MIT Technology Review

If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell Technologies CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006 is @theICToptimist. ICT stands for information and communication. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was…

Toronto and the corridor that stretches west to Kitchener and Waterloo is already Canada’s capital of finance and technology—and naturally, the region’s leaders want to set an example for the rest of the world. That’s part of the reason why in 2017, municipal organizations in Toronto tapped Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs to redevelop a…

Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval. What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer. Estep swirled together the mixture and…

The ongoing battle between social-media companies and covid-19 misinformation pushers—including US president Donald Trump—stepped up again this week thanks to a new viral video. And it has exposed, once again, how difficult addressing conspiracy theories is for Facebook, Twitter, and others. The latest video comes from a group called America’s Frontline Doctors, which is sponsored…

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The news: In a new white paper about its plans for AI, translated by China scholars Jeffrey Ding and Caroline Meinhardt, Tencent, the owner of WeChat and one of China’s three largest tech giants, emphasizes that deepfake technology is “not just about ‘faking’ and ‘deceiving,’ but a highly creative and groundbreaking technology.” It urges regulators…

In the depths of a downturn that has wiped out millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth, a wide range of voices in the US are calling for a green stimulus to kick-start growth and lay the foundation for a more sustainable economy. That sentence could have been written a decade ago as…

Biotech company Moderna has been making some pretty promising strides in developing and testing its covid-19 vaccine. The company just announced it was working with the US National Institutes of Health to launch what will be one of the largest covid-19 vaccine trials, a phase 3 study enrolling tens of thousands of American volunteers to…

Twitter recently announced it would take action against accounts posting information related to the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents follow the “breadcrumbs” left by a mysterious figure known as Q in cryptic messages posted about the Trump administration on anonymous online message boards. In response to their spread of misinformation and harassment, more than 7,000…

The European Union’s economic recovery plan is notable for its focus on climate action, sustainable investments, and a just transition fund. As part of this deal, the EU is also proposing a carbon border adjustment, also known as a carbon border tax, on imports by 2023. In the simplest terms, a carbon border adjustment is…

Twitter is perfect as a megaphone for the far right: its trending topics are easy to game, journalists spend way too much time on the site, and—if you’re lucky—the president of the United States might retweet you. QAnon, the continuously evolving pro-Trump conspiracy theory, is good at Twitter in the same way as other successful…

Since the onset of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have turned to AI to assist with their hiring. The most common systems involve using face-scanning algorithms, games, questions, or other evaluations to help determine which candidates to interview. While activists and scholars warn that these screening tools can perpetuate discrimination, the makers themselves…

When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed. Now a network of seismic monitoring stations around the world has quantified this unprecedented period of quiet. The resulting research into “seismic silence,” published in Science today, has shown just…

The US Space Command has announced it’s found evidence that Russia recently conducted a test of anti-satellite weapons, albeit one that did not destroy or harm any objects. SpaceCom claims that on July 15, Russian satellite Kosmos 2543 deployed a new object into its own orbit, similar to a previous anti-satellite demonstration in 2017. What does…

The news: China’s Tianwen-1 mission to Mars successfully lifted off shortly before 1 p.m. local time on Thursday, July 23, Chinese media reported. The mission, which includes a lander, rover, and orbiter, is expected to arrive at the Red Planet in February 2021. China is the first nation to try to transport all three components…

The first time the US went to the moon, it put down an estimated $283 billion to do it alone. That’s not the case with Artemis, the new NASA program to send humans back. Although it’s a US-led initiative, Artemis is meant to be a much more collaborative effort than Apollo. Japan is quickly emerging as…

It’s impossible to contain covid-19 without knowing who’s infected: until a safe and effective vaccine is widely available, stopping transmission is the name of the game. While testing capacity has increased, it’s nowhere near what’s needed to screen patients without symptoms, who account for nearly half of the virus’s transmission. Our research points to a…

The news: Facebook says it is setting up new internal teams to look for racial bias in the algorithms that drive its main social network and Instagram, according to the Wall Street Journal. In particular, the investigations will address the adverse effects of machine learning—which can encode implicit racism in training data—on Black, Hispanic, and…

