MIT Technology Review

We’re still not very sure how covid-19 immunity works. As we inch closer to a vaccine and pin our hopes on herd immunity to allow us to safely open up communities again, the uncertainties will only get more pressing. Here’s a look at some of the biggest questions we’re still trying to answer. How much…

This report is part of “The global AI agenda,” a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and…

Potential weapons against covid-19 include manufactured antibodies, serum transfusions from survivors, antivirals, steroids, and more than 100 vaccine candidates, some now advancing toward decisive tests in volunteers. But there’s another approach to battling the virus—one that hasn’t won much attention, but which in the future could become the fastest way to beat back a pandemic.…

The news: The UK is going to abandon its current contact tracing app in favor of one based on technology built by Apple and Google, the BBC reports. Tests of its existing app among residents on the Isle of Wight found it had trouble recognizing iPhones. The app had been supposed to launch for the…

The discovery that led Nir Shavit to start a company came about the way most discoveries do: by accident. The MIT professor was working on a project to reconstruct a map of a mouse’s brain and needed some help from deep learning. Not knowing how to program graphics cards, or GPUs, the most common hardware…

Jacob White, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was invited by Dean of Digital Learning Krisha Rajagopal to share the details of his teaching-from-home set up with the Academic Continuity Working Group. In this short video during one of the ACWG’s 8 a.m. calls, he walks through how he devised a makeshift lecture hall…

We give robots some pretty scary and stressful jobs: cleaning up nuclear sites, inspecting pipelines from the inside, exploring the frozen wastes of Mars. The arrival of the coronavirus has transformed more familiar settings, like grocery stores and hospitals, into potentially hazardous environments as well. Erika Hayasaki, a writer and journalism professor in California, learned…

After students in 12.307 left campus, they were able to study atmospheric wind patterns using a virtual laboratory created from video of a real experiment using animation software. The above video shows a can of icy water placed at the center of a circular tank of warm water on a slowly rotating platform, creating flow patterns…

Watch a sample lecture: This clip from a “new and improved” 2.00b lecture covers goals for the students’ CAD milestone and provides tips for designing under constraints. It’s part of a 1.5-hour lecture that also includes a tutorial on using electronics components. The 2.00b teaching team wrote, filmed, and produced the full-length version of the…

The screen read ## result null set as expected but above the crash were strings of phrases Krishna couldn’t explain. ## Dog. Drinking water in a kitchen. A woman in a house at night. ## City, palace, god, priest. In the court of the Lord, slave, gold sword. ## A story in a book. A…

Inside a Schnucks grocery store in St. Louis, Missouri, the toilet paper and baking ingredients are mostly cleared out. A rolling robot turns a corner and heads down an aisle stocked with salsa and taco shells. It comes up against a masked customer wearing shorts and sneakers; he’s pushing a shopping cart carrying bread. The…

Learn other people’s languages NABIHA SAKLAYENClass of 2018 Cofounded Cellino Biotech, which uses lasers to “program” stem cells. I became an entrepreneur without knowing what it meant. My collaborators at Harvard Medical School saw how my physics perspective could solve challenges in biology and pushed me into entrepreneurship. However grueling my PhD years in a…

In early March I started getting calls from people trying to respond to what was clearly turning into a global pandemic. A government agency that funds R&D wanted help connecting its research teams with experts on scale-up and manufacturing. An academic lab was searching for folks in government or industry who knew about the ventilator…

I felt bad asking Zack Gray to repeat his story. He was used to it, he said. It’s the founding tale of his startup, Ophelia; he’d already told part of it in his commencement speech at Wharton, and to potential investors. “There was a girl in my life,” he started. “I call her my girlfriend.…

As we learn more about how the coronavirus spreads between people, there’s more evidence to suggest that most infections are transmitted by a select few individuals we call “superspreaders.” Here’s what a superspreader is, the role these people play in transmitting the virus, and what we’re trying to do about it. What is a superspreader? The…

The news: Norway is halting its coronavirus contact tracing app, Smittestopp, after criticism from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, which said that the country’s low rate of infections meant that the app’s privacy invasions were no longer justified. As a result, the app will cease collecting new data, all data collected so far is being…

