MIT Technology Review

Over the past two decades, the data economy has permeated every aspect of our social and economic lives. Now, a growing community of voices is seeking a new social contract between the tech industry and citizens. Early optimism about the transformative power of the internet has given way, more recently, to a sense that the…

Like many vaccine tourists, “Alex” doesn’t want you to know his real name. The British expat arrived on a red-eye flight from his home in Nairobi, Kenya, at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday, May 21, with the intention of staying just a few days—more than enough time, he hoped, to get…

Jim Cantrell calls himself “one of the intellectual fathers of the small-launch business.” It’s hard to disagree. When Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, Cantrell became its first vice president of business development. His expertise was critical to the development of the company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1. Cantrell later founded Strategic Space Development (StratSpace),…

Every person engaged with the networked world constantly creates rivers of data. We do this in ways we are aware of, and ways that we aren’t. Corporations are eager to take advantage. Take, for instance, NumberEight, a startup, that, according to Wired, “helps apps infer user activity based on data from a smartphone’s sensors: whether…

When Joanie Schaffer heard about Dr. B, a free covid-19 vaccine standby service, she was running out of options. It was early February, and vaccine appointments were scarce, so Schaffer, who was already vaccinated herself, was volunteering her time to help friends, family, and even strangers secure their shots. She had read stories about people…

The 58-year-old man was blind, barely able to perceive whether it was day or night. After receiving gene therapy to add light-sensing molecules to one of his retinas, he could locate a notebook set on a table. Scientists in Europe and the US are reporting today what they describe as the first successful use of…

On January 11, antivirus company Bitdefender said it was “happy to announce” a startling breakthrough. It had found a flaw in the ransomware that a gang known as DarkSide was using to freeze computer networks of dozens of businesses in the US and Europe. Companies facing demands from DarkSide could download a free tool from…

On May 22, Virgin Galactic took two people to the very edge of suborbital space for the first time in more than two years, and its third time overall. It’s the first of four planned crewed missions slated for this year. What happened: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo took off from Spaceport America in New Mexico at…

More than 1.5 billion covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered in over 180 countries. That works out to roughly 21 doses for every 100 people. However, as you can see from the animated chart below, the pace—and coverage—of vaccination programs has been highly uneven. If you hit play on the chart, produced by Our World…

On May 10, 40 advocacy groups sent an open letter demanding a permanent ban on the use of Amazon’s facial recognition software, Rekognition, by US police. The letter was addressed to Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, the company’s current and incoming CEOs, and came just weeks before Amazon’s year-long moratorium on sales to law enforcement…

What touches the American psyche more deeply than a gas shortage? If the Colonial Pipeline attack is any measure, nothing. Ransomware has been a growing problem for years, with hundreds of brazen criminal hacks against schools, hospitals, and city governments—but it took an attack that affected people’s cars for the US to really take notice. …

On May 18, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced an impressive new tool: an AI system called LaMDA that can chat to users about any subject. To start, Google plans to integrate LaMDA into its main search portal, its voice assistant, and Workplace, its collection of cloud-based work software that includes Gmail, Docs, and Drive. But…

Water levels are running dangerously low in rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers across much of the American West, raising serious dangers of shortages, fallowed agricultural fields, and extreme wildfires in the coming months. Monitoring stations across California’s Sierra Nevada range are registering some of the driest conditions on record for this point in the year. High…

Is NASA really going to return humans to the moon in 2024? That was the increasingly unlikely mandate issued to the agency by the Trump administration. President Biden hasn’t changed that goal yet, although most experts expect him to give NASA some much-needed breathing room and reset that deadline for later in the decade. The problem is,…

In a recent survey, “2021 Thriving in an AI World,” KPMG found that across every industry—manufacturing to technology to retail—the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing year over year. Part of the reason is digital transformation is moving faster, which helps companies start to move exponentially faster. But, as Cliff Justice, US leader for…

Almost exactly a year ago, software developers rushed to build technologies that could help stop the pandemic. Back then, the focus was on apps that could track whether you’d been near someone with covid. Today the discussion is about digital vaccine credentials, often called “vaccine passports,” designed to work on your smartphone and show that…

The pandemic that has raged across the globe over the past year has shone a cold, hard light on many things—the varied levels of preparedness to respond; collective attitudes toward health, technology, and science; and vast financial and social inequities. As the world continues to navigate the covid-19 health crisis, and some places even begin…

If the world hopes to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions by midcentury, nearly half the cuts will have to come from technologies that are only in early stages today. That finding, in a report from the International Energy Agency released Tuesday, points to the need for aggressive investment in research, development, and scale-up of clean energy…

On May 14, China’s space program took a huge leap forward when it landed a rover on Mars for the first time, according to state media. China is now only the second country to land successfully on Mars. The rover, named Zhurong (after the god of fire in ancient Chinese mythology), joins NASA’s Curiosity and…

In 1998 a couple of Stanford graduate students published a paper describing a new kind of search engine: “In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently and produce much more…