An international group of researchers have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that were recently active and are likely still active today. The results, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, upend long-held assumptions that the second planet from the sun is largely dormant. What we thought: Unlike Earth, Venus doesn’t have plate tectonics that are constantly…

“Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days to OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI. OpenAI first described GPT-3 in a research paper published in May. But last week it…

The UAE launched its Emirates Mars Mission on Monday, from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center at 6:58 a.m. local time (Sunday evening US Eastern Time). If the mission successfully reaches Mars, the UAE will join a very small list of nations to have gone to the Red Planet. What’s the mission about? An orbital spacecraft named…

The concept: When we look at a chair, regardless of its shape and color, we know that we can sit on it. When a fish is in water, regardless of its location, it knows that it can swim. This is known as the theory of affordance, a term coined by psychologist James J. Gibson. It…

Earlier this week as a pandemic raged across the United States, residents were cut off from the only publicly available source of aggregated data on the nation’s intensive care and hospital bed capacity. When the Trump administration stripped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of control over coronavirus data, it also took that…

Yeshimabeit Milner was in high school the first time she saw kids she knew getting handcuffed and stuffed into police cars. It was February 29, 2008, and the principal of a nearby school in Miami, with a majority Haitian and African-American population, had put one of his students in a chokehold. The next day several…

Morgan Eckroth became famous on TikTok as morgandrinkscoffee. A 21-year-old barista and social-media manager for Tried & True Coffee in Corvallis, Oregon, she shares latte art, dramatic reenactments of customer interactions, and drink tutorials with her 4 million followers. Before the pandemic her content was pretty wholesome—she likes her job! But then in May, someone…

The news: Russian hackers targeted UK, US, and Canadian researchers developing coronavirus vaccines, according to a report from the United Kingdom, American, and Canadian intelligence services. The hackers: The Russian intelligence hacking group known as Cozy Bear or APT29 has been blamed. You might know Cozy from its many previous high-profile cyber-espionage ventures, most notably…

In February of last year, the San Francisco–based research lab OpenAI announced that its AI system could now write convincing passages of English. Feed the beginning of a sentence or paragraph into GPT-2, as it was called, and it could continue the thought for as long as an essay with almost human-like coherence. Now, the…

It’s been a banner year for solar observations so far. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii presented some of the best images ever taken of the sun, showing us a caramel-like surface where individual cells of plasma ooze up and down hypnotically. Not to be outdone, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission has just…

Joe Biden has raised the ambitions of his climate plan, in a clear sign his campaign is responding to demands for greater action among the progressive flank of his party. In a speech on Tuesday, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president announced proposals to spend $2 trillion on clean-energy projects and eliminate carbon emissions from…

This story is part of our ongoing list of answers to the biggest questions our readers have about the coronavirus. That list is constantly updated, and you can check it out here. Since early in the pandemic, there’s been an interest in learning whether blood type has anything to do with who is more likely…

The news: We should prepare now for a potential new wave of coronavirus cases this winter, according to the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences. Health-care systems tend to struggle in winter anyway because infectious diseases spread faster as we spend more time in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and because conditions like asthma, heart attacks, and…

Editor’s note: On July 14, 2020, the Trump administration said it would reverse an Immigration and Customs Enforcement rule that would have required foreign students to leave the US if they were taking all of their classes online. For decades, US policymakers have bet that the world’s best and brightest will endure a dysfunctional immigration…

Astronomers have found one of the largest structures in the known universe—a “wall” of galaxies that’s at least 1.4 billion light-years long. And given how close it is to us, it’s remarkable that we haven’t seen it before now. What happened: An international team of scientists reported the discovery of the South Pole Wall in…

We are at the very beginning of a medical revolution, fueled by our ability to analyze hitherto unheard-of amounts of data using artificial intelligence (AI). AI is enabling the development of smart medical devices that can address some of society’s most persistent and expensive health problems. Conditions such as heart arrhythmias, type 1 diabetes, celiac…

