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Updated 2025-09-13 21:02
What India needs to get through its covid crisis
In a cruel irony, India, the world’s vaccine manufacturing powerhouse, is now crippled by a virus for which multiple safe and effective vaccines have been developed in record time. Official reports of more than 380,000 new cases and 3,400 deaths daily, while staggering, likely underestimate the actual toll. As health systems across India buckle under…
Here’s what China wants from its next space station
At 11:23 a.m. local time Thursday at Wenchang, Hainan Island, China launched Tianhe-1, the first module of a new orbital space station. It’s scheduled to be operational by the end of 2022. The launch, which went flawlessly, sets China up for a very busy next two years as it seeks to build upon the decade’s…
The tactics police are using to prevent bystander video
Kian Kelley-Chung was wearing a black T-shirt with the logo of his documentary and art collective on the day last summer when he found himself filming the Washington, DC, police during a protest. It was August 13, 2020, and Kelley-Chung had been recording Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the city for a couple of months.…
Computer vision in AI: The data needed to succeed
Developing the capacity to annotate massive volumes of data while maintaining quality is a function of the model development lifecycle that enterprises often underestimate. It’s resource intensive and requires specialized expertise. At the heart of any successful machine learning/artificial intelligence (ML/AI) initiative is a commitment to high-quality training data and a pathway to quality data…
New business models, big opportunity: Financial services
By any measure, 2021 corporate planning isn’t business as usual. As the coronavirus pandemic grinds on, financial services institutions are coming out of crisis mode— addressing immediate cash management and operational challenges—with a renewed readiness for business growth. Fortunately, most businesses across industries are doing a good job of navigating the pandemic and its economic…
Some vaccinated people are still getting covid. Here’s why you shouldn’t worry.
Tens of millions of people in the United States have now been fully vaccinated against covid-19. These people are seeing friends, eating out, and—in rare cases—getting infected. But we shouldn’t panic: these kinds of “breakthrough infections” are entirely expected with any mass vaccine rollout. According to new figures released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more…
The J&J vaccine is back. Next comes trust.
Last week US regulators recommended resuming use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, after deciding that a side effect involving blood clots was too rare to justify continuing the brief suspension they had imposed: there were just 15 reported instances out of 8 million doses. But even though the pause lasted just 11 days, it…
The climate solution actually adding millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere
Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high. But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts. Beyond the crest of…
Podcast: AI finds its voice
Today’s voice assistants are still a far cry from the hyper-intelligent thinking machines we’ve been musing about for decades. And it’s because that technology is actually the combination of three different skills: speech recognition, natural language processing and voice generation. Each of these skills already presents huge challenges. In order to master just the natural…
Fiction: Unpaired
They drilled a hole in my skull on the 43rd floor of an empty skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. One of those towers where they told people to go and work from home and they never came back. Floor-to-ceiling windows, beige and white walls, spaces that felt impossibly big now that the cubicle dividers have vanished.…
Politics and the pandemic have changed how we imagine cities
Science fiction is full of cities imagined from the ground up, but an author who writes about a real place has to engage with real cultures and real histories. It takes a special kind of world-building skill to develop a city when its origins are already known. The Membranes, a fascinating new book out in…
How technology helped archaeologists dig deeper
Construction workers in New York’s Lower Manhattan neighborhood were breaking ground for a new federal building back in 1991 when they unearthed hundreds of coffins. The more they dug, the more they found—eventually uncovering nearly 500 individuals, many buried with personal items such as buttons, shells, and jewelry. Further investigation revealed that the remains were…
Slum dwellers in India get unique digital addresses
Fourteen-year-old Neha Dashrath was ecstatic when the pizza arrived. It was the first time she’d ever ordered from a food delivery app. “I always felt shy when my friends talked about ordering food from apps,” she says. “Now I, too, can show off.” Dashrath lives in Laxmi Nagar, a slum in Pune, Maharashtra, alongside some…
Cape Town fights for energy independence
Power outages are a way of life in Africa’s most industrialized country. Over the last decade, South Africa’s electricity grid has come apart at the seams and failed to deliver dependable power. As renewable energy gets cheaper, South African cities such as Cape Town have demanded the right to find their own sources. The primary…
Can “democracy dollars” keep real dollars out of politics?
