MIT Technology Review

An international team of astronomers has found signs that a habitable planet may be lurking in Alpha Centauri, a binary star system a mere 4.37 light-years away. It could be one of the closest habitable planet prospects to date, although it’s probably not much like Earth if it exists. What’s Alpha Centauri? It’s the closest…

On January 28, a physician at a hospital in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad received an SMS with the date and time for his first shot of a covid-19 vaccine. He’d been toiling away in the covid ward, where he’d watched many breathe their last since April, and the vaccine was the one thing…

When acting Danish finance minister Morten Bødskov announced last week that Denmark would soon launch a digital “corona passport,” the news spread rapidly around the world. For many, the promise of an app that would enable people to prove they were vaccinated against covid-19 or otherwise immune was exciting: it suddenly put international travel, restaurant…

Update 11:20 a.m. Eastern: The Hope probe is officially in orbit around Mars. Fewer than half of all the spacecraft that have been sent to Mars have actually made it. For every celebrated mission like NASA’s Curiosity Rover, there’s a story of failure like the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli lander, which crashed into the Martian…

If we ever start an extraterrestrial colony on Mars, we’ll need water for a host of essential services, and most obviously for something to drink. But while there’s plenty of water ice at the planet’s poles, the elevation is too high and there’s limited access to sunlight for power. So we’ll want to look for…

A hyper-transmissible form of the coronavirus that causes covid-19 has been found in US sewer systems in California and Florida, confirming its widening presence in the US. Buckets of dirty water drawn from sewer pipes near Los Angeles and outside Orlando starting in late January are among those in which genetic mutations shared by a…

Over the last few years, Section 230 of the 1996 US Communications Decency Act has metamorphosed from a little-known subset of regulations about the internet into a major rallying point for both the right and left. So when Democrats unveiled their attempt to overhaul the law on Friday, the technology world took notice. There have…

While much of the world is engaged in a frantic scramble to get vaccinated against covid-19, there’s one group noticeably absent from the queues of people at vaccine clinics: children. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is still approved for use only in those aged 16 years or older, and the Moderna vaccine is only for adults. Both…

Our dependency on tech has soared during the pandemic. The app analytics company App Annie found that people spent around 4 hours and 18 minutes per day on mobile devices in April 2020. That’s a 20% increase from the year before, equating to an extra 45 minutes per day of screen time. Research shows that…

As machine-learning applications move into the mainstream, a new era of cyber threat is emerging—one that uses offensive artificial intelligence (AI) to supercharge attack campaigns. Offensive AI allows attackers to automate reconnaissance, craft tailored impersonation attacks, and even self-propagate to avoid detection. Security teams can prepare by turning to defensive AI to fight back—using autonomous…

It’s no secret that predictive policing tools are racially biased. A number of studies have shown that racist feedback loops can arise if algorithms are trained on police data, such as arrests. But new research shows that training predictive tools in a way meant to lessen bias has little effect. Arrest data biases predictive tools…

In 1964, mathematician and computer scientist Woodrow Bledsoe first attempted the task of matching suspects’ faces to mugshots. He measured out the distances between different facial features in printed photographs and fed them into a computer program. His rudimentary successes would set off decades of research into teaching machines to recognize human faces. Now a…

On December 23, as part of a publicity push to encourage people to get vaccinated against covid-19, the University of Pennsylvania released footage of two researchers who developed the science behind the shots, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, getting their inoculations. The vaccines, icy concoctions of fatty spheres and genetic instructions, used a previously unproven…

Most image-recognition systems are trained using large databases that contain millions of photos of everyday objects, from snakes to shakes to shoes. With repeated exposure, AIs learn to tell one type of object from another. Now researchers in Japan have shown that AIs can start learning to recognize everyday objects by being trained on computer-generated…

On Tuesday, February 2, Jeff Bezos announced that he would be stepping down as Amazon’s CEO later this year (though he will stay with the company as he transitions into a role as executive chairman of Amazon’s board). In his statement, Bezos noted that he was looking forward to having “the time and energy I…

Before his 190-square-foot apartment in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district was connected to the internet, Marvis Phillips depended on a friend with a laptop for his prolific letter-writing campaigns. Phillips, a community organizer, wrote each note by hand and mailed them, then his friend typed and sent the missives, via email and online comment forms, to…

