MIT Technology Review

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…

A startup using genetically engineered microbes, light, and carbon dioxide in an attempt to make an alternative to petroleum-based products has caught the attention of United, one of the world’s largest airlines. Aviation accounts for about 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions—nearly 1 gigaton in 2019. That number is growing, and there are few solutions…

Daan Keuper has hacked under a bright spotlight before. In 2012, he hacked a brand-new iPhone and took home $30,000 while on center stage at Pwn2Own, the biggest hacking contest in the world. Driven by curiosity, Keuper and his colleague Thijs Alkemade then hacked a car in 2018. Last year, motivated by the pandemic, they…

Organized cybercriminals with money to burn are fueling a spike in the use of powerful, expensive zero-day hacking exploits, new research has found. Zero-days exploits, which help grant a hacker access to a chosen target, are so called because cyber-defenders have had zero days to fix the newly discovered holes—making the tools extraordinarily capable, dangerous,…

Mobile providers are accelerating their rollout of the flexible, low-latency, multi-gigabit-per-second communications network known as 5G. The technology promises to deliver not just faster data rates, but a more flexible and programmable network. This will be combined with the high reliability and low latency required to create secure, reliable wireless ecosystems to benefit industries beyond…

In the Bendungan Hilir neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from Jakarta’s glitzy central business district, a long row of makeshift wooden stalls crammed onto the sidewalk serves noodle soup, fried rice, and cigarettes to locals. One place stands out in particular, buzzing with motorcycle drivers clad in green. It’s an informal “base camp,” or meeting…

If sheer square footage of advertising space is any indication, crypto has arrived. Crypto billboards surround the Bay Area and line LA highways, and you can’t catch a train in NYC without running into an ad for a coin or exchange. A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow are pushing crypto platforms, and this year’s Super Bowl broadcast…

It was meant to be a temporary side job—a way to earn some extra money. Oskarina Fuentes Anaya signed up for Appen, an AI data-labeling platform, when she was still in college studying to land a well-paid position in the oil industry. But then the economy tanked in Venezuela. Inflation skyrocketed, and a stable job,…

Every day, a repurposed garbage truck ferries visitors up El Salvador’s Conchagua Volcano to an ecotourism retreat. The vehicle thunders along a cratered road, tossing passengers from side to side. At the summit, they spill out into the sun-dappled forest and are rewarded with sweeping vistas of the deep blue Gulf of Fonseca. The retreat…

The cameras are not there yet. But the fiber already is. Thami Nkosi points to the telltale black box atop a utility pole on a street once home to two Nobel Peace Prize laureates: South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela, and the anti-apartheid activist and theologian Desmond Tutu. It always happens this way, Nkosi…

My husband and I love to eat and to learn about history. So shortly after we married, we chose to honeymoon along the southern coast of Spain. The region, historically ruled by Greeks, Romans, Muslims, and Christians in turn, is famed for its stunning architecture and rich fusion of cuisines. Little did I know how…

The economy is being transformed by digital technologies, especially in artificial intelligence, that are rapidly changing how we live and work. But this transformation poses a troubling puzzle: these technologies haven’t done much to grow the economy, even as income inequality worsens. Productivity growth, which economists consider essential to improving living standards, has largely been…

If, in 2017, you had taken a gamble and purchased a comparatively new digital currency called Bitcoin, today you would be a millionaire many times over. But while the industry has provided windfalls for some, local communities have paid a price. Cryptocurrency is created by computers solving complicated mathematical equations—a process that took off after…

The FBI said on Thursday that the Lazarus Group, a prolific hacking team run by the North Korean government, is responsible for the March 2022 hack of a cryptocurrency platform called Ronin Network. The hackers stole $620 million in the cryptocurrency Ethereum. That’s an eye-catching number in almost any context. But in the Wild West…

Like many banks, National Australia Bank (NAB) decided to outsource a large part of its operations in the 1990s. “We pushed all our operations and a large part of our development capability out to third parties with the intent of lowering costs and making our operations far more process driven,” says Steve Day, the chief…

Age is much more than the number of birthdays you’ve clocked. Stress, sleep, and diet all influence how our organs cope with the wear and tear of everyday life. Factors like these might make you age faster or slower than people born on the same day. That means your biological age could be quite different…

“We are cashless,” proclaims a sign on the gleaming glass door of the cafe I frequent. The sign predates the glossy list of covid-19 measures taped beside it, but together they present a united declaration of touchless efficiency—the promise of experiencing public space, social interaction, and consumer exchange with utmost convenience and cleanliness. Yet for…