MIT Technology Review

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,…

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…