MIT Technology Review

The news: Ahead of a landmark vote that could lead to the formation of the first-ever labor union at a US-based Amazon warehouse, new Twitter accounts purporting to be Amazon employees started appearing. The profiles used deepfake photos as profile pictures and were tweeting some pretty laughable, over-the-top defenses of Amazon’s working practices. They didn’t…

Our solar system is full of comets that whizz by as we track them over centuries. But humans have so far seen only two visiting objects from outside the solar system. There’s ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar asteroid that we think might actually be a flat pancake-like rock originating from the remains of an exoplanet similar to Pluto. It’s…

Like many countries, China has a health care problem. Changing demographics and lifestyles mean demand for health care is outstripping growth in medical resources and its cost is rising faster than the insurance premium. With 250 million people over the age of 60, the world’s most populous country is ageing. Diseases associated with more affluent…

The news: A “real-world” study of 3,950 people in six states found that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines cut the risk of infection by 90%. The findings are broadly in line with the 95% and 94% efficacy that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed, respectively, in their clinical trials. The details: The…

Here on Earth, we have more detailed maps of Mars than of our own ocean, and that’s a problem. A massive force for surviving climate change, the ocean absorbs 90% of the heat caused by emissions and generates 50% of the oxygen we breathe. “We have the ocean to thank for so many aspects of…

We’ve all been there. “Please listen to our entire menu as our options have changed. Say or press one for product information…” Sometimes, these automated customer service experiences are effective and efficient—other times, not so much. Many organizations are already using chatbots and virtual assistants to help better serve their customers. These intelligent, automated self-service…

In order to truly end the pandemic, it will be essential to get vaccines to all parts of the world. The first part of that challenge involves boosting the supply and securing doses for all, but even if enough vaccines become ready, the next hurdles are storage and distribution. For some covid vaccines, that means…

In a Massachusetts home, a family gathers around the kitchen table. The parents tune in to the device that sits at the head of the table. Moments later, a cheery voice quiets the chatter as the whole family settles in to listen. No, this isn’t a scene from the golden era of the wireless. This…

A wild-animal trader who caught a strange new virus from a frozen pangolin. A lab worker studying bat viruses who slipped up and sniffed the air under her biosafety hood. A man who suddenly fell ill after collecting bat guano from a cave to use for fertilizer. Were any of these scenarios what touched off…

Google runs some of the most venerated cybersecurity operations on the planet: its Project Zero team, for example, finds powerful undiscovered security vulnerabilities, while its Threat Analysis Group directly counters hacking backed by governments, including North Korea, China, and Russia. And those two teams caught an unexpectedly big fish recently: an “expert” hacking group exploiting…

Andrew Ng has worn many hats in his life. You may know him as the founder of the Google Brain team or the former chief scientist at Baidu. You may also know him as your own instructor. He has taught countless students, curious listeners, and business leaders about the principles of machine learning through his…

In a congressional hearing about disinformation on Thursday, Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to respond to a claim he once made about his own company: that the more likely content posted to Facebook is to violate the company’s community standards, the more engagement it will receive. Is this, she…

Anna Podedworna first heard about NFTs a month or so ago, when a fellow artist sent her an Instagram message trying to convince her to get on board. She found it really off-putting, like a pitch for a pyramid scheme. He had the best of intentions, she thought: NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are basically just…

In his 1979 book of the same name, Tom Wolfe described astronauts as needing the “right stuff”—meaning they had to be in top physical and mental shape to withstand the rigors and dangers of space travel. In the days of the Apollo missions, you had to be an experienced pilot to stand much chance of…

Astronomers have released a brand-new image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. It’s a sharper follow-up to a historic 2019 picture, showing the polarized light that traces the monster’s magnetic field lines. The background: The Event Horizon Telescope made history on April 10, 2019, when it released the first…

One afternoon before the pandemic, I went to a decommissioned hospital in West London to meet the Hindi film director Anurag Kashyap on the set of his new Netflix production. The old maternity unit where he was filming had never been entirely cleared out. Members of his crew, recently arrived from Mumbai, were maneuvering around…

The digital revolution is here, but not everyone is benefiting equitably from it. And as Silicon Valley’s ethos of “move fast and break things” spreads around the world, now is the time to pause and consider who is being left out and how we can better distribute the benefits of our new data economy. “Data…

