MIT Technology Review

The US space program has been a footnote to every presidential administration since Richard Nixon. Nothing, not even the space shuttle or the International Space Station, could define a presidency or an era of American life the way the Apollo program did. It still won’t define the first (and maybe only) presidential term of Donald…

The 2020 election may be among the most consequential in modern memory, but it’s not just candidates that are on the ballot. Voters in 34 states are deciding on 129 measures, including several that touch on the way we use technology. Among these are three initiatives in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan that could affect access…

In the past month, US President Donald Trump and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie were diagnosed with covid-19 and spent time in the hospital, just like tens of thousands of other Americans nearly every day since the pandemic began. But Trump and Christie were special cases. They received experimental covid-19 treatments that are not…

Update 10/26/2020: NASA plans to stow the sample away Tuesday. NASA confirmed that the OSIRIS-REx mission picked up enough material from asteroid Bennu during its sample collection attempt on Tuesday. In fact, the spacecraft’s collection chamber is now too full to close all the way, leading some of the material to drift off into space.…

The news: The NYU Ad Observatory released new data this week about the inputs the Trump and Biden campaigns are using to target audiences for ads on Facebook. It’s a jumble of broad and specific characteristics ranging from the extremely wide (“any users between the ages of 18-65”) to particular traits (people with an “interest…

Hey, GPT-3: Why are rabbits cute? “How are rabbits cute? Is it their big ears, or maybe they’re fluffy? Or is it the way they hop around? No, actually it’s their large reproductive organs that makes them cute. The more babies a woman can have, the cuter she is.” It gets worse. (Content warning: sexual…

Nellwyn Thomas cut her chops in campaign technology as the deputy chief of analytics for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Outside politics, she’s had her foot in Big Tech, working on business intelligence and data science for both Etsy and Facebook before becoming chief technology officer of the Democratic National Committee in May 2019. The…

A pandemic is raging with devastating consequences, and long-standing problems with racial bias and political polarization are coming to a head. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help us deal with these challenges. However, AI’s risks have become increasingly apparent. Scholarship has illustrated cases of AI opacity and lack of explainability, design choices that…

Just before 9 p.m. on October 20, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitch to play the hottest game in America: Among Us. “Hi, everyone! This is crazy!” she began, urging viewers to make a plan for how they will vote with I Will Vote, an outreach program funded by the Democratic National Committee. After a few…

At 6:08 p.m. US Eastern Time on Tuesday, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finished a four-and-a-half-hour descent to the surface of asteroid Bennu, 200 million miles from Earth. Once there, it briefly made contact with the ground in an attempt to collect some rocky pebbles and dust before safely flying away. We won’t know if the sample…

As long as humans have built machines, we’ve feared the day they could destroy us. Stephen Hawking famously warned that AI could spell an end to civilization. But to many AI researchers, these conversations feel unmoored. It’s not that they don’t fear AI running amok—it’s that they see it already happening, just not in the…

There have been many conspiracy theories about the 2020 US election, from lies about vote-by-mail fraud to the discredited idea that millions of non-citizens get to vote. But just two weeks before Election Day, the most common disinformation claim is currently the idea that the vote is “rigged,” researchers say. The conspiracy theory is so…

In 2009, two farmers checked in to the Heartland hospital in Missouri within days of each other with fever, nausea, diarrhea, and rapidly declining white blood cell counts. Doctors sent their blood samples to the Centers for Disease Control, which discovered that both farmers had contracted a previously unknown virus from a tick bite. The…

It’s dark. Vegetal decay hangs thick in the air, trapped beneath the rotting innards of a felled beech tree. You wedge the hard shell of your exoskeleton through softening pulp, legs clicking in rhythm with each other. Chemosensors on your antennae and mouthparts ping with a steady stream of information, and you toodle your little…

Karma Ura is a bespectacled, self-effacing man of many achievements—a scholar, writer, painter, and bureaucrat. He is also the president of the Centre for Bhutan & Gross National Happiness Studies, which he’s led since 1999. Gross national happiness has been around for a while. In 1972 the fourth king of Bhutan put forward the idea…

Within a few days of the covid-19 lockdown in Oxford, UK, the street where philosopher Roman Krznaric lives had transformed. An email chain quickly morphed into a WhatsApp group with over 100 neighbors. Parents traded homeschooling tips and compared bread recipes. Food packages, coordinated via cell phone, were delivered to the most vulnerable, and when…