Teresa Mosqueda used to spend her days asking people to run for office. A union leader and third-generation Mexican-American from Seattle, she figured the most effective way to address working families’ issues was to encourage people who had once experienced them to enter politics. But when people would ask her to run, Mosqueda would decline,…
Rio de Janeiro is making a digital map of one of Brazil’s largest favelas
Finding your way through Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is not easy. The buildings are densely and turbulently arranged in a manner that defies traditional identification systems like street names and numbers. Rocinha is a favela, one of the largest among hundreds of unplanned settlements that have sprung up on the outskirts of Brazilian cities…
Why cities will come back stronger after covid
The coronavirus pandemic presents a cruel irony for urban dwellers. What good are cities if the very quality that makes them so dynamic—the ease of connecting with people and gathering in large groups for everything from a baseball game to an opera—now renders them more dangerous than before? That question lies at the heart of…
How Indians are crowdsourcing aid as covid surges
Sohini Chattopadhyay had almost given up her medical quest before deciding to try one last bizarre idea. Chattopadhyay, 30, and her friends were looking for a plasma donor for a childhood pal who was battling covid-19 in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata. The woman’s oxygen levels were plummeting, and doctors said that “convalescent plasma,”…
D-Lab project leads to solar career in Africa
When she started her junior year after a corporate internship that left her feeling unfulfilled, Jodie Wu ’09 was questioning her path as an engineer. Participating in a D-Lab class project in Tanzania revealed a way to use her passion for engineering to help serve emerging markets in Africa while also having an impact. Wu…
Knocking on the door of innovation in Chile
Growing up in Chile, where her family owned a minimarket, Rocio Fonseca, SM ’14, was taught to expect a life limited by her family’s social class. In her early professional years, as the first in her family to have gone to college, she often ran into the cultural barriers of her country’s traditional business environment.…
Emerson Yearwood ’80
Emerson Yearwood, who has spent most of his career as an attorney in the communications sector, is dedicated to supporting students of color at MIT through his giving and volunteerism. His current focus is the Black Alumni of MIT Community Advancement Program and Fund (BCAP), which supports student proposals for public service projects that address…
Better amputations
Most amputations sever the muscle pairs that control joints such as the elbow or ankle, disrupting the sensory feedback about the limb’s position in space that would help patients control a prosthesis. But a surgical technique developed by MIT researchers appears to leave amputees with both greater control and less pain than people who have…
Newest address on campus
New Vassar, MIT’s new undergrad dorm, opened in January across the street from the Henry Steinbrenner Stadium and Track with the goal of promoting a healthy, well-balanced lifestyle. The 450-bed residence emphasizes four core values chosen by its founders’ group: well-being, inclusiveness, adventure, and kindness. Dining options will eventually include a cooking pod program that…
The next normal
One morning at the start of the spring semester, I was surprised by a most welcome sound outside: the voices of students! I could not resist going to the window. Even bundled up against the cold, the students were obviously excited to be back on campus—or in the case of first-years, to be on campus…
Wood without trees
Like meat production, logging and agriculture can exact a heavy environmental toll. Now an MIT team has proposed a way to circumvent that by growing certain plant tissues in the lab—an idea somewhat akin to cultured meat. The researchers, in Luis Fernando Velásquez-García’s group at the Micro­systems Technology Laboratories, grew wood-like plant tissue indoors, without…
The outer bounds of big questions
Christopher Rose ’79, SM ’81, PhD ’85, earned three MIT degrees in electrical engineering but has always been drawn to many disciplines. As a professor of engineering at Brown University, he’s working at the frontiers of communications theory, while as an administrator, he’s striving to enhance student and faculty diversity across STEM disciplines. And he’s…
In a cookieless future, half-baked marketing won’t do
Third-party cookies are like Cretaceous dinosaurs. They’re munching away on consumers’ data while asteroids lobbed by Google, Mozilla, Apple, and others are on the brink of obliterating the current marketing ecosystem. Google is planning to phase out these online tracking tools by 2022. For its part, Apple plans to make its mobile device ID—known as…