The US has administered more than 118 million doses of covid-19 vaccines so far, and millions more are being injected every day. So far, demand from people who are desperate to get vaccinated has outstripped supply of the drugs, and when vaccine appointments are released, they’re quickly scooped up. But jurisdictions across the country may…

Nikolai Petrovsky was scrolling through social media after a day on the ski slopes when reports describing a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, caught his eye. It was early January 2020, and Petrovsky, an immunologist, was at his vacation getaway in Keystone, Colorado, which is where he goes most years with his…

Facebook says it has created a wristband that translates motor signals from your brain so you can move a digital object just by thinking about it. How does it work? The wristband, which looks like a clunky iPod on a strap, uses sensors to detect movements you intend to make. It uses electromyography (EMG) to…

The search for life on other planets is a lot like cooking. (Bear with me for a second.) You can have all the ingredients in one place—water, a warm climate and thick atmosphere, the proper nutrients, organic material, and a source of energy—but if you don’t have any processes or conditions that can actually do…

The photographs alone tell a fantastic story—a mouse embryo, complete with beating heart cells, a head, and the beginning of limbs, alive and growing in a glass jar. According to a scientific group in Israel, which took the picture, the researchers have grown mice in an artificial womb for as long as 11 or 12…

It’s been a long, challenging year for government technologies. Some have failed massively, requiring endless patches by governments, business, and the informal volunteer corps who have come together to fill the holes. Developers had to build apps that could identify potential covid exposure without invading people’s privacy. Notoriously janky unemployment websites were crushed under the…

In 2016, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz grew human embryos in a lab dish for longer than anyone had before. Bathing the tiny spheres in a special broth inside an incubator, her team at the University of Cambridge watched the embryos develop, day after day, breaking all prior records. The embryos even attached to the dish as if…

At the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole—a monster that keeps the neighborhood of stars and planets and gas and dust together. Over the decades since astronomers began studying them in earnest, we have confirmed that these objects indeed exist; we’ve learned they are likely essential for helping stars form; and we’ve…

Billions of years ago, Mars was a warm home to lakes and oceans. That is, until these enormous liquid bodies on its surface vanished around 3 billion years ago. For years, scientists have assumed that this water disappeared into space when the planet’s atmosphere thinned out. As it turns out, the water may not have gone…

Europe’s difficult rollout of covid-19 shots took another blow over the weekend, as several countries halted deployment of the AstraZeneca vaccine amid worries it could cause blood clots. On Monday Germany, Spain, Italy, and France were among those to suspend deployment of the vaccine, following similar moves made last week by Denmark, Norway, Ireland, and…

In late January, tech impresario Peter Diamandis hosted an exclusive, indoor conference for a group of ultra-wealthy patrons in Los Angeles. As MIT Technology Review reported last month, the get-together, where no masks were required, became a covid-19 superspreader event. Four days later, as staff, speakers, and attendees began testing positive for the virus, an…

It’s “time to wake up and do a better job,” says publisher Tim O’Reilly—from getting serious about climate change to building a better data economy. And the way a better data economy is built is through data commons—or data as a common resource—not as the giant tech companies are acting now, which is not just…

A persona is an imaginary figure representing a segment of real people, and it is a communicative design technique aimed at enhanced user understanding. Through several decades of use, personas were data structures, static frameworks user attributes with no interactivity. A persona was a means to organize data about the imaginary person and to present…

Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience. It was March 23, 2018, just days after the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign, had surreptitiously siphoned the personal data of tens of millions of Americans from their Facebook accounts in…

At first the Chinese hackers ran a careful campaign. For two months, they exploited weaknesses in Microsoft Exchange email servers, picked their targets carefully, and stealthily stole entire mailboxes. When investigators eventually caught on, it looked like typical online espionage—but then things accelerated dramatically. Around February 26, the narrow operation turned into something much bigger…

On Sunday, NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had gone into safe mode once again, “due to an onboard software error.” The telescope’s science systems were not affected at all, but all science operations were suspended while crews on the ground worked to fix the problem. The agency didn’t release any details as to…