SpaceX weathered through the onset of the covid-19 pandemic last year to become the first private company to launch astronauts into space using a commercial spacecraft. It’s poised to build on that success with another huge milestone before 2021 is over. On Monday, the company announced plans to launch the first “all-civilian” mission into orbit…

In December 2018, researchers at Google detected a group of hackers with their sights set on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Even though new development was shut down two years earlier, it’s such a common browser that if you can find a way to hack it, you’ve got a potential open door to billions of computers. The…

Sebastián De Toma joined Pfizer’s clinical trial last year, getting his shots in August and September. The Argentinian journalist still doesn’t know if he got the real covid-19 vaccine or the placebo, but on Sunday, January 31, the trial doctors called him with a new offer. Would De Toma be willing to undergo a series…

Observing space rocks from afar is all very well, but sometimes you need to get up close. The biggest questions in space science—how the solar system formed, how it led to life on Earth, and whether there’s ever been life on other nearby worlds—can really only be answered with direct study of the materials from…

Around 10 p.m. last Thursday, I received a call from a friend. The two of us primarily text, so a call was out of the ordinary. I picked up immediately, assuming it was an emergency. She told me that a friend of a friend —a health-care worker who was distributing covid-19 vaccines that evening— was…

Corporate planning is difficult in the best of times, let alone in the middle of a global health crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has made strategic planning harder because of economic upheaval, personal stress, work and lifestyle changes, and the unpredictability of everything. This report explores how companies worldwide conduct strategic enterprise planning—particularly in uncertain times.…

Across the US, people are clamoring to get the hottest ticket of the season: an appointment for a covid-19 vaccination. The recommended method is to visit a local hospital website or call a hotline. But the results can be frustrating. Families have spent hours on the hotlines, scoured appointments on platforms like the ticket sales site…

The first time Mary Ann Price logged into her employer’s system to schedule a vaccine, she found an appointment three days later at a nearby Walgreens pharmacy. She woke up the next day to an email saying it had been canceled. So she logged in again and found an opening that afternoon at the local…

Language-generation algorithms are known to embed racist and sexist ideas. They’re trained on the language of the internet, including the dark corners of Reddit and Twitter that may include hate speech and disinformation. Whatever harmful ideas are present in those forums get normalized as part of their learning. Researchers have now demonstrated that the same…

The news: Two new sets of vaccine results announced today suggest the South African variant of the virus is proving harder to vaccinate against. Novavax and Johnson & Johnson both announced that final-stage clinical trials showed their vaccines are effective at preventing illness—but that this efficacy dropped when dealing with the variant sequenced in South…

As the Biden administration ramps up, it inherits soaring cases and a muddled vaccine rollout— so it’s reasonable to wonder what else can possibly slow the spread of covid-19. Some strategies in the administration’s covid plan are basics, like calling on people to wear masks, doing more testing, and communicating more clearly. But digital technology…

In late October 1959, a Mexican spy named Eduardo Diaz Silveti slipped into the US Embassy in Mexico City. Tall and well-spoken with slicked-back hair, Silveti, 30, descended from a family of bullfighters. He had learned spycraft at the Federal Security Directorate, or DFS, Mexico’s secret police. During the Cold War, the capital had become…

President Joe Biden continues to make good on his campaign pledge to accelerate progress on climate change, rapidly working down the list of what he can accomplish on his own in his early days in office. On Wednesday, January 27, he will sign a second set of executive orders and memorandums on climate change that…

After just a week in office, the Biden administration is already under immense public pressure to fix America’s mangled vaccine rollout. Operation Warp Speed injected enormous sums into developing vaccines but left most of the planning—and cost—of administering them to states, which are now having to cope with the fallout. The reliance on chronically underfunded…

The current covid-19 pandemic has shined the spotlight on longstanding health inequities for people of color. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to the general United States population, African Americans are 1.4 times more likely to contract the coronavirus, and 2.8 times more likely to die from covid-19. Similarly, Native Americans…

The pharmaceutical and chemicals industries are no strangers to digital technology, with decades of experimentation using data and statistical techniques to improve productivity and innovation. But the results were historically disappointing relative to the promise. Over the past two or three years, the pace of digital transformation is increasing thanks to the improved performance, power,…