On a crisp, sunny morning in August, software engineer Rodrigo Espinosa de los Monteros rode up 22 floors to a stranger’s rooftop in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Willem Boning, an acoustical designer and fellow volunteer for the grassroots wireless project NYC Mesh, was waiting on the roof with two backpacks…

On a seasonably warm day in August along a rugged stretch of the Southern California coast, work crews put on their reflective vests and hard hats. They directed a fleet of heavy vehicles known as cask handlers to haul great white concrete barrels from the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, known as SONGS. Each…

In July, Joseph Giaime, a physics professor at Louisiana State University and Caltech, gave me a tour of one of the most complex science experiments in the world. He did it via Zoom on his iPad. He showed me a control room of LIGO, a large physics collaboration based in Louisiana and Washington state. In…

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The 2020 “Support Black Lives at MIT” petition by the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and Black Students’ Union (BSU):http://bgsa.mit.edu/sbl2020 The Tech’s article on student evaluation of the 2015 BSU/BGSA recommendations:https://thetech.com/2020/06/02/letter-bsa-bgsa-recommendations 2015 BSU Recommendations:https://drive.google.com/file/d/13wGeu4Soj5a5pO0J-33uB0qmQtjJhcny/view 2015 BGSA Recommendations:http://bgsa.mit.edu/recommendations What happens to black women and girls in a world without policing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb3kcfIZVi4&feature=youtu.be What does America with defunded…

The US Department of Justice and attorneys general from 11 Republican-led states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, alleging that the company maintains an illegal monopoly on online search and advertising. The lawsuit follows a 16-month investigation, and repeated promises from President Trump to hold Big Tech to account amid unproven allegations of…

Maria Zuber got the word on a Friday: Harvard had shut down its research labs. As vice president for research, Zuber consulted with lead researchers across campus over whether MIT should follow suit. “Don’t you dare,” she remembers them saying. “Don’t you dare be like those Harvard people.” As covid-19 cases continued to rise across…

Today, one in every six people on Earth lives in an informal urban or squatter settlement. United Nations analysts estimate that number will rise to one in three by 2050. “Traditionally, policymakers see these people as a problem,” says Janice Perlman, PhD ’71. “I believe they’re part of the solution.” Perlman’s landmark 1976 book The…

How is it possible the housing market is as strong as it is, given that the overall economy is as weak as it is? Confronting questions like these, Daryl Fairweather ’10, chief economist of the real estate website and brokerage Redfin, seeks explanations based in complex human motivations. “When people make the decision to buy…

In 2004, Gloria Ro Kolb ’94 was leading her first startup, Fossa Medical, which developed therapies for kidney stones, when she learned a startling statistic: one in three women over 30 deals with urinary incontinence. However, it wasn’t until Kolb had three kids that she began to understand the scope of the problem—and the need…

In 1892, Hannah Knox Luscomb took her five-year-old daughter, Florence, to hear Susan B. Anthony speak. The speech made such an impression on Florence that she always began her life story with this moment, which inspired her long career as an activist. She would begin as a college student, working in concert with a group…

Sally Yu became an MIT volunteer almost immediately after graduating. “It’s like I never left!” she says. “For the little volunteering I do, I gain so much in knowledge, friendships, and personal growth.” She and her spouse, Jeff Shen, recently continued their support of the Institute by creating the Yu Endowed Scholarship Fund for undergraduates…

Before coming to the States for college, I had never gone beyond the borders of Kenya. While I had expected some level of culture shock, I wasn’t prepared for the jarring reality of being Black in America. Sure, I had skimmed through US Black history in my high school lessons, so I was familiar with…

In 1996, Life magazine published a shocking exposé of child labor practices in South Asia. The lead photograph showed a 12-year-old boy in northern Pakistan, stitching soccer balls stamped with the Nike logo. It would take two years—and a collapse in profits—for the company’s cofounder and CEO, Phil Knight, to declare a commitment to social…

My first week at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology was rife with revelations. I learned that five days sufficed to build a photosensitive robot from wires, circuit boards, and Legos; that burritos were tasty, if a bit messy, their insides prone to spilling on formerly white shoes; that I had an accent. This last bit…

In August, about 12,000 cell phones with Detroit area code 313 got recorded messages from “Tamika Taylor.” She claimed to be a member of a civil rights organization called Project 1599, and said she was calling to warn that applying to vote by mail could lead people’s personal information to be entered into a public…

Impossible Foods has continued to expand throughout the pandemic, bringing its bleeding, sizzling plant-based burgers and sausages to more than 10,000 additional US stores this year. Now the company, which has raised $700 million in 2020, is preparing to move into new markets and product lines. On Tuesday, it will announce plans to double its…