The world watched in wonder in February as NASA’s robotic rover Perseverance successfully landed on the surface of Mars with the goal of searching for evidence of past life on the red planet. The technology itself was, of course, astounding. But what really captivated the public was the video taken by a couple of miniature…

Fully vaccinated Americans can now gather indoors, maskless and without distancing—as long as it’s with others who’ve gotten their shots, according to new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The advice, which comes as vaccinations continue to gain speed in America, are a positive signal for those who have had a course…

A Chinese government-linked hacking campaign revealed by Microsoft this week has ramped up rapidly. At least four other distinct hacking groups are now attacking critical flaws in Microsoft’s email software in a cyber campaign the US government describes as “widespread domestic and international exploitation” with potential impact on hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide. Beginning…

On Valentine’s Day, a rare burst of Arctic air spread across the central US and into Texas, dropping temperatures there into the single digits and nearly causing the state’s power grid to collapse. A state known for its abundant energy resources saw widespread failures of natural-gas and electricity systems that left more than four million…

Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up their understanding of your preferences. That data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and…

Across the country, schools are wrestling with the difficult choice of whether to reopen, and how to do it with reduced risk. In Kalamazoo, Michigan—not far from one the main sites where Pfizer is frantically manufacturing vaccines—they plan to stay virtual through the end of the school year. In Iowa, a state without a mask…

I first came across Qoves Studio through its popular YouTube channel, which offers polished videos like “Does the hairstyle make a pretty face?,” “What makes Timothée Chalamet attractive?,” and “How jaw alignment influences social perceptions” to millions of viewers. Qoves started as a studio that would airbrush images for modeling agencies; now it is a…

On March 3, SpaceX’s Starship pulled off a successful high-altitude flight—its third in a row. Unlike in the first two missions, the spacecraft stuck the landing. Then, as in the last two, the spacecraft blew up. What happened: At around 5:14 p.m. US Central Time, the 10th Starship prototype (SN10) was launched from SpaceX’s test facility…

The search for AI has always been about trying to build machines that think—at least in some sense. But the question of how alike artificial and biological intelligence should be has divided opinion for decades. Early efforts to build AI involved decision-making processes and information storage systems that were loosely inspired by the way humans…

In the private space industry, it can seem that there’s SpaceX and then there’s everyone else. Only Blue Origin, backed by its own billionaire founder in the person of Jeff Bezos, seems able to command the same degree of attention. And Blue Origin hasn’t even gone beyond suborbital space yet. Rocket Lab might soon have something…

It’s one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but its people are among the most vulnerable. Afghanistan’s snowy mountains and fertile foothills give way to arid plateaus, offering a contrast often described as stark and gorgeous. The nexus of ancient East-West trade routes, this landlocked country hosts many languages, artisan traditions, and centuries of…

The vaccine rollout in the United States has been sluggish, hampered by manufacturing delays, logistical challenges, and freak snowstorms. Demand far outstrips supply. Meanwhile, the more transmissible variant circulating widely in the UK is gaining a foothold in the US. Modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests it will quickly become the…

Fully recovering from the SolarWinds hack will take the US government from a year to as long as 18 months, according to the head of the agency that is leading Washington’s recovery. The hacking campaign against American government agencies and major companies was first discovered in November 2020. At least nine federal agencies were targeted,…

The commercial opens with a tempting vision and soaring instrumentals. A door swings wide to reveal a sunlit patio and a relaxed, smiling couple awaiting a meal. “How much have we missed going out with friends?” a voiceover asks. “With the green pass, doors simply open in front of you … We’re returning to life.”…

You’ve heard of Apple’s famous walled garden, the tightly controlled tech ecosystem that gives the company unique control of features and security. All apps go through a strict Apple approval process, they are confined so sensitive information isn’t gathered on the phone, and developers are locked out of places they’d be able to get into…

An advisory board to the US Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously in favor of the first single-shot covid-19 vaccine, clearing the path for the health agency to authorize its immediate use as soon as tomorrow. The one-shot vaccine, developed by Johnson & Johnson, has the additional advantage of being easy to store, because it…

Describing a decision-making system as an “algorithm” is often a way to deflect accountability for human decisions. For many, the term implies a set of rules based objectively on empirical evidence or data. It also suggests a system that is highly complex—perhaps so complex that a human would struggle to understand its inner workings or…