The global vaccine rollout is full of glitches, shortages, and problems, but not every country faces the same challenges. Evening out those inequalities to make sure poorer countries are included in the vaccination race isn’t just the ethical thing to do: it’s good for rich countries, too. A new study from the National Bureau of…

Every morning, as Nandita Mohan sifts through her emails, her college pals are in her ear—recounting their day, reminiscing, reflecting on what it’s like to have graduated in the throes of a pandemic. Mohan, a 23-year-old software programmer in the Bay Area, isn’t on the phone, nor is she listening to an especially personal podcast;…

Online misinformation and political polarization have hampered the efforts of public health officials to stop the spread of covid-19. Are there better ways to counter the falsehoods and get more reliable information out there? The MIT Media Lab’s HealthPulse project recently tried to answer that question. It ran a trial in Atlanta, a city with…

On January 10, Charlie O’Donnell, a startup investor who runs Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, published a blog post that he hoped would inspire self-reflection among his peers in the industry. Provocatively titled Seed Investments in Insurrection, his argument was that venture capitalists needed to wrestle with their impact on democracy. “It’s kind of hard to make…

Salim Abdool Karim was at a cricket match on December 26, Boxing Day, when he made the mistake of looking at his email. He had received a new report and the news wasn’t good. A heavily mutated coronavirus spotted in South Africa appeared to allow the virus to bind more tightly, and more easily, to…

On Wednesday, the US waited with bated breath as president Trump handed the government reins over to president Biden. The transition of power ended up peaceful, and Biden promptly ushered in his new vision for America with a flurry of executive orders. At the moment, the most pressing issues on his table are fighting the…

A virtual robot arm has learned to solve a wide range of different puzzles—stacking blocks, setting the table, arranging chess pieces—without having to be retrained for each task. It did this by playing against a second robot arm that was trained to give it harder and harder challenges. Self play: Developed by researchers at OpenAI,…

The news: President Biden has said it will take a “wartime effort” to tackle the covid-19 pandemic as he unveiled a seven-point plan on his first full day in the job. He pledged to be guided by science, and to make transparency and accountability core values for his administration’s response. The plan is a distillation…

In the last few years, research has shown that deep learning can match expert-level performance in medical imaging tasks like early cancer detection and eye disease diagnosis. But there’s also cause for caution. Other research has shown that deep learning has a tendency to perpetuate discrimination. With a healthcare system already riddled with disparities, sloppy…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, now the world’s richest person with a net worth north of $180 billion, announced on Twitter that he plans to give away $100 million of it as a prize for the “best carbon capture technology.” He added in a subsequent tweet that he’ll provide more details next week, so it’s not…

For oil and gas companies, digital transformation is a priority—not only as a way to modernize the enterprise, but also to secure the entire energy ecosystem. With that lens, the urgency of applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities for optimization and cybersecurity becomes clear, especially as threat actors increasingly target connected devices and…

China’s space program might have been slowed by the pandemic in 2020, but it certainly didn’t stop. The year’s highlights included sending a rover to Mars, bringing moon rocks back to Earth, and testing out the next-generation crewed vehicle that should take taikonauts into orbit—and possibly to the moon—one day. But there were a few…

A flurry of executive orders is expected to take place over the next few days from the new US president as he takes residence in the White House. Here are the highlights of those he has signed so far. The “100 day mask challenge” Biden’s first order is part recommendation, part requirement: it requires people…

The news: Hours before leaving the presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order that requires American cloud computing companies to do more to verify the identities of their foreign customers. The stated aim is to help prevent hacking operations against the United States, although the timing and scope of the order mean it is surrounded…

For two years now, NASA’s InSight probe has sat on the surface of Mars, attempting to dig 5 meters (16 feet) deep in order to install the lander’s heat probe. The instrument was going to effectively take the planet’s temperature and tell scientists more about the internal thermal activity and geology of Mars. InSight never…

At the height of California’s worst wildfire season on record, Geoff Marshall looked down at his computer and realized that an enormous blaze was about to take firefighters by surprise. Marshall runs the fire prediction team at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (known as Cal Fire), headquartered in Sacramento, which gives him…