MIT Technology Review

Galileo once observed that nature is written in math. Biology might be written in words. Natural-language processing (NLP) algorithms are now able to generate protein sequences and predict virus mutations, including key changes that help the coronavirus evade the immune system. The key insight making this possible is that many properties of biological systems can…

The year 2020 was profoundly challenging for citizens, companies, and governments around the world. As covid-19 spread, requiring far-reaching health and safety restrictions, artificial intelligence (AI) applications played a crucial role in saving lives and fostering economic resilience. Research and development (R&D) to enhance core AI capabilities, from autonomous driving and natural language processing to…

Covid vaccines reprogrammed to aim at emerging new strains of the virus could reach the market quickly, without going through large clinical trials, according to officials at Moderna Therapeutics and the US government. As researchers identify mutated versions of the coronavirus that causes covid-19, there’s concern that the germ could evade approved vaccines and new…

The US may face a rapidly closing window to bring a suspected extra-contagious variant of covid-19 under control. If the variant strain, first spotted in the United Kingdom, is as infectious as some suspect, it could dominate US case numbers by March, send covid-19 deaths to unprecedented levels, and collide with the rollout of vaccines,…

Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks don’t notice when the words in a sentence are jumbled up, which shows that they don’t really understand language at all. The problem lies in the way natural-language processing (NLP) systems are trained; it also…

When the pandemic threw the world into disarray in spring 2020, most organizations responded by holding on—barely, at times. Executives assessed the impact on operations and dealt with the immediate emergency. Now businesses are ready to move beyond resilience and recovery and capture growth. Certainly, corporate execs and finance professionals have to focus on the…

For Singaporeans, the covid-19 pandemic has been closely intertwined with technology: two technologies, to be specific. The first is the QR code, whose little black-and-white squares have been ubiquitous all over the country as part of the SafeEntry contact tracing system rolled out in April and May. Under SafeEntry, anyone entering a public venue—restaurants, stores,…

What’s happening: Parler, a site that bills itself as a “free speech social network” and that was widely used to coordinate the storming of the Capitol last week, has gone offline after Amazon stopped hosting it on Sunday night, citing violations of the terms of service. Why?: BuzzFeed obtained a copy of the email from…

This week a violent mob mounted the biggest attack on the Capitol, the seat of American democracy, in more than 200 years, driven by the false belief that the presidential election had been stolen. The chief author of that claim was President Donald Trump, but the mob’s readiness to believe it was in large part…

On January 7, following the violent white supremacist riots that breached the US Capitol, Twitter and Facebook both suspended President Donald Trump from their platforms. The next day, Twitter made its suspension permanent. Many praised the decision for preventing the president from doing more harm at a time when his adherents are taking cues from…

Less than 24 hours after President Trump was allowed back on Twitter, the social media platform announced on Friday afternoon, January 8, that it was permanently suspending his @realdonaltrump account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” The decision followed several more tweets warning that his supporters would not be “disrespected” and saying…

As a violent mob incited by President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol on January 6, halting the procedure in Congress to formally certify Joe Biden as president-elect, a Redditor with the username Adam Lynch began a thread on the subreddit r/DataHoarder—a forum dedicated to saving data that might be erased or deleted. “Archiving videos…

A year ago, none the wiser about what 2020 would bring, I reflected on the pivotal moment that the AI community was in. The previous year, 2018, had seen a series of high-profile automated failures, like self-driving-car crashes and discriminatory recruiting tools. In 2019, the field responded with more talk of AI ethics than ever…

Maybe you saw this coming nearly a decade ago, when #YourSlipIsShowing laid bare how racist Twitter users were impersonating Black women on the internet. Maybe, for you, it was during Gamergate, the online abuse campaign targeting women in the industry. Or maybe it was the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, when a gunman steeped…

Just as well-known, easily identifiable far-right figures livestreamed themselves invading the Capitol in Washington, DC, a lie started spreading around the Trump-supporting internet: What if the mob was actually a group of antifa activists trying to make the president’s supporters look bad? The rumor was false, and debunked repeatedly—not least by the words and actions…

The outcomes in Georgia’s runoff Senate elections hand the Democratic Party control of both chambers of Congress, easing the path for President-elect Joe Biden to achieve progress on his ambitious climate agenda, at least during the next two years. The dual victories of Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock—which appeared highly improbable just weeks…