The world is waking up to India’s plight—too late
The news: Oxygen and other vital medical supplies have started arriving in India as it battles one of the most acute covid-19 crises any country has experienced yet. The country set a global record for new cases for the fifth day in a row yesterday, reporting 352,991 and 2,812 deaths. The true figure is almost…
Lessons from the pandemic’s superstar data scientist, Youyang Gu
The data scientist Youyang Gu thinks of himself as a realist—he declares it in his Twitter profile: “Presenter of unbiased takes. Realist.” When he noticed the scattershot covid-19 projections last spring—one model projected 2 million US deaths by the summer, another predicted 60,000—Gu questioned whether that was as good as the modeling could be. He…
We’re on track to set a new record for global meat consumption
Bill Gates made headlines earlier this year for saying that “all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef” in an interview with MIT Technology Review about the release of his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Although he recognized the political difficulty of telling Americans they can’t eat any more red meat,…
Taking a systems approach to sustainability
These days we are all striving for connections. In families, between generations, in neighborhoods, and even among co-workers. We rely on it for learning, for trading, for economic growth, for innovation and for global change. Audrey Choi is the Chief Sustainability Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at Morgan Stanley. If we didn’t know it before,…
The pandemic could remake public transportation for the better
On paper, the task was gargantuan. To slow the rapid spread of the coronavirus, the New York City subway would start closing every night for the first time in 115 years. That meant the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), its overseer, had to create a massive bus network to mirror 665 miles of track. That’s roughly…
Could covid lead to a lifetime of autoimmune disease?
When Aaron Ring began testing blood samples collected from covid-19 patients who had come through Yale–New Haven Hospital last March and April, he expected to see a type of immune protein known as an autoantibody in at least some of them. These are antibodies that have gone rogue and started attacking the body’s own tissue;…
Stop talking about AI ethics. It’s time to talk about power.
At the turn of the 20th century, a German horse took Europe by storm. Clever Hans, as he was known, could seemingly perform all sorts of tricks previously limited to humans. He could add and subtract numbers, tell time and read a calendar, even spell out words and sentences—all by stamping out the answer with…
NASA’s Perseverance rover has produced pure oxygen on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully generated breathable oxygen on Mars. The demonstration, carried out by the rover’s MOXIE instrument on April 20, could lay the groundwork for helping future astronauts establish a sustainable colony on the planet. What’s MOXIE and how does it work? Short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, it’s a toaster-size…
The US has pledged to halve its carbon emissions by 2030
The news: The US will pledge at a summit of 40 global leaders today to halve its carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. This far exceeds an Obama-era pledge in 2014 to get emissions 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. The hope is that the commitment will help encourage India, China, and other major…
Asian-Americans are using Instagram to help protect their communities
One February afternoon, a 50-year-old Asian woman was waiting in line at a bakery in Queens, New York, when a man threw a box of spoons at her and then shoved her so violently she required 10 stitches in her head. In a surveillance video, a crowd watches as the man attacks the woman, doing…
This spit test promises to tell couples their risk of passing on common diseases
A new startup called Orchid is offering the chance for couples planning a pregnancy to learn their odds of passing on risks for common conditions like Alzheimer’s, heart disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes, schizophrenia, and certain cancers to their future child. Existing pre-conception tests, which are widely available, can tell parents whether their children…
This has just become a big week for AI regulation
It’s a bumper week for government pushback on the misuse of artificial intelligence. Today the EU released its long-awaited set of AI regulations, an early draft of which leaked last week. The regulations are wide ranging, with restrictions on mass surveillance and the use of AI to manipulate people. But a statement of intent from…
