MIT Technology Review

Collagen, a protein prevalent in bones and connective tissue, has been discovered in dinosaur fossils as old as 195 million years-even though the normal half-life of the peptide bonds that hold proteins together is about 500 years. A new study from MIT offers an explanation for collagen's longevity: A special atomic-level interaction prevents water from...

Intermittent fasting can delay the onset of some age-related diseases and lengthen lifespan. In part, MIT researchers have found, that's because it boosts intestinal stem cells' ability to regenerate, which helps the intestine recover from injuries or inflammation. A new mouse study by the same researchers now sheds further light on how this mechanism works,...

The most effective way to prevent death when someone has overdosed on opioids is to administer a drug called naloxone: It binds to opioid receptors, sometimes restoring normal breathing in minutes. But people often don't receive it in time if at all, especially if they overdose while they are alone. Now mechanical engineer Giovanni Traverso...

When alumni opened the first issue of The Technology Review in January 1899, they found not only a description of MIT's new Pierce Building but crisp photographs of its interiors as well. The second issue featured photos of the varsity football team and an alumni banquet in Chicago that looped in 130 long-distance guests by...

A bird's-eye view of campus featuring Maseeh Hall, captured by a DJI Mavic 3 drone in late August. Given airspace restrictions, the photographer, an FAA-certified drone pilot, had to get FAA clearance three days ahead of time-and hope the weather forecast would hold-to get this shot.

One of the things I've come to value deeply about the MIT community is the near-universal willingness to name a problem, measure it, design a solution, and keep iterating until it's right. It's an approach that has worked for a long time, and it's one we'll continue to rely on. As we step into the...

I spent 10 years at MIT, earning four degrees in electrical engineering and computer science," says Arvola Chan '74, SM '76, EE '78, PhD '80. I was a beneficiary of scholarships through my undergraduate years and research assistantships through my graduate years, so I'm forever grateful." As planned-giving chair for the Class of 1974 50th...

When Anthony Jones '08 reminisces about his childhood, he thinks of clams. Growing up on the reservation of the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe, about an hour from Seattle, he spent a lot of time playing outside with his brothers-fishing, digging clams, and gathering oysters on the beach. Those idyllic childhood memories wouldn't have been possible,...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How refrigeration ruined fresh food Three-quarters of everything in the average American diet passes through the cold chain-the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk,...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I've recently been feeling heartbroken. A very close friend recently cut off contact with me. I don't really understand why, and my attempts at fixing the situation have backfired. Situations like...

Before you buy orange juice, it probably waited, for as long as two years, in a two-story, stainless-steel tank filled with 265,000 gallons of viscous brown slush. It's orange juice, but with its water and volatile flavor molecules burned off. The result is a simple syrup six times more sugary than juice and devoid of...

The demand for new and improved infrastructure across the world is not being met. The Asian Development Bank has estimated that in Asia alone, roughly $1.7 trillion needs to be invested annually through to 2030 just to sustain economic growth and offset the effects of climate change. Globally, that figure has been put at $15...

Dried cells-it's what's for dinner. At least that's what a new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are hoping to convince us. Their claims sound too good to be true: They say they can make food out of thin air. But that's exactly how certain soil-dwelling bacteria work. In...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. These companies are creating food out of thin air A new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are promising something that seems too good to be true....

This is simply a question of right and wrong." You can't deny the costs, though. You keep saying that just one more year of taxes will solve- We're not solving-we're mitigating!" Then what's the point?" The shrill back-and-forth fills the kitchen, where Xia is busy making breakfast, some kind of awful cricket-protein smoothie with kale....

Meta is releasing a massive data set and models, called Open Materials 2024, that could help scientists use AI to discover new materials much faster. OMat24 tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks in the discovery process: data. To find new materials, scientists calculate the properties of elements across the periodic table and simulate different combinations...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. AI could help people find common ground during deliberations Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views. Perhaps an AI tool could help....

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. There have been plenty of reports of potentially concerning viruses this last year. Covid is still causing thousands of deaths, and bird flu appears set to make the...

Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views. Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a caucus mediator," generating summaries that outline a group's areas of agreement on complex but important...

Generative AI's promises for the software development lifecycle (SDLC)-code that writes itself, fully automated test generation, and developers who spend more time innovating than debugging-are as alluring as they are ambitious. Some bullish industry forecasts project a 30% productivity boost from AI developer tools, which, if realized, could inject more than $1.5 trillion into the...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The quest to figure out farming on Mars Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from...

Lab scientists spend much of their time doing laborious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or running the same analyses over and over again. But what if they could simply tell a robot to do the experiments, analyze the data, and generate a report? Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers...

Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from thick, cloudy skies. It wasn't really so different from our own planet 4 billion years ago, except for one crucial detail-its size. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth,...

In an age where customer experience can make or break a business, Cathay Pacific is embracing cloud transformation to enhance service delivery and revolutionize operations from the inside out. It's not just technology companies that are facing pressure to deliver better customer service, do more with data, and improve agility. An almost 80-year-old airline, Cathay...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Intro to AI: a beginner's guide to artificial intelligence from MIT Technology Review It feels as though AI is moving a million miles a minute. Every week, it seems, there are product launches,...

