MIT Technology Review

Grassroots groups of researchers are taking matters into their own hands. But volunteering doesn’t always go smoothly.

What has the role of disasters been in shaping society throughout history? Disasters tend to make structural failures and long-running structural inequalities glaringly obvious. They force them to a crisis point. And ideally these terrible events then force people to reckon with ongoing problems that have been ignored by those in power. You distinguish between…

A new paper by researchers from Harvard’s school of public health modeling the spread of covid-19 in the United States says that “prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022.” The emphasis in many news reports about the paper is on the date, which is startling. Most of us are hoping for some…

The petrochemical industry came of age during World War II, ushering in the era of gasoline, polymers, and plastics. But it truly expanded after the war, helped along by pioneering chemical engineers such as Peter H. Spitz ’48, SM ’49. Spitz’s family emigrated to the US from Austria in 1939, when he was 13, after…

“I would love to see a future where looking inside the body becomes as routine as a blood pressure cuff measurement,” says Charles Cadieu ’04, MEng ’05. As president of the medical technology startup Caption Health, he sees that future in reach—with the help of artificial intelligence. Cadieu still remembers the “lightbulb moment” during his…

This May, residents chosen from a lottery of 2,600 applicants are scheduled to begin moving into 98 affordable housing units in the new Finch Cambridge building on Concord Avenue near Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Designed by Boston’s Icon Architecture, the building features playful bay and corner windows to let in sunlight and allow cross-­ventilation,…

Like many college students, Matthew Kallis ’82 took a while to find his focus. He recalls the day it happened: “I sat down in the middle of Killian Court staring out at the pillars of Building 10, and sort of had a cinematic moment. I wandered aimlessly through campus and found this weird lab called…

I still remember the smell of the tobacco smoke. Bans on indoor smoking had recently gone into effect, but there had been no provision to fumigate, and a haze lingered throughout Professor Joseph Harris’s office. Still, as a student at Dartmouth College, I found myself racing up three flights of creaking wooden stairs to visit…

Back in 2008, Oregon health officials had enough money to let additional people join their state-run Medicaid system. They figured demand would exceed the number of spaces available, so the state ran a drawing: 90,000 people applied, and 10,000 were accepted. The unusual program seemed almost designed for Amy Finkelstein, PhD ’01, to study. Finkelstein,…

The Institute launched the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing (SCC) with three critical objectives: to support the rapid evolution and growth of computer science and AI, to facilitate collaborations between computing and other disciplines, and to address the social and ethical responsibilities of computing. In August 2019, Daniel Huttenlocher, SM ’84, PhD ’88,…

As this issue of MIT News goes to press, MIT has joined the nation, and the world, in facing an unprecedented public health crisis. Our community has a significant role to play in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and this extraordinary challenge has called for dramatic action. The scope of that action may be…

The question at the top of most Americans’ minds right now is: When can we go outdoors again? California took one of the first stabs at answering that question on Tuesday, as Governor Gavin Newsom laid out the key criteria that will guide state and local officials as they determine when, or if, to relax…

The widespread perception that it was once official British policy to let the novel coronavirus spread until the population reached herd immunity is false; the government was just overly optimistic about how easy flattening the curve would be. But the idea has gained so much traction in some circles, fueled by speculation that we might…

Enabling contact tracing on billions of phones is a significant move. But will people trust them enough to make it successful?

Coronavirus was a test, and many of the world’s most advanced nations have all too visibly failed. What can we do better?

Lori Perlow emailed her colleagues when her grandmother died last Monday, letting them know she’d take the afternoon off. She sat down at her computer the next day and opened Zoom, just as she would on a work day. This time, though, she was there to watch the burial. There would be no shiva, no…

The inside story of how one Indian state is flattening the curve through epic levels of contact tracing and social assistance.

In this episode of Radio Corona, Jennifer Strong, our audio and live journalism editor, will speak with economist John Van Reenen about how to make effective policy to salvage the global economy. Reenen is a professor of Applied Economics at MIT and recently won the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) research award for his paper…

It’s becoming increasingly clear how we can get back outside and back to work—although not exactly back to normal.

