the fracking industry. But far fewer jobs were created there and in neighboring states like…

The big data era has created valuable resources for public interest outcomes, like health care. In the last 18 months, the speed with which scientists were able to respond to the covid-19 pandemic—faster than any other disease in history—demonstrated the benefits of gathering, sharing, and extracting value from data for a wider good. Access to…

A year ago, vaccines to tackle the covid pandemic seemed like a far-off idea. Today, though, doses have been delivered to almost one-quarter of the world’s people—and some are being asked to prove they’re among them, leading to the rise of so-called vaccine passports. The details of these credentials vary from place to place, but…

Not all astronauts start off as test pilots. I spoke with David Saint-Jacques, a Canadian astronaut with a medical degree who’s spent 203 days aboard the ISS, and learned some of the career twists and turns one can take on the way into orbit. Most people would think being an engineer and astrophysicist is enough.…

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…