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| Updated | 2026-08-02 04:17 |
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by James Temple on (#5Y61F)
The venture capital firm Lowercarbon Capital has raised a $350 million fund dedicated to carbon removal startups, in another sign of the surging interest in a space that barely existed a few years ago. The goal of the new fund, which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively, is to accelerate the development and scale-up of…
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by Jonathan W. Rosen on (#5Y5QW)
Hitchhiking in the cab of a sand truck late one Saturday night in 2018, Bill Kirwa had almost forgotten about the bet. The wager he’d placed that afternoon had been a long shot: to win, he’d need to correctly pick which team was ahead, at both halftime and full time, in four soccer matches on…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5Y5A4)
With its Emirates Mars Mission, also known as the Hope Probe, the UAE has established itself as only the fifth country in history to reach Mars and the seventh in the world to reach the orbit of another planet. The UAE’s first mission to Mars, Hope’s goal is to provide the first, complete picture of…
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by Rhiannon Williams on (#5Y53E)
Cities are loud places. Traffic, trains, and machinery generate a lot of noise. While it’s a mere inconvenience much of the time, it can become a deadly problem when it comes to detecting earthquakes. That’s because it’s difficult to discern an approaching earthquake amid all the usual vibrations in bustling cities. Researchers from Stanford have…
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by Casey Crownhart on (#5Y4TR)
A new type of battery made from electrically conductive polymers—basically plastic—could help make energy storage on the grid cheaper and more durable, enabling a greater use of renewable power. The batteries, made by Boston-based startup PolyJoule, could offer a less expensive and longer-lasting alternative to lithium-ion batteries for storing electricity from intermittent sources like wind…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5Y4QZ)
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by Matthew Ponsford on (#5Y4ED)
For years, Michael Maxson spent more nights in hotels than his own bed, working on speaker systems for the titans of heavy rock on global tours. When Maxson decided to settle down with his wife and their two dogs, they chose the city where stadium rock spectacles took him more often than any other: Las…
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by Patrick Howell O'Neill on (#5Y3KB)
Russian hackers targeted the Ukrainian power grid and attempted to cause a blackout that would have hit 2 million people, according to Ukrainian government officials and the Slovakian cybersecurity firm ESET. The hackers attempted to destroy computers at a Ukrainian energy company using a wiper, malware specifically designed to destroy targeted systems by erasing key…
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by Eswar Prasad on (#5Y34S)
Money is one of humankind’s most remarkable innovations. It makes it possible to trade products and services across great geographic distances, between people who may not know each other and have no particular reason to trust each other. It can even be used to transfer wealth and resources over time. Without money, trade and commerce—all…
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by Mark Harris on (#5Y1WW)
In a former insurance office building on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia, a new kind of sugar factory is taking shape. The 48,000-square-foot facility is being developed by a startup called Bonumose, funded in part by Hershey. It uses a processed corn product called maltodextrin that is found in many junk foods. Like its notorious…
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by Elana Wilner on (#5XZVR)
To create sustainable business impact, AI capabilities need to be tailored and optimized to an industry or organization’s specific requirements and infrastructure model. Hear how customers’ challenges across industries can be addressed in any compute environment from the cloud to the edge with end-to-end hardware and software optimization. About the speakers Kavitha Prasad, VP &…
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by Elana Wilner on (#5XZVS)
The use of AI in finance is gaining traction as organizations realize the advantages of using algorithms to streamline and improve the accuracy of financial tasks. Step through use cases that examine how AI can be used to minimize financial risk, maximize financial returns, optimize venture capital funding by connecting entrepreneurs to the right investors;…
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by Jonathan W. Rosen on (#5XZ43)
The morgue at Lusaka’s University Teaching Hospital (UTH), a sprawling brick facility near the center of Zambia’s capital, is not the most pleasant place to carry out a clinical study. Inside the cavernous interior, newly arrived bodies linger unattended—on rolling metal tables or on the concrete floor wrapped in blankets. Others lie stacked on open-air…
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by Nicole Silva on (#5XYQD)
Good data is the bedrock of a self-service data consumption model, which in turn unlocks insights, analytics, personalization at scale through AI. Yet many organizations face immense challenges setting up a robust data foundation. Dive into a pragmatic perspective on abstracting the complexity and untangling the conflicts in data management for better AI. About the…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5XY8Q)
In many areas of the world, environmental conditions are not conducive to traditional farming. Ensuring food security depends on continuous agricultural innovation, which has been part of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) mission since its founding, given the country’s arid conditions and little water. Smart Acres is one of the many companies exploring new sustainable…
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by Eileen Guo, Adi Renaldi on (#5XX34)