I stop the car when I see him walking slowly down the empty footpath outside our now shuttered building—I know he lives on campus and is far from home. I sent my students away more than a week ago; I think of them as diasporic now, not necessarily remote, but it is still a shock…

The global effort to halt the spread of the deadly coronavirus has stalled much the global economy, setting up an unintended experiment on the impact on carbon emissions. China’s GDP may have plummeted by 40% during the first three months of the year (on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis). The US’s GDP could drop anywhere…

Apple and Google are jointly building software into iPhone and Android devices to help track the spread of coronavirus by telling users if they contacted an infected person and are potentially sick themselves. The new project is slated for release in May. Medical experts know that contact tracing is vital to public health during disease…

The blood sample arrived in Vancouver by courier on February 25. It wasn’t much to look at, but to the scientists at the 117-person biotechnology company AbCellera, it was precious. The blood had been drawn from an male survivor of covid-19 in the US. The company was told it was the very first blood sample…

On the early afternoon of December 15, the gavel fell at the UN COP25 conference in Madrid. The weeks of negotiations over crucial pieces of the Paris climate agreement reached four years earlier had ended in failure. Despite spending nearly two days longer than scheduled, thousands of delegates departed the convention halls deadlocked on the…

Imagine, a few weeks or months from now, having a covid-19 test kit sent to your home. It’s small and portable, but pretty easy to figure out. You prick your finger as in a blood sugar test for diabetics, wait maybe 15 minutes, and bam—you now know whether or not you’re immune to coronavirus. If…

How many people have really been infected by the coronavirus? In one German town a preliminary answer is in: about 14%. The municipality of Gangelt, near the border with the Netherlands, was hard hit by covid-19 after a February carnival celebration drew thousands to the town, turning it into an accidental petri dish. Now, after…

In this episode of Radio Corona, on April 10 at 4 pm ET, Karen Hao, senior AI reporter of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Shion Lim, a postdoc research fellow at the Wells Lab of UCSF. They will be discussing prospects for developing tests and treatments for covid-19 as well as what it’s like to…

When it comes to predicting the spread of an infectious disease, it’s crucial to understand what Ryan Tibshirani, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, calls the “the pyramid of severity.” The bottom of the pyramid is asymptomatic carriers (those who have the infection but feel fine); the next level is symptomatic carriers (those who…

The US isn't ready to hold a vote during a pandemic. It needs to get there, quickly.

Ten years ago I ran away to sea after a family crisis. But life on a container ship was a very different kind of loneliness from the self-isolation caused by coronavirus.

In this episode of Radio Corona, on April 9 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center. They will be discussing what it’s like to treat patients with covid-19 in New York City,…

In the first employment report after social distancing measures had taken hold in many US states, the Department of Labor announced that 3.3 million people had filed jobless claims. A week later, in the first week in April, an additional 6.6 million claims came in—almost unfathomable compared with the previous record of 695,000, which was…

In one of the first such efforts in the country, San Francisco is assembling a task force to interview and trace the interactions of all people who test positive for covid-19. The goal is to find who gave it to them and whom they may have given it to, in the hopes of isolating infected…

The news: Facebook has launched a new app called Tuned, which lets couples message each other, swap music, share their mood, keep a daily shared diary, and send photos and voice memos. It can be used without a Facebook profile and is pitched as a “private space” for couples to connect. However, it isn’t end-to-end…

Transfusions of blood serum from people who’ve recovered from covid-19 could help severe cases recover, according to a new study from China. Plasma donation: The concept of using blood from survivors—or “convalescent plasma”—isn’t new, but it’s now being tried against covid-19 because there aren’t any drugs known to work. A survivor’s blood is charged up with…

The novel coronavirus sweeping the globe has exposed how vulnerable international supply chains are to disruption. The World Economic Forum has a pitch for how to make them more resilient: blockchains. Covid-19 chaos: Quarantines, lockdowns, and reduced air travel have disrupted normal business operations all over the world and made it difficult for buyers to…

Just like that, our internet connection has become an umbilical to the outside world. We now depend on it to do our jobs, to go to school, and to see other people. It is our primary source of entertainment. And we’re using it a lot. Between January and late March, internet traffic increased by around…

Far from breaking it, the surge in usage the internet is seeing right now is driving a major upgrade.

A small study from China suggests transfusions of blood from those who have beaten the disease could help buy time for new victims

We all know by now that flattening the curve is one of the most important things we can do to mitigate the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. China and Italy provided a grim picture of what happens when you’re unsuccessful: overwhelmed hospitals are forced to choose which patients receive life-saving resources, overworked doctors are more…

Every state’s health-care capacity will have an outsize impact on covid-19 deaths.

The news: WhatsApp has said it will implement new limits on message forwarding amid growing concerns that it is being used to spread misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. From today, messages identified as “highly forwarded” can be forwarded to only a single person as opposed to five, the company, which is owned by Facebook, said in a…

From today, messages identified as “highly forwarded” can be forwarded only to a single person instead of five.

The messy network of labs rushing to increase testing capacity has some big problems, but they’re fixable.

Jason Bae, an urgent-care physician in Northern California, has been seeing covid-19 patients for almost a month. When he first started ordering coronavirus tests, around the week of March 9, his health-care system was quoting a 48- to 72-hour turnaround time from their third-party laboratory. But “even from the very beginning, a lot of tests…

The coronavirus pandemic has turned back the clock to a kinder time on the web, before the novelty of virtual connection wore off. Will it last?