In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 civil rights and research organizations wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon stop providing face recognition technology to governments. As part of an increased focus on the role that tech companies were playing in enabling the US government’s tracking and deportation of immigrants, it called on…

Deepfakes⁠ have struck a nerve with the public and researchers alike. There is something uniquely disturbing about these AI-generated images of people appearing to say or do something they didn’t. With tools for making deepfakes now widely available and relatively easy to use, many also worry that they will be used to spread dangerous misinformation.…

The coronavirus pandemic and the protests sparked by the May 25 murder of George Floyd have been the defining events of 2020 so far, and in both cases one 17-year-old has played a major role online: Avi Schiffmann, the creator of the web’s preeminent covid-19 case tracker and, more recently, a protest tracking site. The…

It was a surge unlike any other, even for Amazon. In the first quarter of 2020, the e-commerce giant’s net sales increased by 26% over the same period a year earlier. It was panic-buying on a grand scale. Amazon.com search rankings from mid-March awarded top billing to toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and Clorox wipes, but…

The news: Twitter is testing a new feature on Android phones that prompts people to read articles before they share them. Someone who goes to retweet a link on Twitter without having clicked through to the story it leads to may be shown a pop-up message saying “Want to read this before retweeting?” It’s currently…

Demands for climate action have largely faded into the background as the covid-19 pandemic, the economic meltdown, and widespread protests over police brutality have seized the world’s attention. But for Rhiana Gunn-Wright, the director of climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute and one of the architects of the Green New Deal, the issues are inextricably…

On board the International Space Station since May 2018 is a mini-fridge-size facility called the Cold Atom Lab (CAL), capable of chilling atoms in a vacuum down to temperatures one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero. It is, for all intents and purposes, one of the coldest spots in the known universe. And…

After months spent battling covid-19, the US is now gripped by a different fever. As the video of George Floyd being murdered by Derek Chauvin circulated across social media, the streets around America—and then the world—have filled with protesters. Floyd’s name has become a public symbol of injustice in a spiraling web of interlaced atrocities…

Of all the videos that were released after George Floyd’s murder, the one recorded by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier on her phone is the most jarring. It shows Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck as Floyd pleads, “Please, please, please, I can’t breathe,” and it shows Chauvin refusing to budge. A criminal complaint later states…

Like other industries, space hasn’t been immune to the effects of covid-19 pandemic. Operations across the world have been slowed or shut down thanks to lockdowns imposed by governments to stop the spread of the virus. The recent Crew Dragon launch of astronauts to the International Space Station by SpaceX and NASA was more of an exception…

Inside the biosafety level 4 lab at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) in Boston, researchers wear three sets of gloves and breathe air piped into moon suits through snaking tubes. Before them, under a plastic shield, are human lung-sac cells grown from organoids, blobs of cells that mimic organs. Now it’s time to…

The news: IBM has said the company will stop developing or selling facial recognition software due to concerns the technology is used to promote racism. In a letter to Congress, IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna said the tech giant opposes any technology used “for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms.” He…

The news: Lockdowns in Europe helped stop 3.1 million deaths up to the start of May, researchers have estimated. Strictly limiting people’s movements and enforcing social distancing cut the average number of people that contagious individuals infected by 81%. The measures pushed the epidemic’s reproduction number, R, down from 3.8 to below 1 in all…

In the business world, the opportunities for applying quantum technology relate to optimization: solving difficult business problems, reconfiguring complex processes, and understanding correlations between seemingly disparate data sets. The main purpose of quantum computing is to carry out computationally costly operations in a very short period of time, while at the same time accelerating business performance.…

Imagine if Facebook stopped moderating its site right now. Anyone could post anything they wanted. Experience seems to suggest that it would quite quickly become a hellish environment overrun with spam, bullying, crime, terrorist beheadings, neo-Nazi texts, and images of child sexual abuse. In that scenario, vast swaths of its user base would probably leave,…

This week on Radio Corona, join us for a discussion between reporter Neel Patel and NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, who returned back to Earth in late April after a nearly seven-month mission aboard the ISS. Meir’s experience coming back to Earth during the covid-19 pandemic is unique. We will be asking Meir about what it…

This report is part of “The global AI agenda,” a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and…