As a mob of right-wing extremists occupied the US Capitol building on Tuesday, President Trump posted a short video message to his loyal supporters on social media: “We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said, repeating a lie he has promoted for months. “Go home. We love you; you’re very special,” he…

Covid-19 patients who recovered from the disease still have robust immunity from the coronavirus eight months after infection, according to a new study. The result is an encouraging sign that the authors interpret to mean immunity to the virus probably lasts for many years, and it should alleviate fears that the covid-19 vaccine would require…

To say the first few weeks of vaccine delivery have been turbulent would be an understatement. States across the US have found themselves struggling with underdeveloped logistics that have caused problems in delivery and made rollout slower than promised. Meanwhile, the debacle at Stanford Medical Center, where a system to rank potential vaccine recipients managed…

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence has fostered hope that it will help us solve many of the world’s most intractable problems. However, there’s also much concern about the power of AI, and growing agreement that its use should be guided to avoid infringing upon our rights. Many groups have discussed and proposed ethical guidelines…

We’ve all been there by now: surfing the web and bumping into ads with an uncanny flavor. How did they know I was thinking about joining a gym? Or changing careers? Or that I need a loan? You might wonder if Google can read your mind. Google even boasts that it knows you better than…

With GPT-3, OpenAI showed that a single deep-learning model could be trained to use language in a variety of ways simply by throwing it vast amounts of text. It then showed that by swapping text for pixels, the same approach could be used to train an AI to complete half-finished images. GPT-3 mimics how humans…

The news: Police will be able to access data collected by Singapore’s covid-19 contact tracing system for use in criminal investigations, a senior official said on Monday. The announcement contradicts the privacy policy originally outlined when the government launched its TraceTogether app in March 2020 and is being criticized as a backpedal just after participation…

Spaceflight in 2020 did not go as planned. Like nearly everything else in the world, space activity was hit hard by the pandemic. Last year we listed the seven space missions that we were most excited to see take flight throughout 2020. Some of those went brilliantly: SpaceX sent astronauts into space! China brought moon rocks…

There’s a case to be made that 2020, for all the sacrifices it demanded and tragedies it inflicted, could at least mark a turning point on climate change. It’s now possible that global oil demand and greenhouse-gas emissions may have already peaked in 2019, since the pandemic could slow economic growth for years, accelerate the…

Even amidst stay-at-home orders and restricted mobility, the photographers commissioned for stories this year were able to connect us with events around the world.

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

This was a year we needed technology to save us. A pandemic raced over the land, there were wildfires, uneasy political divisions, and we gasped in the miasma of social media. In 2020, the ways in which technology can help or hurt never seemed clearer. In the success column we have covid-19 vaccines. But this…

America’s first confirmed wrongful arrest by facial recognition technology happened in January 2020. Robert Williams, a Black man, was arrested in his driveway just outside Detroit, with his wife and young daughter watching. He spent the night in jail. The next day in the questioning room, a detective slid a picture across the table to…

A spacesuit is more like a miniature spacecraft you wear around your body than an item of clothing. It’s pressurized, it’s decked out with life support systems, and it’s likely to look pretty cool. But should the suit fail, you’re toast. No one has ever died because of a faulty spacesuit, but that doesn’t mean…

Valerie Fitzhugh has watched the news a lot more over the past four years, certainly more than she remembers doing at any other point in her life. In the first months of the pandemic, she kept hearing one message, from news outlet to news outlet, that she couldn’t stop thinking about: there weren’t enough people…

When Joe Biden takes over the US presidency on January 20, 2021, he intends to make climate change a centerpiece of his administration. As well as rejoining the Paris agreement, reinforcing the Clean Air Act, and restoring the Clean Power Plan, he will also have an opportunity to strengthen climate research. One way he can…

The consensus is that 2020 has been “the worst.” But there is reason to look back at this year and find the unexpected silver linings of quarantine, particularly when it comes to how we connect with other people. None of these benefits compare with the death and suffering and misery of a terrible year, but…

In 2018, Sam Cole, a reporter at Motherboard, discovered a new and disturbing corner of the internet. A Reddit user by the name of “deepfakes” was posting nonconsensual fake porn videos using an AI algorithm to swap celebrities’ faces into real porn. Cole sounded the alarm on the phenomenon, right as the technology was about…

