MIT Technology Review

As a machine operator for the robotics startup FarmWise, Diego Alcántar spends each day walking behind a hulking robot that resembles a driverless Zamboni, helping it learn to do the work of a 30-person weeding crew. On a Tuesday morning in September, I met Alcántar in a gigantic cauliflower field in the hills outside Santa…

We won’t easily forget how we worried about food in the first days of the pandemic: empty shelves, scarce products, and widespread hoarding became an alarming reality around the world. While being reassured that the disruptions were “temporary,” Americans also heard troubling news about farmers plowing crops back into their fields, dairy farmers pouring milk…

There’s a long-running column in Cook’s Illustrated called “What is it?” where we track down the origins of kitchen gadgets that our readers find in their attics or on dusty antique-store shelves. A recent favorite: the Acme Rotary Mincer, vintage 1935, a handheld device featuring 10 stainless-steel rotary blades, which promised to mince herbs and…

Lab-grown meat, artificial human breast milk, genetically modified pigs, a cauliflower field farmed by robots—if that’s the kind of science-fiction-y stuff you expect to read about in a special issue on technology and food, you won’t be disappointed. (And if you like actual science fiction, take a look at this short story by Anjali Sachdeva.) …

Blockchain Chicken Farm, a new book from Oakland-based writer, designer, and scholar Xiaowei Wang, explores technology in rural China and the surprising ripple effects of the country’s food supply chain on people all around the world. The book connects, for example, an AI-driven pig-farming operation in Guangdong to Silicon Valley surveillance culture, while avoiding the…

This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay. It has been edited for length and clarity. As told to Krithika Varagur. The National Agricultural Statistics Service is used to set nationwide estimates of agricultural commodities. We have 12 regions across the country,…

When he was growing up, Venkatesh Mannar and his siblings treated the family saltworks as their playground: they would slide down mountains of salt drying in the sun the way other children might sled down snow-covered hillsides. The salt operation, in the southern Indian port city of Thoothukudi, had been founded by his grandfather’s grandfather.…

Forty attorneys general representing both Republican- and Democratic-led states and territories have filed a new antitrust lawsuit against Google claiming that the company has “virtually untrammeled power over internet search traffic” as a result of its “overwhelming and durable monopoly in general internet searches.” The move comes one day after another complaint filed by Texas…

The first covid-19 vaccine developed as part of Operation Warp Speed is likely to be authorized for emergency use this week in the US following an all-day meeting of federal medical advisors today, December 17. The shot, called mRNA-1273, was developed by the biotech company Moderna, and the US is relying heavily on it to…

Nine members of the US Congress have sent a letter to Google asking it to clarify the circumstances around its former ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru’s forced departure. Led by Representative Yvette Clarke and Senator Ron Wyden, and co-signed by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, the letter sends an important signal about how Congress…

Cloud computing is at a critical juncture. Millions of companies now use it to store data and run applications and services remotely. This has reduced costs and sped operations. But a new trend threatens the benefits that cloud computing has unlocked. “Digital sovereignty” describes the many ways governments try to assert more control over the…

Nobel Prizes are rarely awarded without controversy. The prestige usually hatches a viperous nest of critics who deride the credentials of the winner, complain about the unmentioned collaborators who’ll be sidelined by history, or point to the more deserving recipients who’ve been unfairly snubbed. So when the Norwegian committee decided to award the 2020 Nobel…

So what happened? Texas and nine other Republican-led states have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company has monopolized digital advertising by means that include anti-competitive agreements with Facebook. Google, the suit alleges, not only connects ad buyers and sellers; it operates the exchange and manipulates the rules and algorithms to favor…

China’s Chang’e 5 mission successfully delivered samples of lunar rock and dust to Earth on December 17. It marks the first time in 44 years that moon rocks have been brought back to our planet, since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976. It’s also the first time China has ever pulled off a…

Over the past year, we’ve seen a rise in robotaxis and autonomous vehicle use. Companies such as Waymo, Cruise, and Baidu have all made strong headway as industry pioneers. In China specifically, 2020 headlines regularly featured major autonomous vehicle announcements, such as the public launch of Baidu Apollo robotaxi services in the cities of Beijing,…

On November 3, Tina Barton ran into a problem. It was Election Day in the US and Barton, a Republican, was city clerk for Rochester Hills, Michigan, a conservative-leaning community near Detroit. As her team was uploading voting results, a technical issue resulted in the double counting of some votes. The error wasn’t initially realized,…

