MIT Technology Review

Startups are exploring how electric planes could clean up air travel, which accounts for about 3% of worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions. The problem is that today’s electric aircraft could safely carry you and about a dozen fellow passengers only around 30 miles, according to a recent analysis. The limiting factor is the battery, in particular the…

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article. In the late 1950s, Ian Burton, then a geographer at the University of Chicago, learned about a troubling conundrum with levees. These expensive and engineering-intensive strategies—which the US Army Corps of Engineers favored for reining in floods along big river floodplains—worked well for holding…

Late one evening in June of 2016, John Barentine stood alone at Mather Point, an iconic and rarely empty overlook at Grand Canyon National Park. The moon slid away, leaving the darkness of a crisp, clear sky. The stars that make up our galaxy seemed to align overhead. The inky chasm of the ancient canyon…

Fertility treatments can be undesirable for transgender men, as they involve pausing gender-affirming hormone therapy and undergoing potentially distressing procedures such as female hormone treatments and vaginal exams. New evidence suggests combining two existing techniques for the first time could help sidestep those issues. The process involves removing pieces of a transgender man’s ovary, extracting…

A hacking group linked to China has spent the last three years targeting human rights organizations, think tanks, news media, and agencies of multiple foreign governments, according to a revealing new report from the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. The report, shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review, offers new clues about how private contractors and front…

Ransomware, hackers, and nation-state threat actors have long dominated security teams’ focus. These external threats often feel more urgent and more dangerous, carrying greater potential consequences for the business. There’s no question about intent—it’s malicious. From a psychological perspective, it’s straightforward for security teams to identify the enemy and prepare for a fight. But what…

When Ollie’s mother, Katie, was nine weeks pregnant, her obstetrician-gynecologist’s office in Boulder, Colorado, offered her a special $100 price on a new prenatal blood test that she was told could detect major chromosomal hiccups such as Down syndrome and trisomy 18. She and her husband agreed—who can say no to a deal?—with one caveat.…

A heritage financial services institution isn’t necessarily the first place a technologist looks to grow their career. But that hasn’t been a problem for JPMorgan Chase, which has made itself an appealing career destination for technologists. “Technology is not an afterthought,” says Gill Haus, chief information officer of consumer and community banking at JPMorgan Chase.…

Sabra Klein is deeply aware that sex matters. During her PhD research at Johns Hopkins University, Klein learned how sex hormones can influence the brain and behavior. “I naively thought: Everybody knows hormones can affect lots of physiological processes—our metabolism, our heart, our bone density. It must be affecting the immune system,” she says. But…

Matt Kaeberlein is what you might call a dog person. He has grown up with dogs and describes his German shepherd, Dobby, as “really special.” But Dobby is 14 years old—around 98 in dog years. “I’m very much seeing the aging process in him,” says Kaeberlein, who studies aging at the University of Washington in…

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which marks the US’s largest-ever investment in climate and clean energy at nearly $400 billion, is a clear environmental victory. But just how far that funding will go in cutting carbon emissions is yet to be seen, and the results are far less certain that some have claimed. Estimates…

Researchers have used deep learning to model more precisely than ever before how ice crystals form in the atmosphere. Their paper, published this week in PNAS, hints at the potential to significantly increase the accuracy of weather and climate forecasting. The researchers used deep learning to predict how atoms and molecules behave. First, models were…

A conversation about equity and what it takes to make effective AI policy. This episode was taped before a live audience at MIT Technology Review’s annual AI conference, EmTech Digital. We Meet: Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology at the Brookings Institution Anthony Green, producer of the In Machines We Trust podcast…

A bioengineered cornea has restored vision to people with impaired eyesight, including those who were blind before they received the implant. These corneas, described in Nature Biotechnology today, could help restore sight to people in countries where human cornea transplants are in short supply, and for a lower price. Unlike human corneas, which must be…

DXY is the latest victim of a polarized social media environment in China, where scientific debates are increasingly becoming ideological conflicts.

