MIT Technology Review

A startup plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide. The facility, developed by Mote of Los Angeles, would rely on the mounds of agricultural waste produced on the state’s sprawling almond orchards and other types…

Areas of New York City with higher rates of “stop-and-frisk” police searches have more closed-circuit TV cameras, according to a new report from Amnesty International’s Decode Surveillance NYC project. Beginning in April 2021, over 7,000 volunteers began surveying New York City’s streets through Google Street View to document the location of cameras; the volunteers assessed…

Over the past few weeks, convoys of truckers and sympathizers protesting vaccination mandates and covid restrictions have cut off Ottawa’s busiest border with the US. The sounds of air and truck horns have filled the air at all hours, to the point where an injunction has been required. Some protesters are camping in parks and…

On February 4, a geomagnetic storm caused by the sun knocked up to 40 new SpaceX Starlink satellites out of orbit. Now experts are worried about whether mega-constellations planned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others will be resilient to such events in the future. SpaceX had launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites on…

I have spent a lot of my career, both in Silicon Valley and beyond, insisting that all our technologies have histories and even pre-histories, and that far from being neat and tidy, those stories are in fact messy, contested, and conflicted, with competing narrators and meanings. The metaverse, which graduated from a niche term to…

Something has changed for the tech giants. Even as they continue to hold tremendous influence in our daily lives, a growing accountability movement has begun to check their power. Led in large part by tech workers themselves, a movement seeking reform of how these companies do business, treat their employees, and conduct themselves as global…

In the early days of the pandemic, all eyes were on potential vaccines. In May 2020, the US announced Operation Warp Speed, a plan to spend billions on vaccine development. But mostly out of sight of the news media, quieter efforts to custom-design a covid-19 pill were moving forward with similar urgency and hope. Chemists…

The news: People who’ve caught covid become infectious far more quickly than previously believed, according to the world’s first “human challenge” study in which healthy young volunteers were deliberately infected with the virus. The study, carried out by a team led by researchers at Imperial College London, is the first to watch what happens from…

It’s one thing to know whether an individual customer is intrigued by a new mattress or considering a replacement for their sofa’s throw pillows; it’s another to know to how to move these people to go ahead and make a purchase. When deployed strategically, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a marketer’s trusted customer experience ally—transforming…

For someone with a deeply scientific job, Gil Herrera has a nearly mystical mandate: Look into the future and then shape it, at the level of strange quantum physics and inextricable math theorems, to the advantage of the United States. Herrera is the newly minted leader of the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate. The directorate,…

A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives. Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victim’s jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, and the case goes cold. …

OpenAI has built a new version of GPT-3, its game-changing language model, that it says does away with some of the most toxic issues that plagued its predecessor. The San Francisco-based lab says the updated model, called InstructGPT, is better at following the instructions of people using it—known as “alignment” in AI jargon—and thus produces less offensive…

Lisa Levy is a housing case manager at Columbus House in New Haven, Connecticut, where she oversees residents in a complex of 25 apartments. Each of her clients has a dual diagnosis of severe mental illness and a substance use disorder, and all have been homeless. “They’re among the most vulnerable people,” Levy says, “and…

Last month, I attended the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, where 26,000 geoscientists convened in person and virtually to share the latest Earth and climate science. Maybe a hundred of those people were there to talk about research on solar geoengineering—the idea of reflecting a fraction of incoming sunlight to cool a warming…

Moving to the cloud is all the rage. According to an IDC Survey Spotlight, Experience in Migrating Databases to the Cloud, 63% of enterprises are actively migrating their databases to the cloud, and another 29% are considering doing so within the next three years. This article discusses some of the risks customers may unwittingly encounter…

For organizations in today’s complex business environment, data is like water—essential for survival. They need to process, analyze, and act on data to drive business growth—to predict future trends, identify new business opportunities, and respond to market changes faster. Not enough data? Businesses die of thirst. Dirty data? Projects are polluted by “garbage in/garbage out.”…

Russia has sent more than 100,000 soldiers to the nation’s border with Ukraine, threatening a war unlike anything Europe has seen in decades. Though there hasn’t been any shooting yet, cyber operations are already underway. Last week, hackers defaced dozens of government websites in Ukraine, a technically simple but attention-grabbing act that generated global headlines.…

If you can recognize a dog by sight, then you can probably recognize a dog when it is described to you in words. Not so for today’s artificial intelligence. Deep neural networks have become very good at identifying objects in photos and conversing in natural language, but not at the same time: there are AI…

This story has been updated after charges were officially dismissed, and to include statements from Dr. Gang Chen, Rachael Rollins, the US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and MIT president L. Rafael Reif. A judge has approved the government’s motion to dismiss all charges against MIT mechanical engineering professor and nanotechnologist Gang Chen, nearly…