The lowdown: Immunity to covid-19 may be short-lived, according to a new longitudinal study of people who have caught the disease and recovered. The study: Researchers at King’s College London repeatedly tested 96 patients and health-care workers at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust for antibodies between March and June. All the participants were…

This was the week airborne transmission became a big deal in the public discussion about covid-19. Over 200 scientists from around the world cosigned a letter to the World Health Organization urging it to take seriously the growing evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted through the air. WHO stopped short of redefining SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes…

When France launched its app for digital contact tracing, it looked like a possible breakthrough for the virus-ravaged country. After going live in June, StopCovid was downloaded by 2 million people in a short time, and digital affairs minister Cédric O said that “from the first downloads, the app helps avoid contamination, illness, and so…

This virtual panel session from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Next conference takes an in-depth look at Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Review’s recently released research, Opportunity Marketplaces, which sits at the center of this paradigm shift in business strategy, and asks: are you ready to fast forward and accelerate the future of work? This content was…

There’s a certain routine to logging on to the now-ubiquitous videoconference: join a screen of Brady Bunch–like squares, ping-ponging your gaze between speakers but mostly staring self-consciously at your own face. What started as a novelty of working at home is now an exhausting ordeal that can leave us feeling mentally wiped out. Microsoft thinks…

The news: A study of more than 17 million people in England has confirmed the various factors that are linked with an increase in a person’s risk of dying from covid-19: age; being male, Black, or from another ethnic minority background; or having underlying health conditions. It confirms a lot of previous research, but it’s…

Two companies have teamed up on a project that could provide a key test of our ability to use synthetic fuel, made from carbon dioxide captured from the air, to cut emissions from aviation. Carbon Engineering, a direct air capture company based in British Columbia, has signed a deal with Aerion, a startup based in…

A notorious hacker who made an estimated $1.5 million by stealing information from more than 300 companies and governments in 44 countries has been identified as a 37-year-old man from Kazakhstan. Known as Fxmsp, the hacker became famous in 2019 when he advertised access and source code for leading cybersecurity companies, amid claims that he…

The news: A group of 239 scientists from 32 countries have written an open letter to the World Health Organization arguing that covid-19 can be transmitted through the air. You might think we know that already, but most current guidance is based on the idea that covid-19 is transmitted via droplets expelled from an infected…

There’s no shortage of promises when it comes to AI. Some say it will solve all problems while others warn it will bring about the end of the world as we know it. Both positions regularly play out in Hollywood plotlines like Westworld, Carbon Black, Minority Report, Her, and Ex Machina. Those stories are compelling…

Are you hiding from covid-19? I am. The reason is simple: the high chance of death from the virus. I was reminded of the risk last week by this report from the New York City health department and Columbia University which estimated that on average, between March and May, the chance of dying if you get infected…

When SpaceX’s Crew Dragon took NASA astronauts to the ISS near the end of May, the launch brought back a familiar sight. For the first time since the space shuttle was retired, American rockets were launching from American soil to take Americans into space. Inside the vehicle, however, things couldn’t have looked more different. Gone was…

The news: An experimental covid-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech provoked immune responses in 45 healthy volunteers, according to a preprint paper on medRXiv. The levels of antibodies were up to 2.8 times the level of those found in patients who have recovered. The study randomly assigned 45 people to get either one…

In today’s business environment, strategic technology initiatives are driven by the need to grow with greater agility and adapt to rapidly changing commercial, environmental, and regulatory conditions. A new report, sponsored by Panduit, explores how IT leaders from a variety of industries are building intelligent infrastructure that provides a platform for innovation and insights. The…

In 1996 John Perry Barlow, cofounder of internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote “A declaration of the independence of cyberspace.” It begins: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the…

Ilan Gur always wanted to build things. But after finishing his PhD in material science at UC Berkeley, he says he “bounced around, feeling like a misfit.” He left the publish-or-perish world of academia, and burned through a few million dollars before realizing that venture capital isn’t the right way to fund applied research, either.…