A man with a brain implant that allows him to control computers via mental signals says he is ready to challenge Elon Musk’s neuroscience company Neuralink in a head-to-head game of Pong—with a monkey. Neuralink is developing advanced wireless brain implants so humans can connect directly to computer networks. In April, researchers working with the…

A year ago, the idea that the covid-19 pandemic could have been caused by a laboratory accident was denounced as a conspiracy theory by the world’s leading journals, scientists, and news organizations. But the origin of the virus that has killed millions remains a mystery, and the chance that it came from a lab has…

Ayanna Howard has always sought to use robots and AI to help people. Over her nearly 30-year career, she has built countless robots: for exploring Mars, for cleaning hazardous waste, and for assisting children with special needs. In the process, she’s developed an impressive array of techniques in robotic manipulation, autonomous navigation, and computer vision.…

The covid-19 pandemic is a catastrophe that could have been averted, say a panel of 13 independent experts tasked with assessing the global response to the crisis. Their report, released May 12 and commissioned by the WHO, lambasts global leaders who failed to heed repeated warnings, wasted time, hoarded information and desperately needed supplies, and…

On May 10, the World Health Organization added a new virus to its list of covid-19 variants of global concern. The variant, B.1.617, is being blamed for the runaway infections in India. It is the fourth addition to a list that also includes variants first identified in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil. “There is some…

Credit scores have been used for decades to assess consumer creditworthiness, but their scope is far greater now that they are powered by algorithms. Not only do they consider vastly more data, in both volume and type, but they increasingly affect whether you can buy a car, rent an apartment, or get a full-time job.…

Emoji are now part of our language. If you’re like most people, you pepper your texts, Instagram posts, and TikTok videos with various little images to augment your words—maybe the syringe with a bit of blood dripping from it when you got your vaccination, the prayer (or high-fiving?) hands as a shortcut to “thank you,”…

Engineers are under unprecedented pressure to build products that are used by thousands, if not millions, of consumers every day. Just ask Bernd Zapf. Head of development, new business, and technologies at Heller Group, a machine tool manufacturer in Germany, Zapf says today’s organizations must increasingly “strike a balance between the design, engineering, manufacturing, operation,…

The Massachusetts Audubon Society has long managed its land in western Massachusetts as crucial wildlife habitat. Nature lovers flock to these forests to enjoy bird-watching and quiet hikes, with the occasional bobcat or moose sighting. But in 2015, the conservation nonprofit presented California’s top climate regulator with a startling scenario: It could heavily log 9,700…

Update 5/9, 12:25 a.m. ET: The US Space Force confirmed the booster landed in the Indian Ocean just north of Maldives late Saturday evening. Last week, China successfully launched Tianhe-1, the first part of its new space station, to be completed before the end of 2022. A week later, the mission is still making huge waves—and…

Several years ago, when Elizabeth Softky first heard of the concept of universal basic income, she had her doubts. She was a public school teacher at the time, and she knew how hard it was to convince people to support even modest financial benefits, like pay raises for her coworkers. “Giving people money? I couldn’t…

The news: A new type of attack could increase the energy consumption of AI systems. In the same way a denial-of-service attack on the internet seeks to clog up a network and make it unusable, the new attack forces a deep neural network to tie up more computational resources than necessary and slow down its…

A dozen covid-19 vaccines are now being used around the world. Most require two doses, and health officials have warned against mixing and matching: the vaccines, they argue, should be administered the way they were tested in trials. But after emerging concerns about the very rare risk of blood clots linked to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine,…

In March 2017, a group of hackers from China arrived in Vancouver with one goal: Find hidden weak spots inside the world’s most popular technologies. Google’s Chrome browser, Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and Apple’s iPhones were all in the crosshairs. But no one was breaking the law. These were just some of the people taking…

Uploading personal photos to the internet can feel like letting go. Who else will have access to them, what will they do with them—and which machine-learning algorithms will they help train? The company Clearview has already supplied US law enforcement agencies with a facial recognition tool trained on photos of millions of people scraped from…

The night before the Facebook Oversight Board decided to stand by the company’s decision to ban him from its platforms, former president Donald Trump announced—via an exclusive on Fox News—that he’d created a website. Called From the Desk of Donald Trump, it looked like a social media site but was really just a feed of…

Over-the-counter home tests for covid-19 are finally here. MIT Technology Review obtained kits sold by three companies and tried them out. After buying tests from CVS and online, I tested myself several times and ended up learning an important lesson: while some people worry that home tests could miss covid cases, the bigger problem may…

Jennifer Xiong spent her summer helping Hmong people in California register to vote in the US presidential election. The Hmong are an ethnic group that come from the mountains of China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand but don’t have a country of their own, and Xiong was a volunteer organizer at Hmong Innovating Politics, or HIP,…

There’s nothing new about conspiracy theories, disinformation, and untruths in politics. What is new is how quickly malicious actors can spread disinformation when the world is tightly connected across social networks and internet news sites. We can give up on the problem and rely on the platforms themselves to fact-check stories or posts and screen…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…