The internet can feel like a bottomless pit of the worst aspects of humanity. So far, there’s little indication that the metaverse—an envisioned virtual digital world where we work, play, and live—will be much better. As I reported last month, a beta tester in Meta’s virtual social platform, Horizon Worlds, has already complained of being…

Artificial intelligence helps build physical infrastructure like modular housing, skyscrapers, and factory floors. “…many problems that we wrestle with in all forms of engineering and design are very, very complex problems…those problems are beginning to reach the limits of human capacity,” says Mike Haley, the vice president of research at Autodesk. But there’s hope with…

Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai, an underwater volcano off the coast of Tonga, has erupted several times in the last 13 years, but the most recent, on January 15, was likely its most destructive. The blast has had global consequences: more than 6,000 miles away, waves caused by the eruption drowned two people in Peru. But the effect…

Biologists at several startups are applying the latest advances in genetic engineering to the age-old problem of baldness, creating new hair-forming cells that could restore a person’s ability to grow hair. Some researchers tell MIT Technology Review they are using the techniques to grow human hair cells in their labs and even on animals. A…

On January 14, federal prosecutors recommended that the US Department of Justice dismiss all three charges against MIT nanotechnology professor Gang Chen, ending a two-year ordeal stemming from accusations that he hid funding from Chinese entities on grant disclosure forms. Chen had pleaded not guilty to all charges, while his employer had indicated that the…

In December, researchers reported that huge and growing cracks have formed in the eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-size mass of ice that stretches 75 miles across western Antarctica. They warned that the floating tongue of the glacier—which acts as a brace to prop up the Thwaites—could snap off into the ocean…

“Workplace” used to be defined by physical location. Even when employees were hard at work elsewhere, from home or on the road, they were “out of the office.” When offices began to shut down in March 2020 to slow down the covid-19 pandemic, few realized that they were embarking on a fundamental and enduring transformation…

The news: A pig’s heart has been transplanted into a human being for the first time. David Bennett Sr., a man with terminal heart disease, received the genetically modified heart during an eight-hour operation on Friday January 7 at the University of Maryland Medical Center, which issued a statement last night. The operation was a…

When Zipline, the operator of the world’s largest autonomous drone delivery system, began building its logistics service to deliver medicines, vaccines, and medical supplies to health facilities across rural Africa, the company needed a development and manufacturing process that could quickly incorporate design improvements. It also needed to remain flexible so it could cater to…

Later next month, Maeghan Easler will have a box fan propped in the window, blowing cold February air into her apartment in Des Moines, Iowa. She’ll have cooling packs—tights filled with ice cubes—stuffed into her cycling kit. And she’ll be pedaling like crazy. Easler will compete with dozens of other e-cyclists from around the globe in…

Before reality, there’s simulation. A 2021 missile-inceptor test conducted by aerospace and US defense technology provider Raytheon Technologies held no surprises because the company had already tested almost every aspect of the launch in simulation. Siemens and space agency NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory worked together on a digital twin of the Mars Science Laboratory on…

From the MIT Technology Review art team, here are some of our very favorite illustrations of the year:

Like clockwork, at the end of every year, people around the world sit down and make resolutions for the new one: lose weight, meditate, save money. Maybe this year it’s time to take stock of your tech life. Perhaps you’ve been getting a persistent note that your storage is full, or you simply want to feel less stressed by…

Four months after the Afghan government fell to the Taliban, 22-year-old Asad Asadullah had settled into a new routine. In his hometown in Afghanistan’s northern Samangan province, the former computer science student started and ended each day glued to his laptop screen. Since late October, Asadullah had been participating in a virtual coding bootcamp organized…

We’ve never relied more on technology to solve our problems than we do now. Sometimes it works. Vaccines against covid-19 have cut the death toll. We’ve got virus tests and drugs, too. But this isn’t the story about what worked in 2021. This is MIT Technology Review’s annual list of cases where innovation went wrong.…

A shock has reverberated inside Israel in the last few months. NSO Group, the billion-dollar Israeli company that has sold hacking tools to governments around the world for more than a decade, has drawn intense scrutiny after a series of public scandals. The company is in crisis. Its future is in doubt. But while NSO…

When Hongzhi Gao was young, he lived with his family in Gansu, a province located in the center of northern China by the Tengger Desert. Thinking back to his childhood, he recalls the constant, steady wind of dirt outside their house, and that during most months of the year it didn’t take more than a…

New data shows that the polarization of political discourse online has remained largely unchanged since the end of 2020. That’s probably not surprising if you’ve looked at the internet at all in the past year. But the data also shows an underlying pattern in which individual topics—like abortion and immigration—took turns driving divisiveness. While people…

The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year. We asked our writers and editors to look back over all the stories we published in 2021 and tell us which…