In June of 2019, Vice uncovered the existence of a disturbing app that used AI to “undress” women. Called DeepNude, it allowed users to upload a photo of a clothed woman for $50 and get back a photo of her seemingly naked. In actuality, the software was using generative adversarial networks, the algorithm behind deepfakes,…

The news: Young, healthy people will be deliberately infected with covid-19 in the first ever human challenge trial, set to begin at a London hospital in January. The study, announced today, will recruit up to 50 healthy volunteers between 18 and 30. The UK government has pledged to invest £33.6 million ($44 million) in the…

More than 29 million voters have already cast their ballots in the 2020 US elections, and we’re still more than two weeks from Election Day itself. At the same point in 2016, the number of early votes was about 6 million. But while a great deal of this is the result of the ongoing (and worsening)…

Our upcoming magazine issue is devoted to long-term problems. Few problems are longer-term or more intractable than America’s systemic racial inequality. And a particularly entrenched form of it is housing discrimination. A long history of policies by banks, insurance companies, and real estate brokers has denied people of color a fair shot at homeownership, concentrated…

After being released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 5, US President Donald Trump praised the doctors who treated him for covid-19 and promised that the public would soon have a vaccine against the deadly coronavirus. “We have the best medicines in the world, and very shortly they are all getting approved,…

The news: Facebook is open-sourcing a new AI language model called M2M-100 that can translate between any pair among 100 languages. Of the 4,450 possible language combinations, it translates 1,100 of them directly. This is in contrast to previous multilingual models, which heavily rely on English as an intermediate. A Chinese to French translation, for…

Climate scientists have found that any scenario that prevents the planet from shooting past 1.5 ˚C of warming requires effectively eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions by around midcentury. But can that still be done after decades of delayed action on climate change? In its annual report released on Tuesday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has taken a…

When the pandemic hit, parents scrambled to get enough devices to get their kids for online schooling. But even when they did, not everything went smoothly. Getting multiple people online for hours at a time in a home was one big obstacle; making sure entire communities were able to sign on was another. Jessica Rosenworcel,…

The news: A man in the US caught covid-19 for a second time in the space of just two months, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. That makes him the fifth person to have officially caught the coronavirus twice, after cases recorded in Hong Kong, Belgium, Ecuador, and the Netherlands (and…

From the outside, VertiVegies looked like a handful of grubby shipping containers put side by side and drilled together. A couple of meters in height, they were propped up on a patch of concrete in one of Singapore’s nondescript suburbs. But once he was inside, Ankesh Shahra saw potential. Huge potential. Shahra, who wears his…

In a clean room in Building 23 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, a spacecraft called DART was splayed open like a fractured, cubic egg. An instrument called a star tracker—which will, once DART is in deep space, ascertain which way is up—was mounted to the core, along with…

Rolando Chang Barrero lives in Palm Beach County, Florida, in what he calls a bipartisan Hispanic neighborhood. He’s an artist and gallery owner who is well known in his community, and he is president of the county’s Democratic Hispanic Caucus. But this election season, he says, neighbors of all political persuasions have been coming to…

With an unprecedented number of Americans voting by mail this year, it may take longer than normal for results to come in this Election Day—including even unofficial results. Yet President Donald Trump’s disinformation campaign about election security continues to falsely suggest that any “delay” would be the result of fraud. Government officials charged with protecting…

The long-awaited tech antitrust report that the US Congress released on October 6 presents a remarkably flimsy case for action against the nation’s most innovative and competitive companies. The report’s main recommendations would do very little to solve real social problems caused by technology, like misinformation and election interference, because these problems aren’t related to…

In a national database in Argentina, tens of thousands of entries detail the names, birthdays, and national IDs of people suspected of crimes. The database, known as the Consulta Nacional de Rebeldías y Capturas (National Register of Fugitives and Arrests), or CONARC, began in 2009 as a part of an effort to improve law enforcement…

In 2019, two multimedia artists, Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund, set about to pursue a provocative idea. Deepfake video and audio had been advancing in parallel but had yet to be integrated into a complete experience. Could they do it in a way that demonstrated the technology’s full potential while educating people about how it…

President Trump is trying to recruit an “army” of poll watchers for Election Day. As part of his ongoing disinformation campaign about election fraud, these aggressive appeals to his supporters are raising worries about voter intimidation—or worse. Meanwhile, Facebook just announced new rules that will no longer allow “militarized” language for poll watching on its…