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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5KMC6)
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MIT Technology Review
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| Updated | 2025-09-16 18:03 |
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by Neel V. Patel on (#5KM8P)
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…
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by Cassandra Willyard on (#5KM5P)
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…
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by Karen Hao, Eileen Guo on (#5KK0N)
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…
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by Antonio Regalado on (#5KH8P)
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…
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by Jill Langlois on (#5KGWB)
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…
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by James Temple on (#5KG0T)
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…
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by Eileen Guo on (#5KFBK)
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…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5KEEQ)
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…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5KEAV)
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by Tatyana Woodall on (#5KE7B)
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…
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by Neel V. Patel on (#5KE7C)
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…
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by Sheridan Wall, Hilke Schellmann on (#5KDRS)
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…
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by Maryn McKenna on (#5KDRT)
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…
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by Anthony Green on (#5KDKZ)
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…
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by Patrick Howell O'Neill on (#5KD23)
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…
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by Charlotte Jee on (#5KCN7)
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.…
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by Neel V. Patel on (#5KBDR)
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…
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by Ellen Campana, Swami Chandrasekaran on (#5KB4A)
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…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5KAS3)
The steady advance of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies has been reshaping work and jobs for the past decade. Well before covid-19, robust debates were underway about the future of work and what potential scenarios for employment might emerge. While many Asian markets have met the challenge of containing the spread of covid-19 with…
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by Cat Ferguson on (#5KAJS)
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…
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by Tatyana Woodall on (#5K7T3)
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…
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by Will Douglas Heaven on (#5K66D)
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…
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by Neel V. Patel on (#5K5FK)
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…
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by Siemens Healthineers on (#5K56K)
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…
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by Betsy Ladyzhets on (#5K4M9)
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…
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by Andrew McCormick on (#5K4JW)
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.…
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by Joe Schaefer on (#5K3S6)
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…
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by Charlotte Jee on (#5K36H)
The risk of being hospitalized with the Delta covid-19 variant is roughly double that associated with the original Alpha strain, according to a study published in The Lancet. The study: The researchers analyzed data from 5.4 million people in Scotland, where the Delta variant is now dominant, from April 1 to June 6. After adjusting…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5K273)
For the past several years, economists, and government leaders have regularly sounded alarms about the dangers of big tech monopolies. On her 2020 campaign website, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren said “big tech companies have too much power, too much power over our economy, our society, our democracy.” In the months since the election, politicians…
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by Karen Hao on (#5K1P3)
Timnit Gebru never thought a scientific paper would cause her so much trouble. In 2020, as the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, Gebru had reached out to Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, and the two decided to collaborate on research about the troubling direction of artificial intelligence. Gebru wanted…
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by Tanya Basu on (#5JZQ2)
On the first hot weekend of the summer, Richard Knapp put up a sign outside Mother’s Ruin, a bar tucked in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. It had two arrows: one pointing vaccinated people indoors, another pointing unvaccinated people outdoors. The Instagram post showing the sign (above) quickly went viral among European anti-vaxxers on Reddit. “We started…
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by Karen Hao on (#5JYJC)
You can see the faint stubble coming in on his upper lip, the wrinkles on his forehead, the blemishes on his skin. He isn’t a real person, but he’s meant to mimic one—as are the hundreds of thousands of others made by Datagen, a company that sells fake, simulated humans. These humans are not gaming…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5JXEK)