A full decade has passed since Ellen Pao filed a sexual discrimination suit against her employer, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Two years later came the toxicity and misogyny of Gamergate, followed by #MeToo scandals and further revelations of powerful tech-business men behaving very badly. All catalyzed an overdue public reckoning…

A habit called “lateral reading” is a core part of any good fact-checking routine. It means opening up a bunch of tabs and doing multiple searches to verify the facts, source, or claims made in a piece of online information. So it seemed like great news when a new study from Poynter, YouGov, and Google…

Nikhita Singhal’s breath still catches when she talks about how her life changed. A psychiatry resident at the University of Toronto, Singhal says it was using psychedelic drugs—ayahuasca, ketamine, and MDMA—that finally addressed the eating disorder she’d had since she was seven years old. “It was really emotionally and psychologically painful,” she says, recounting a…

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. Social media is polluting society. Moderation alone won’t fix the problem We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to our opponents.…

We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to our opponents. At the same time, we don’t want to be exposed to speech that is inappropriate or crosses a line. Technology companies address this conundrum by setting standards for free speech, a practice protected…

I learned on a liveblog that I had lost the right to have an abortion. When the United States Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade on the morning of June 24, 2022, I was one of the nearly 16,000 people reading SCOTUSblog, a news site launched 20 years ago, which has no official relationship with…

Fifteen years ago, David Glowacki was walking in the mountains when he took a sharp fall. When he hit the ground, blood began leaking into his lungs. As he lay there suffocating, Glowacki’s field of perception swelled. He peered down at his own body—and, instead of his typical form, saw that he was made up…

China’s chipmaking industry descended into chaos last week, with at least four top executives associated with a state-owned semiconductor fund arrested on corruption charges. It’s an explosive turn of events that could force the country to fundamentally rethink how it invests in chip development, according to analysts and experts. On July 30, China’s top anticorruption…

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 copy you into an embryo for organ harvesting In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage…

Machine-learning researchers make many decisions when designing new models. They decide how many layers to include in neural networks and what weights to give inputs at each node. The result of all this human decision-making is that complex models end up being “designed by intuition” rather than systematically, says Frank Hutter, head of the machine-learning…

In a search for novel forms of longevity medicine, a biotech company based in Israel says it intends to create embryo-stage versions of people in order to harvest tissues for use in transplant treatments. The company, Renewal Bio, is pursuing recent advances in stem-cell technology and artificial wombs demonstrated by Jacob Hanna, a biologist at…

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. Researchers repaired cells in damaged pig organs an hour after it died The news: A new system called OrganEx stopped the deterioration of cells in pig organs one hour after the animal’s death,…

A new system stopped the deterioration of cells in pig organs one hour after the animal’s death, a finding that suggests cells don’t die as quickly as previously understood. The technology successfully restored blood circulation and repaired damaged cells in the pigs. The research, described in Nature today, could pave the way to making 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. Everything you need to know about the monkeypox vaccines The global outbreak of monkeypox has so far led to more than 24,000 cases in over 80 countries, and the World Health Organization has…

The global outbreak of monkeypox has so far led to more than 24,000 cases in over 80 countries, and the World Health Organization has warned that the window of opportunity to contain the disease and prevent it from becoming endemic outside Africa is rapidly closing. Vaccines represent a potentially crucial measure. Monkeypox vaccines are already…

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. Electric vehicle uptake in the US could be held back by a lack of batteries The news: The US Senate Democrats released a bill last week that could significantly cut the country’s carbon…

A tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 designed to spur adoption of EVs could fail to reach consumers because of the auto industry’s heavy reliance on battery materials and components from China. To qualify for the credit, which could effectively shave up to $7,500 off the price of a new EV, 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. Wildfires are raging across the US The news: Five large wildfires ignited across the US yesterday, with further outbreaks expected over the next few days, experts have warned. The new fires in California,…

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. Here are the biggest technology wins in the breakthrough climate bill Two weeks after blowing up hopes of a US climate deal, Senator Joe Manchin announced on Wednesday that he and Senator Chuck…

Two weeks after blowing up hopes of a US climate deal, Senator Joe Manchin announced on Wednesday that he and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, had struck a compromise agreement that would provide nearly $400 billion for climate and energy projects. It remains to be seen whether the sprawling spending package proposed by…