On a sunny morning last December, Iyus Ruswandi, a 35-year-old furniture maker in the village of Gunungguruh, Indonesia, was woken up early by his mother. A technology company was holding some kind of “social assistance giveaway” at the local Islamic elementary school, she said, and she urged him to go. Ruswandi joined a long line…
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by Will Douglas Heaven on (#5XX35)
When OpenAI revealed its picture-making neural network DALL-E in early 2021, the program’s human-like ability to combine different concepts in new ways was striking. The string of images that DALL-E produced on demand were surreal and cartoonish, but they showed that the AI had learned key lessons about how the world fits together. DALL-E’s avocado…
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by Jessica Hamzelou on (#5XWMQ)
Before Jasmin got covid-19 last year, she was an especially active 10-year-old. She loved dancing, swimming, and gymnastics. “She was always upside-down, doing handstands,” says her mother, Binita Kane. Although she only had a mild case of the virus, she developed lasting, debilitating symptoms that kept her out of school. Jasmin, now 11, has abandoned…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5XVZQ)
For many people, the concept of directed energy, or lasers, conjures images of lightsabers and bank vault security systems—the stuff of Hollywood movies. However, the fact is, lasers are commonly used in everyday life applications, from surgery to optical communications. At Technology Innovation Institute’s (TII) Directed Energy Research Center (DERC), scientists and engineers are using…
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by Antonio Regalado on (#5XVZR)
The daring Chinese biophysicist who created the world’s first gene-edited children has been set free after three years in a Chinese prison. He Jiankui created shock waves in 2018 with the stunning claim that he’d altered the genetic makeup of IVF embryos and implanted them into a woman’s uterus, leading to the birth of twin…
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by James Temple, Casey Crownhart on (#5XVZS)
A bleak new report from the UN’s climate panel underscores the price the world is paying for the long delays in addressing global warming despite decades of warnings. Last year, worldwide energy-related carbon dioxide topped 36 billion tons, setting a new record as the global economy sprang back from the depths of the pandemic. As…
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by Casey Crownhart on (#5XR15)
The droughts that swept across the western US in 2021 sparked wildfires and damaged crops. But the historic lack of water also had an impact on one of California’s key sources of renewable energy: hydropower. Electricity generation from California hydropower plants was down 48% from the 10-year average, according to new data from the Energy…
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by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan on (#5XPKG)
In 1999, Rice University chemist Jim Tour co-founded Molecular Electronics Corporation, a company that aimed to use single molecules to make a new type of electronic memory. But Tour had even bigger dreams. In a 2000 story in Wired, he foretold a future in which molecular electronics would leapfrog silicon-based circuitry, allowing computer chips to…
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by James Temple on (#5XNDN)
The world’s oceans are amazing carbon sponges. They already capture a quarter of human-produced carbon dioxide when surface waters react with the greenhouse gas in the air or marine organisms gobble it up as they grow. Their effectiveness has prompted growing hopes that we could somehow accelerate those natural processes to boost the amount the…
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by Will Douglas Heaven on (#5XM7Q)
At last year’s Google I/O, its annual showcase of new widgets and work-in-progress tech, CEO Sundar Pichai revealed his company’s “latest breakthrough in natural-language understanding”: a chatbot called LaMDA, designed to converse on any topic. He then gave a demo in which LaMDA answered questions about Pluto in natural language. The exchange showed off a…
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by Casey Crownhart on (#5XKDA)
One of the largest and fastest-growing oil production sites in the US is emitting far more methane than previously measured. It’s well known that oil and natural-gas production is a significant source of the powerful greenhouse gas: methane that is trapped underground leaks out from wells and pipelines, and it can also be released intentionally…
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by Jenn Webb on (#5XKB0)
Since the 1940s, scientists have studied ways to increase rainfall with the goal of increasing precipitation in arid and semi-arid climates. Today, that endeavor is making incredible leaps and bounds as scientists and engineers apply nanotechnology to improve the effectiveness of cloud seeding. “The global water shortage has continuously intensified by rapid population growth and…
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by Sankar Das Sarma on (#5XJTD)
As a buzzword, quantum computing probably ranks only below AI in terms of hype. Large tech companies such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft now have substantial research and development efforts in quantum computing. A host of startups have sprung up as well, some boasting staggering valuations. IonQ, for example, was valued at $2 billion when…
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by MIT Technology Review Insights on (#5XJNG)
When it comes to computing ability, the general rule of thumb is more is better. Quantum computers promise to feed this hunger. Their immense processing power comes from their ability to store and handle significantly larger volumes of data than classical bit-driven computers. The result—a future quantum computer could, in theory, take minutes to solve…
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by Alli Chase on (#5XF2K)
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