How a tiny media company is helping people get vaccinated
More than 132 million people in the US have received at least one dose of a covid-19 vaccine, and as of this week, all Americans over 16 are eligible. But while the US has vaccinated more people than any other country in the world, vulnerable people are still falling through the cracks. Those most affected…
NASA has just flown a helicopter on Mars for the first time
The news: NASA has flown an aircraft on another planet for the first time. On Monday, April 19, Ingenuity, a 1.8-kilogram drone helicopter, took off from the surface of Mars, flew up about three meters, then swiveled and hovered for 40 seconds. The historic moment was livestreamed on YouTube, and Ingenuity captured the photo above…
Inside the rise of police department real-time crime centers
At a conference in New Orleans in 2007, Jon Greiner, then the chief of police in Ogden, Utah, heard a presentation by the New York City Police Department about a sophisticated new data hub called a “real time crime center.” Reams of information rendered in red and green splotches, dotted lines, and tiny yellow icons…
NASA has selected SpaceX’s Starship as the lander to take astronauts to the moon
Later this decade, NASA astronauts are expected to touch down on the lunar surface for the first time in decades. When they do, according to an announcement made by the agency, they’ll be riding inside SpaceX’s Starship vehicle. NASA’s award of a $2.9 billion contract to build Starship, first reported by the Washington Post on…
Geoffrey Hinton has a hunch about what’s next for AI
Back in November, the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton had a hunch. After a half-century’s worth of attempts—some wildly successful—he’d arrived at another promising insight into how the brain works and how to replicate its circuitry in a computer. “It’s my current best bet about how things fit together,” Hinton says from his…
The $1 billion Russian cyber company that the US says hacks for Moscow
The hackers at Positive Technologies are undeniably good at what they do. The Russian cybersecurity firm regularly publishes highly-regarded research, looks at cutting edge computer security flaws, and has spotted vulnerabilities in networking equipment, telephone signals, and electric car technology. But American intelligence agencies have concluded that this $1 billion company—which is headquartered in Moscow,…
Building a high-performance data and AI organization
CxOs and boards recognize that their organization’s ability to generate actionable insights from data, often in real-time, is of the highest strategic importance. If there were any doubts on this score, consumers’ accelerated flight to digital in this past crisis year have dispelled them. To help them become data driven, companies are deploying increasingly advanced…
Why is it so hard to review the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? Data.
The future of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson covid vaccine remains in limbo after an advisory panel recommended taking a deeper look into reports of rare—and sometimes fatal—side effects. The US Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration advised suspension of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on Tuesday, after reports that six…
The new lawsuit that shows facial recognition is officially a civil rights issue
On January 9, 2020, Detroit police drove to the suburb of Farmington Hill and arrested Robert Williams in his driveway while his wife and young daughters looked on. Williams, a Black man, was accused of stealing watches from Shinola, a luxury store. He was held overnight in jail. During questioning, an officer showed Williams a…
Podcast: What’s AI doing in your wallet?
Our entire financial system is built on trust. We can exchange otherwise worthless paper bills for fresh groceries, or swipe a piece of plastic for new clothes. But this trust—typically in a central-government-backed bank—is changing. As our financial lives are rapidly digitized, the resulting data turns into fodder for AI. Companies like Apple, Facebook, and…
The US says not to give Johnson & Johnson vaccines after a woman died from a rare blood clot
The US took the dramatic step of recommending that health-care providers stop giving people the Johnson & Johnson vaccine against covid-19 after six women who received it developed serious blood clots and one died. The US Food and Drug Administration described its action as a temporary halt to give regulators time to understand the apparent…
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