We’re now six weeks past Election Day, and electors in every state followed the will of the voters and confirmed the victory of Joe Biden. But while the Electoral College made the results official, President Donald Trump is continuing to protest them, despite having lost dozens of court cases within the past month. In any…

By now, we’ve all heard some version of the story. On December 2, after a protracted disagreement over the release of a research paper, Google forced out its ethical AI co-lead, Timnit Gebru. The paper was on the risks of large language models, AI models trained on staggering amounts of text data, which are a…

With thousands of developers, publishers, authors, designers, production houses and distributors, Microsoft’s Xbox gaming platform is a complex ecosystem of relationships. Collaboration across this ecosystem is key to producing a high-quality product that attracts the best talent and satisfies consumers—but Microsoft recognized points of friction that needed to be addressed. A multitude of manual processes…

Thousands of companies and governments are racing to discover whether they have been hit by the Russian hackers who reportedly infiltrated several US government agencies. The initial breach, reported on December 13, included the Treasury as well as the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security. But the stealthy techniques the hackers used mean it could…

This MIT Technology Review Insights report is part of a series examining the degree to which business preparedness, particularly in technology strategy, contributed to corporate resilience during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in three world regions: Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. Based on survey research and in-depth executive interviews, the series also seeks to understand how…

This MIT Technology Review Insights report is part of a series examining the degree to which business preparedness, particularly in technology strategy, contributed to corporate resilience during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in three world regions: Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. Based on survey research and in-depth executive interviews, the series also seeks to understand how…

This MIT Technology Review Insights report is part of a series examining the degree to which business preparedness, particularly in technology strategy, contributed to corporate resilience during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in three world regions: Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. Based on survey research and in-depth executive interviews, the series also seeks to understand how…

California’s exposure notification system launched statewide on December 10, which means that almost half of all Americans now live somewhere covered by an app that will warn them if they’ve been close to someone with covid-19. We’re watching these rollouts closely as part of our Covid Tracing Tracker, which monitors the development of contact tracing…

As covid-19 has taken over the US, medical providers have looked for any possible way to keep people home and out of hospitals without compromising care. We’re only now coming to grips with the unintended consequences of changes meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus and relieve strain on the medical system. One of…

A few times a week, Vincent Buyssens’s students in Mechelen, Belgium’s Thomas More University College get on Instagram while he’s lecturing about creative strategy. They swipe through stories, add posts to their profile, and get lost in rabbit holes. But they’re not being surreptitious about it; in fact, Buyssens requires those taking his college course…

Deep learning is an inefficient energy hog. It requires massive amounts of data and abundant computational resources, which explodes its electricity consumption. In the last few years, the overall research trend has made the problem worse. Models of gargantuan proportions—trained on billions of data points for several days—are in vogue, and likely won’t be going…

Many of the most successful and widely used machine-learning models are trained with the help of thousands of low-paid gig workers. Millions of people around the world earn money on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allow companies and researchers to outsource small tasks to online crowdworkers. According to one estimate, more than a million people…

A genetically modified salmon will become the first GM food animal to go on sale in the US, according to its maker, AquaBounty, possibly launching an era of steaks and chops from creatures with modified DNA. In the US, a number of genetically modified animals have been approved or cleared for sale. There’s the neon…

When covid-19 began to race around the world, countries closed businesses and told people to stay home. Many thought that would be enough to stop the coronavirus. If we had paid more attention to pigs, we might have known better. When it comes to controlling airborne viruses, says Bill Christianson, “I think we fool ourselves…

A covid-19 chart that’s been shared thousands of times is dramatizing just how well vaccines against the disease can work and how we might get out of pandemic hell. Today, advisors to the US Food and Drug Administration voted in favor of emergency authorization for Pfizer’s covid-19 shot, and the data in this chart is…

I’ve often been told, “The data does not lie.” However, that has never been my experience. For me, the data nearly always lies. Google Image search results for “healthy skin” show only light-skinned women, and a query on “Black girls” still returns pornography. The CelebA face data set has labels of “big nose” and “big…

The pandemic made for a lot of differences in this year’s US elections, including vastly expanded access to mail-in ballots and early voting. That upended the Election Day rituals many Americans had become used to—but it resulted in more people voting than ever before. It also meant they voted more securely than ever. Officials around…

