MIT Technology Review

The good news started trickling out early this morning, first in a vague company press release and then, by midday, from the White House. A drug called remdesivir appears to actually work against the coronavirus that causes covid-19. The news was delivered to President Donald Trump by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of…

For all the progress that chatbots and virtual assistants have made, they’re still terrible conversationalists. Most are highly task-oriented: you make a demand and they comply. Some are highly frustrating: they never seem to get what you’re looking for. Others are awfully boring: they lack the charm of a human companion. It’s fine when you’re…

Economies are in turmoil. Get the answers to the questions on everyone’s mind: What will it take to stabilize and boost regional, national, and global economies? What can business leaders do to prepare for growth? In this nearly worldwide pause, how can organizations reset, rethink, and innovate the way their business is done in order…

Technology is changing the nature of work on every level of business, from workforce talent to digital implementation and automation. What technologies are having the most significant impact? How do we make smart, practical decisions that enhance and embrace the technologies redefining the way we work today? EmTech Next concludes with Eric Yuan, founder and…

A continuous stream of emerging technologies is radically transforming business, disrupting the technological status quo, and reinventing the way people work. On day two of EmTech Next, we’ll delve into the state of technology today and what leaders need to know now in order to prosper and thrive. Transforming 5G Communications. 5G is unlocking the…

Times of crisis require leadership and strategy to navigate the path forward. Day one of EmTech Next digs into topics including: Innovation and Leadership in a Time of Crisis. If innovation is the fuel that drives business, then what is the formula for innovation? In this segment, we will explore how smart leaders develop, adopt,…

We are living in a changed world. Technology and what it means to be digitally resilient are driving the nature of work on every level of the organization as never before. Your key to success as a leader will be making smart, practical decisions about enhancing the technology you use today and embracing the technology…

Without federal leadership, the hard work of contact tracing is being left to a coalition of states, medics and technology companies like Google and Apple. They can make it happen, but it won't be easy.

There is widespread agreement that the only way to safely reopen the economy is through a massive increase in testing. The US needs to test millions of people per day to effectively track and then contain the covid-19 pandemic. This is a tall order. The country tested only around 210,000 people per day last week,…

Starting in the fall of 2016 and continuing into 2018, researchers at Columbia University in Manhattan began collecting nasal swabs from 191 children, teachers, and emergency workers, asking them to record when they sneezed or had sore throats. The point was to create a map of common respiratory viruses and their symptoms, and how long…

The covid-19 pandemic is stretching hospital resources to the breaking point in many countries in the world. It is no surprise that many people hope AI could speed up patient screening and ease the strain on clinical staff. But a study from Google Health—the first to look at the impact of a deep-learning tool in…

As the coronavirus spread from China across the world earlier this year, two friends in Sydney watched in horror. Milton Zhou is a cofounder of a renewable energy company called the Maoneng Group, which developed some of Australia’s largest solar farms. Saul Khan is a former partner in an energy efficiency consultancy. They met in…

The pandemic is turning medics into social-media stars, but even the most successful say being a positive influence is difficult.

The frustration in Marc Andreessen’s post on our failure to prepare and respond competently to the coronavirus pandemic is palpable, and his diagnosis is adamant: “a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to ‘build.’” Why don’t we have vaccines and medicines, or even masks and ventilators? He writes: “We could have these things but we…

One of Israel’s largest health maintenance organizations is using artificial intelligence to help identify which of the 2.4 million people it covers are most at risk of severe covid-19 complications. Maccabi Healthcare Services says the system—which it developed with AI company Medial EarlySign—has already flagged 2% of its members, amounting to around 40,000 people. Once identified,…

Coronavirus testing in the US is nowhere near where it should be. A recent road map suggested we need to test upwards of 20 million people every day in order to safely reopen the economy (we’re currently running around 150,000 a day). To scale up, we need to move beyond conventional methods—and that might require an entirely different…

Rizwan Malik had always had an interest in AI. As the lead radiologist at the Royal Bolton Hospital, run by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), he saw its potential to make his job easier. In his hospital, patients often had to wait six hours or more for a specialist to look at their x-rays.…

California plans to significantly ramp up its coronavirus testing and tracing efforts, as the state strives to reach a point where it could relax stay-at-home rules implemented to contain the outbreak. During a press conference on Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom said the state intends to increase testing capacity from about 16,000 per day to 25,000…

In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, will discuss volunteer initiatives that might accelerate the development of a coronavirus vaccine. Joining him will be Josh Morrison, executive director at Waitlist Zero and part of the team at 1 Day Sooner. Both organizations recruit volunteers to take part…

You might know Bluetooth best for helping you pair your headphones and smartphone, but the 21-year-old wireless technology is getting a new wave of attention now that it’s at the heart of contact-tracing apps designed to show whether you might have been exposed to the novel coronavirus. Google and Apple, for example, are building a…

Deep Tech is a new subscriber-only podcast that brings alive the people and ideas our editors and reporters are thinking about. Episodes are released every two weeks. We’re making this episode—like much of the rest of our coronavirus coverage—free to everyone. We can probably stay sheltered in our homes, collectively flattening the curve of coronavirus…

There’s a phrase to describe what we’re experiencing: collective trauma. We are all grieving—whether it’s for the deaths of loved ones, the loss of our way of life, or the knowledge that things will never quite be the same again. Most of us are experiencing some level of anxiety. The loss of control over major…

What’s new: Facebook has released a map showing the proportion of people who say they have experienced coronavirus symptoms in each state in the US. The data was gathered from more than one million Facebook users who filled in a survey created by Carnegie Mellon University about whether they were experiencing symptoms like a cough…

Eight years ago, Suleika Jaouad was alone in a hospital room, undergoing aggressive treatment for leukemia and awaiting a bone marrow transplant. Just out of college and harboring dreams of becoming a war correspondent, Jaouad was instead confined to her hospital room and felt desperately, stiflingly alone. In the end, journaling helped Jaouad through her…

The news: A group of experts has produced a plan for the US to reopen its economy safely this summer. However, it’s contingent on doing at least 20 million tests every day, scaling up contact tracing, and ensuring that those who need to isolate can be properly supported. The report, produced by 45 cross-disciplinary experts…

If the federal government actually treated the pandemic like a war, its response would look very, very different.