In the week after George Floyd’s murder, hundreds of thousands of people joined protests across the US and around the globe, demanding education, attention, and justice. But one of the key tools for organizing these protests is a surprising one: it’s not encrypted, doesn’t rely on signing in to a social network, and wasn’t even…

Three thousand light-years from Earth sits Kepler 160, a sun-like star that’s already thought to have three planets in its system. Now researchers think they’ve found a fourth. Planet KOI-456.04, as it’s called, appears similar to Earth in size and orbit, raising new hopes we’ve found perhaps the best candidate yet for a habitable exoplanet…

When the Dallas police called for the public to send them videos of illegal activity during protests a week ago, they didn’t get the evidence of law-breaking demonstrators they expected. Instead, fans of Korean pop music downloaded the police department’s app en masse, rallied each other to flood it with short, fan-produced videos, and gave…

With dozens of digital contact tracing apps already rolled out worldwide, and many more on the way, how many people need to use them for the system to work? One number has come up over and over again: 60%. That’s the percentage of the population that many public health authorities documented by MIT Technology Review’s…

Hamid Khan has been a community organizer in Los Angeles for over 35 years, with a consistent focus on police violence and human rights. He talked to us on April 3, 2020, for a forthcoming podcast episode about artificial intelligence and policing. As the world turns its attention to police brutality and institutional racism, we…

In the last few months, millions of people around the world stopped going into offices and started doing their jobs from home. These workers may be out of sight of managers, but they are not out of mind. The upheaval has been accompanied by a reported spike in the use of surveillance software that lets…

The news: Holing up with groups of friends or neighbors or other families during lockdown has given many people, especially those stuck home alone, a way to relieve isolation without spreading covid-19. These groups are known as bubbles, and new computer simulations described in Nature today show they may really work. Why this matters: As…

In an advance toward conquering covid-19, doctors in Michigan say an antibody drug may sharply cut the chance patients on a ventilator will die. The problem: The pandemic viral disease is infecting millions, and for those who end up on a ventilator in an ICU, the odds are grim. More than half are dying. The…

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers was captured on video, not once but half a dozen times. As we try to understand why a police officer continued compressing a man’s neck and spine for minutes after he’d lost consciousness, we have footage from security cameras at Cup Foods, where Floyd allegedly paid…

People of all persuasions are angry at the inconsistent politics of social media platforms. For that, blame their founders’ ruling style.

Black Americans have seen technology used to target them again and again. Stopping it means looking at the problem differently.

Ask Zhu Kaiyu about his factory, and he can rattle off a series of statistics meant to impress: 15,000 square meters, 800 employees, 300 machines, 5 million articles of clothing sold per year. Zhu opened his factory for knitted apparel in Dongguan, in China’s Guangdong province, in 2002. He’s proud to be the trusted manufacturing…

SpaceX achieved something historic this past weekend with its Demo-2 launch. The company’s Crew Dragon vehicle became the first private spacecraft to take humans into orbit—a milestone for NASA, the American space industry, and the company itself. Afterwards, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters that the mission had helped establish the success of a new…

Deep Tech is a new subscriber-only podcast that brings alive the people and ideas our editors and reporters are thinking about. Episodes are released every two weeks. We’re making this episode—like much of the rest of our coronavirus coverage—free to everyone. “The reality is that there are two ways to look at responding” to a…

Corporations, politicians, and environmentalists have all embraced carbon farming as the feel-good climate solution of the moment. Several leading Democratic presidential contenders highlighted the potential to alter farming practices to suck up more carbon dioxide in their climate plans. And the presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, declared last summer: “Soil is the next frontier for storing…

“Blackout Tuesday” has overtaken Instagram, but there are more effective ways to show support. What’s Blackout Tuesday? If you’ve been on Instagram today, you may notice black posts. The movement was started by musicians calling for “an urgent step of action to provoke accountability and change.” But if you want to support the protests against…

American legislators have outlined a plan to regulate digital contact tracing apps to protect people’s privacy. But the bill, unveiled on June 1 with bipartisan support, largely recommends measures already built in to a technology provided by Silicon Valley giants Apple and Google. The Exposure Notification Privacy Act is a proposal to prevent potential abuses…