SpaceX today pulled off the first ever high-altitude (well, high-ish) flight of Starship, the rocket the company hopes will one day take humans to the moon and Mars. Although the spacecraft failed to make a safe landing—in fact, it exploded on impact—it’s the highest any Starship prototype has flown. Still well short of orbit, though,…

What happened: The US Federal Trade Commission has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook for its “anticompetitive conduct and unfair methods of competition.” That includes its 2012 acquisition of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp. Facebook, the FTC alleges, has a monopoly on social networking. “Since toppling early rival MySpace and achieving monopoly power, Facebook…

The European Medicines Agency, which has been evaluating covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and BioNTech, says it was hit with a cyberattack. Just days after a coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech was used for the first time in the UK, regulatory documents for the medicine have “been unlawfully accessed,” according to European authorities. The…

Facebook said on December 3 that it would remove posts with false claims or conspiracy theories about what’s in the covid-19 vaccines that everyone’s counting on. In the face of rumors suggesting that Bill Gates has installed tracking microchips in the shots, or that the inoculations contain luciferase, a glowing chemical from fireflies whose name…

When NASA finally gets back to the moon—probably not till sometime after 2024—it will start the groundwork for the first extraterrestrial colony in the history of human civilization, and for future missions to Mars. But America’s return for the first time since the Apollo program will also inaugurate a new era of deep-space science. A NASA…

As a reporter who can code, I can easily collect information from websites and social media accounts to find stories. All I need to do is write a few lines of code that go into the ether, open up websites, and download the data that is already publicly available on them. This process is called…

Scientists have long seen lithium-metal batteries as an ideal technology for energy storage, leveraging the lightest metal on the periodic table to deliver cells jam-packed with energy. But researchers and companies have tried and failed for decades to produce affordable, rechargeable versions that didn’t have a nasty habit of catching on fire. Then earlier this…

The news: The UK started vaccinating its population against covid-19 today, becoming the first country to start distributing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, less than a week after its approval. It is being given to elder-care home workers and people over 80 first, with a 90-year-old woman named Margaret Keenan the first to receive it outside a…

Digital contact tracing apps first emerged early in the pandemic. They’d let you know if you’d been around anyone who had tested positive, and they worked on a regular personal smartphone. So far, they haven’t been a silver bullet, and they’ve faced criticism over usability, privacy, and more. But they’re low-cost tools based on technology…

The news: A capsule containing the first rock samples from the asteroid Ryugu returned to Earth on Sunday, December 6, in “perfect” condition, according to researchers. The samples were gathered after a six-year mission by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2 to and from Ryugu, which is 180 million miles away. Hayabusa-2 flew close to Earth and…

On the evening of Wednesday, December 2, Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, announced via Twitter that the company had forced her out. Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people…

The vaccines are coming. The UK became the first country in the West to approve a covid-19 vaccine for emergency use on December 2, specifically the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine, which has completed phase 3 trials. But the US, the EU, and many other countries are expected to follow suit in the following days and…

The rise of technonationalism. Diverging regulatory regimes. The spread of “walled gardens.” Polarization like nothing we’ve seen before. The confluence of several trends is poised to completely fragment our real and digital worlds. For companies, this raises a host of new risks, from cybersecurity threats to reputation risk—which, in turn, will require new responses and…

On December 2, the AI research community was shocked to learn that Timnit Gebru had been fired from her post at Google. Gebru, one of the leading voices in responsible AI research, is known among other things for coauthoring groundbreaking work that revealed the discriminatory nature of facial recognition, cofounding the Black in AI affinity…

The news: Facebook will remove false claims that have been “debunked by public health experts” about covid-19 vaccines, it has announced. In a post, the company outlined how Facebook plans to apply its existing ban on covid misinformation—which is intended to screen out posts that could lead to “imminent physical harm”—as countries around the world…

Data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia observatory has been used to create the most detailed 3D map of the galaxy ever made. The new data set could help scientists unravel many mysteries about the universe’s expansion and the solar system’s future. What is Gaia? Launched in 2013, the Gaia observatory is intended to…

In late March, Claire Rezba heard about the tragic death of Diedre Wilkes. Wilkes, a 42-year-old mammogram technician, had died alone of covid-19 in her home, her four-year-old child near her body. Rezba, a physician based in Richmond, Virginia, was shaken. “That story resonated with me,” she says. “She was about my age.” Wilkes’s death…