Across San Francisco, trips to workplaces, parks, transit stations, and stores have collectively fallen to about 40% of normal levels since late February, as the region and then state enacted strict social distancing measures to halt the spread of the coronavirus. People moved around New York, British Columbia, and Los Angeles far less as well:…

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced plans to launch a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 27. If the launch takes place, it will be the first time an American rocket will carry passengers to orbit since the final space shuttle launch on July 8, 2011. The…

Results from surveys tracking the true spread of the coronavirus are all over the map—but one done in the heart of the technology sector says the germ is more widespread, and less deadly, than widely believed. The new survey looked for antibodies to covid-19 in the blood of 3,300 residents of Santa Clara County, which…

Ron Kim was already convinced that money should be redesigned. Now that the coronavirus epidemic has hit, he’s doubling down. Before covid-19 started spreading in the United States, Kim, a New York assemblyman who represents a district in Queens, had been pushing for the state to create a publicly run digital payment system. He and…

Andrew Ng’s startup Landing AI has created a new workplace monitoring tool that issues an alert when anyone is less than the desired distance from a colleague. Six feet apart: On Thursday, the startup released a blog post with a new demo video showing off a new social distancing detector. On the left is a…

The news: Facebook will start directing people who have interacted with misinformation about coronavirus to a myth-busting page on the World Health Organization’s website. “We’re going to start showing messages in News Feed to people who have liked, reacted or commented on harmful misinformation about COVID-19 that we have since removed,” Facebook’s VP of integrity,…

Remember Libra, Facebook’s plan to create a global digital currency? Unveiled last June, it was immediately met with resistance from policymakers and central bankers around the world. So the team went back to the drawing board, and today it reemerged with a new vision—one that is a lot less audacious than the original. Here are…

“It’s my first global pandemic. How about you?” Jonathan Rothberg wanted to know. Rothberg is a high-energy biotech entrepreneur who has been trapped in quarantine on his super-yacht, the Gene Machine, since mid-March, when we first reached him by phone. The creator of a fast DNA sequencing machine and, more recently, a revolutionary cheap ultrasound…

If you’d told Areeba Imam a month ago that she’d become obsessed with Nintendo’s Animal Crossing, she wouldn’t have believed you. “I’ve never played video games before,” says the 23-year-old college student, who is currently hunkered at her parents’ home in northern Virginia as the pandemic tightens its grip on the US. “The only game…

President Donald Trump has announced that he is halting US payments to the World Health Organization (WHO). It’s unclear whether he in fact has legal authority to do so. Leaving that aside, though, as Bill Gates and a variety of world leaders have pointed out, it’s a ridiculous decision. The pandemic would have been much…

Facebook has developed a new method to play out the consequences of its code. The context: Like any software company, the tech giant needs to test its product any time it pushes updates. But the sorts of debugging methods that normal-size companies use aren’t really enough when you’ve got 2.5 billion users. Such methods usually…

In this episode of Radio Corona on April 16 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Nelson Mark, economics professor at the University of Notre Dame, about the economic impact of covid-19, how we should think about pandemics as economic risks, and how the US should be…

The news: President Trump’s decision to freeze US funding for the World Health Organization has been met with condemnation by political and scientific leaders around the world. Yesterday Trump announced that US funding to the WHO would be suspended for 60 to 90 days pending a review to assess the organization’s “role in severely mismanaging…

I am writing this on April 10, 2020. Twenty-five days have passed since San Francisco became the first US city to impose a stay-at-home order on its residents. It feels like six months. As the covid-19 pandemic has advanced across the planet at dizzying speed, economies and health-care systems have toppled like dominos. At this…

Linda Kozlowski’s neighbor wanted to know if she needed anything from Walmart. It wasn’t a quick trip into town; the drive from the Oregon coast to Portland took two hours. But because of her age, Kozlowski, a 77-year-old retiree, might be at risk from covid-19. Perhaps there would be hard-to-find goods, like hand sanitizer. She…

And they could even help with the next one.

What it is, where it comes from, how it hurts us, and how we fight it.

The US and other countries are scrambling to test hundreds of thousands of people to see if they are infected by the coronavirus. That test, which employs a technique called PCR, looks directly for the genetic material of the virus in a nasal or throat swab. It can tell people with worrisome symptoms what they…

What steps did the US government take after the 2014 Ebola outbreak? An emergency spending bill that was passed by Congress in December 2014 included $1 billion that the administration used to address some crucial weaknesses. Many nations around the world didn’t have testing capabilities to be able to notice when a novel or really…

June 1956 From “The First Great Epidemic of History”: Since the beginning of recorded history the people of this world have been molested by a long series of awesome epidemics, several of which have brought mankind dangerously close to extinction. The worst of them all is generally thought to have been the so-called Black Death,…