A company making fire-suppressing battery materials just got a $670.6 million loan commitment from the US Department of Energy. Aspen Aerogels makes insulating materials that can be layered inside an EV's battery to prevent or slow heat and fires from spreading within the pack. The company is building a new factory in Georgia to produce...

Does ChatGPT treat you the same whether you're a Laurie, Luke, or Lashonda? Almost, but not quite. OpenAI has analyzed millions of conversations with its hit chatbot and found that ChatGPT will produce a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user's name in around one in 1000 responses on average, and as many...

It feels as though AI is moving a million miles a minute. Every week, it seems, there are product launches, fresh features and other innovations, and new concerns over ethics and privacy. It's a lot to keep up with. Maybe you wish someone would just take a step back and explain some of the basics....

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The quest to protect farmworkers from extreme heat On July 21, 2024, temperatures soared in many parts of the world, breaking the record for the hottest day ever recorded on the planet. The...

On July 21, 2024, temperatures soared in many parts of the world, breaking the record for the hottest day ever recorded on the planet. The following day-July 22-the record was broken again. But even as the heat index rises each summer, the people working outdoors to pick fruits, vegetables, and flowers for American tables keep...

Organizations are starting the heavy lifting to get real business value from generative AI. As Arnab Chakraborty, chief responsible AI officer at Accenture, puts it, 2023 was the year when clients were amazed with generative AI and the possibilities. In 2024, we are starting to see scaled implementations of responsible generative AI programs." Some generative...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Africa fights rising hunger by looking to foods of the past After falling steadily for decades, the prevalence of global hunger is now on the rise-nowhere more so than in sub-Saharan Africa. Conflicts,...

The first time the rains failed, the farmers of Kanaani were prepared for it. It was April of 2021, and as climate change had made the weather increasingly erratic, families in the eastern Kenyan village had grown used to saving food from previous harvests. But as another wet season passed with barely any rain, and...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. These are the best ways to measure your body fat -Jessica Hamzelou We all know that being overweight is not great for your health-it's linked to metabolic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular problems....

When Martin Roth began his career as a forest ranger in the 1980s, his job was to care for the forest in a way that would ensure continuity for decades, even centuries. Now, with climate change, it's more about planning for an uncertain future. It's turned into disaster management," says Roth, for whom the 3,000...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week, an office conversation turned to body weight. We all know that being overweight is not great for your health-it's linked to metabolic diseases like diabetes and...

Recorded on October 10, 2024 Producing Climate-Friendly Food with special guests from Pivot Bio and Rumin8 Speakers: James Temple, Sr Editor for Energy, Casey Crownhart, Sr Reporter for Climate, Karsten Temme, Chief Innovation Officer & Co-founder of Pivot Bio, and Matt Callahan, Co-founder and Counsel of Rumin8. Planet-warming emissions aren't only spewed from power plants...

In 2022, the US made a massive bet on the carbon removal industry, committing $3.5 billion to build four major regional hubs in an effort to scale up the nascent sector. But industry observers fear that market demand isn't building fast enough to support it, even with these substantial federal grants and other subsidies. Some...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The weeds are winning Since the 1980s, more and more plants have evolved to become immune to the biochemical mechanisms that herbicides leverage to kill them. This herbicidal resistance threatens to decrease yields-out-of-control...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. We get to celebrate a very special birthday today-The Spark just turned two! Over the past couple of years, I've been bringing you all the news you need to know in climate...

On a languid, damp July morning, I meet weed scientist Aaron Hager outside the old Agronomy Seed House at the University of Illinois' South Farm. In the distance are round barns built in the early 1900s, designed to withstand Midwestern windstorms. The sky is a formless white. It's the day after a storm system hundreds...

This sponsored session was presented by Ford Pro at MIT Technology Review's 2024 EmTech MIT event. A decarbonized transportation system is a necessary pre-requisite for a sustainable economy. In the transportation industry, the road to electrification and greater technology adoption can also increase business bottom lines and reduce downstream costs to tax payers. Focusing on...

Adobe has announced a new tool to help creators watermark their artwork and opt out of having it used to train generative AI models. The web app, called Adobe Content Authenticity, allows artists to signal that they do not consent for their work to be used by AI models, which are generally trained on vast...

Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose pioneering work on deep learning in the 1980s and '90s underpins all of the most powerful AI models in the world today, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Speaking on the phone to the Academy minutes after the announcement,...

We are in the early stages of a geopolitical competition for the future of artificial intelligence. The winners will dominate the global economy in the 21st century. But what's been too often left out of the conversation is that AI's huge demand for concentrated and consistent amounts of power represents a chance to scale the...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Chatting with an AI chatbot is so 2022. The latest hot AI toys take advantage ofmultimodal models, which can handle several things at the same time, such as images, audio, and...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How to break free of Spotify's algorithm Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to paranormal...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts-and they're weird and amazing Google's new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. On September 28, California became the second US state to officially recognize the importance of mental privacy in state law. That pink, jelly-like, throbbing mass under your skull-a.k.a....

All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech," a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google's new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as...