This spring, while the US government was spinning its wheels on an official covid-19 response, countries around the world were rolling out national contact tracing apps. Beginning with Singapore in mid-March, more than 40 countries have launched digital exposure notification systems, to varying degrees of success. Our Covid Tracing Tracker logs each country’s app and…

Earlier this month a mutated variant of the coronavirus was detected in the UK, setting off alarms across Europe and causing some countries to ban travelers from Britain. But it’s still not clear that the new variant is much more easily transmitted, as some scientists have warned. Moreover, several companies with authorized vaccines or therapeutic…

There are two stories you hear about making a living as an artist in the digital age, and they are diametrically opposed. One comes from Silicon Valley and its boosters in the media. There’s never been a better time to be an artist, it goes. If you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got a recording studio.…

Experts are debating the pros and cons of covid-19 vaccine passports or other types of certification as they attempt to begin reopening public spaces. The idea seems simple on its face: those who can prove they’ve been vaccinated for covid-19 would be able to go places and do things that unvaccinated people would not. There’s…

On November 30, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao pinned an image to his Twitter profile. In it, a soldier stands on an Australian flag and grins maniacally as he holds a bloodied knife to a boy’s throat. The boy, whose face is covered by a semi-transparent veil, carries a lamb. Alongside the image, Zhao…

Many companies expected 2020 to be a challenging year. They anticipated technological shifts that would affect their business—like the transition from combustion to electric vehicles for automotive manufacturers—or ongoing instability due to raging trade wars or Brexit. But the impact of the covid pandemic on top of these challenges has, for many companies, been unprecedented.…

In some stores, sophisticated systems are tracking customers in almost every imaginable way, from recognizing their faces to gauging their age, their mood, and virtually gussying them up with makeup. The systems rarely ask for people’s permission, and for the most part they don’t have to. In our season 1 finale, we look at the…

In part-three of this latest series, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review jump on the court to unpack just how much things are changing. We meet: Donnie Scott, senior vice president of public security, IDEMIA Michael D’Auria, vice president of business development, Second Spectrum Jason Gay, sports columnist, The Wall Street Journal…

What seemed so impossible at the beginning of the pandemic is now real: vaccines are here, in record time. They bring much-needed hope to a holiday season shadowed by death and fear. While authorities work out details for this mass vaccination campaign, though, the public is still waiting for answers to fundamental questions. Who gets…

When resident physicians at Stanford Medical Center—many of whom work on the front lines of the covid-19 pandemic—found out that only seven out of over 1,300 of them had been prioritized for the first 5,000 doses of the covid vaccine, they were shocked. Then, when they saw who else had made the list, including administrators…

A rising wave of covid-19 cases in the south of England has been blamed on a new variant of the coronavirus. The new version, which appeared by September, is now behind half the cases in the region. Genomic researchers have found that not only does the variant have a lot of mutations, but several of the genetic…

In the early 1970s, Steve Gorad ’63 had a successful career as a clinical psychologist. He was in charge of the alcohol unit at Boston State Hospital and had a private practice, but he was restless. “It wasn’t enough,” he says. “I was a long-haired hippie writing [draft exemption] letters for people who didn’t want…

Looking back to the start of the pandemic, I am struck by our community’s formidable strength. In March 2020, we did not know what it would take to sustain MIT’s great mission through this crisis. Since then, we have found a way together, and we have made it work. That accomplishment belongs to every member…

From the choir rehearsal in Washington to family gatherings in Chicago, numerous covid-19 “superspreading” events have seen one person infect many others. MIT researchers who studied about 60 such events found that they have a much larger impact than expected. “Superspreading events are likely more important than most of us had initially realized,” says senior…

In October, astrophysicist Andrea Ghez ’87 became the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics and the 38th in the list of MIT graduates with Nobels to their names. Ghez, a professor at UCLA, and Reinhard Genzel, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, share half the prize for the discovery of a supermassive…

The search for extraterrestrial life has largely focused on Mars, but scientists at MIT, Cardiff University, and elsewhere reported surprising findings in September of what may be signs of life in the clouds of Venus. While Venus is similar to Earth in size, mass, and rocky composition, its surface temperatures reach 900 °F, and its…