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5JX41)
Clinical trials have never been more in the public eye than in the past year, as the world watched the development of vaccines against covid-19, the disease at the center of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Discussions of study phases, efficacy, and side effects dominated the news. The most distinctive feature of the vaccine trials was…
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by Cassandra Willyard on (#5JX0Z)
Covid cases are on the rise in England, and a fast-spreading variant may be to blame. B.1.617.2, which now goes by the name Delta, first emerged in India, but has since spread to 62 countries, according to the World Health Organization. Delta is still rare in the US. At a press conference on Tuesday, the…
by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5JWXE)
Digital transformation has long been a well-established strategic imperative for organizations globally. The effects of covid-19—which have transformed the world into a (perhaps permanently) dispersed collection of individual broadband-connected consumers, partners, and employees—have not disrupted or wholly redefined this trend, instead they have created additional emphasis on digital transformation strategies already well underway. This is…
by Erik Brynjolfsson, Georgios Petropoulos on (#5JWXF)
The last 15 years have been tough times for many Americans, but there are now encouraging signs of a turnaround. Productivity growth, a key driver for higher living standards, averaged only 1.3% since 2006, less than half the rate of the previous decade. But on June 3, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US…
by Abby Ohlheiser on (#5JWXG)
“That’s not my face,” Tori Dawn thought after opening TikTok to make a video in late May. The jaw reflected back on the screen was wrong: slimmer and more feminine. And when they waved their hand in front of the camera, blocking most of their face from the lens, their jaw appeared to pop back…
by Neel V. Patel on (#5JWAN)
When the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions to Venus were given the green light by NASA last week, the scientific community was stunned. Most had expected that NASA, which hadn’t launched a dedicated mission to Venus in 30 years, would be sending at least one mission to the second planet from the sun by the end of…
by Anthony Green on (#5JWAP)
Despite their popularity with kids, tablets and other connected devices are built on top of systems that weren’t designed for them to easily understand or navigate. But adapting algorithms to interact with a child isn’t without its complications—as no one child is exactly like another. Most recognition algorithms look for patterns and consistency to successfully…
by Rod McCullom on (#5JVBP)
Angela Mitchell still remembers the night she nearly died. It was almost one year ago in July. Mitchell—who turns 60 this June—tested positive for covid-19 at her job as a pharmacy technician at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago. She was sneezing, coughing, and feeling dizzy. The hospital management offered her a choice. She…
by Max S. Kim on (#5JV9M)
Early on the morning of October 12, 2020, 27-year-old Jang Deok-joon came home after working his overnight shift at South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang and jumped into the shower. He had worked at the company’s warehouse in the southern city of Daegu for a little over a year, hauling crates full of items ready to…
by Neel V. Patel on (#5JV9N)
NASA has just released the first pictures of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, taken during a flyby by the Juno probe. Juno passed Ganymede on June 7, making its closest approach at just around 1,000 kilometers from its surface while traveling at 66,800 kilometers per hour. It’s the closest any probe has come to the moon…
by Mia Sato on (#5JR6Y)
Long before the first covid-19 vaccines went into arms, certain groups in the US felt the impact of the pandemic more severely: those who whose jobs had to be done in person, who were suddenly labeled “essential”; those who were shut out from government assistance; and certain communities of color. Officials promised that the vaccine…
by Abby Ohlheiser, Eileen Guo on (#5JNZY)
On Friday, Facebook announced that it would suspend former president Donald Trump from the social network for two years, until at least January 7, 2023, and said he would “only be reinstated if conditions permit.” The announcement comes in response to recommendations last month from Facebook’s recently created Oversight Board. Facebook had hoped that the…
by Eileen Guo on (#5JN6T)
The 24-hour vigil started just after 8 a.m. US Eastern Time on June 3—more or less on schedule, and without any major disruptions. The event, hosted on Zoom and broadcast live on other platforms such as YouTube, was put together by Chinese activists to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Beijing’s bloody clampdown on a student-led…
by Karen Hao on (#5JN6V)
For all of the recent advances in language AI technology, it still struggles with one of the most basic applications. In a new study, scientists tested four of the best AI systems for detecting hate speech and found that all of them struggled in different ways to distinguish toxic and innocuous sentences. The results are…
by Patrick Howell O'Neill on (#5JKRJ)
Just weeks after a major American oil pipeline was struck by hackers, a cyberattack hit the world’s largest meat supplier. What next? Will these criminals target hospitals and schools? Will they start going after US cities, governments—and even the military? In fact, all of these have been hit by ransomware already. While the onslaught we’ve…
by Tanya Basu on (#5JKPK)
A few weeks ago, Michelle Watson woke up to a deafening, steadily oscillating screech. “What the heck is that noise?” she wondered. She went outside to her yard and saw hundreds of beady-eyed insects enrobed in a thick shell of gold emerging out of the ground and crawling up the trees. What Watson was seeing…