MIT Technology Review

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…

Each innovation challenges the norms, codes, and values of the society in which it is embedded. The industrial revolution unleashed new forces of productivity but at the cost of inhumane working conditions, leading to the creation of unions, labor laws, and the foundations of the political party structures of modern democracies. Fossil fuels powered a…

As businesses of all sizes welcome a fearful and anxious workforce back to the office, they are simultaneously challenged with ensuring a safe work environment. The stark reality facing business owners still navigating the covid-19 pandemic is the diligence required to limit infectious spread. Corporations are taking note: plexiglass barriers, clearly marked walkways, and hand-sanitizing…

Facial recognition technology is being deployed in housing projects, homeless shelters, schools, even across entire cities—usually without much fanfare or discussion. To some, this represents a critical technology for helping vulnerable communities gain access to social services. For others, it’s a flagrant invasion of privacy and violation of human dignity. In this episode, we speak…

On December 5, Earth is getting a delivery of something literally out of this world: some small grains and dust snatched up from an asteroid 180 million miles away. Once safely back on Earth, the fragments of Ryugu will help scientists learn more about how the solar system formed. JAXA, Japan’s space agency, launched Hayabusa2…

When Gabrielle Diamond and her boyfriend, Brian Cox, showed up for eviction court on October 15, they were more than a little nervous. The two had been renting a bedroom in transitional housing for veterans in Kansas City, Missouri, since January, paying $600 per month for their month-to-month lease. Almost as soon as they moved…

President Trump’s conspiracy-theory-fueled plan to overturn his defeat in the 2020 elections targeted six states that President-elect Joe Biden narrowly won: Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Georgia. All six of those states have now certified their vote counts—with recounts sometimes even increasing the victory margin for Biden. The confirmation of the results has correlated…

The news: The UK’s regulator has approved Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine, making it the first country in the world to provide emergency authorization for a covid-19 vaccine. The UK had already signed an agreement to buy 40 million doses due to be delivered this year and in 2021, with the first batch set to arrive in the…

The first lab-grown, or cultured, meat product has been given the green light to be sold for human consumption. In the landmark approval, regulators in Singapore granted Just, a San Francisco–based startup, the right to sell cultured chicken—in the form of chicken nuggets—to the public. Just had been working with the regulators for the past…

China has just landed a new spacecraft on the surface of the moon. The mission, Chang’e 5, will collect lunar rocks and soil to bring back to Earth, as part of China’s first-ever sample return mission. What happened: China launched Chang’e 5 on November 23. On Sunday, while in lunar orbit, Chang’e 5 separated into…

As covid-19 cases spiral out of control in the US, states are scrambling to fight the virus with an increasingly stretched arsenal. Many of them have the same weapons at their disposal: restrictions on public gatherings and enforcement of mask wearing, plus testing, tracing, and exposure notifications. But while many states struggle to get their…

For all of its upheaval, the deadly 2020 coronavirus pandemic—and efforts to stop it—has taught a valuable lesson: organizations that invest in technology survive. IT infrastructure initiatives put in place before the crisis have allowed countless businesses to shift to online commerce and remote working. In other words, operate during it. The pandemic has taught…

When Mastercard wanted to improve the speed and security of credit card transactions, when Baylor College of Medicine was scaling up its human genomic sequencing program, and when toymaker Spin Master was expanding into online video games and television shows, they all turned to object storage technology to facilitate the processing of massive amounts of…

DeepMind has already notched up a streak of wins, showcasing AIs that have learned to play a variety of complex games with superhuman skill, from Go and StarCraft to Atari’s entire back catalogue. But Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s public face and co-founder, has always stressed that these successes were just stepping stones towards a larger goal:…

Last decade’s clean-tech gold rush ended in disaster, wiping out billions in investments and scaring venture capitalists away for years. But a new investment boom is building again, this time around a broader set of climate-related technologies. Funding has soared more than 3,750% since 2013, according to a PwC report this fall, as numerous climate-focused…

The news: The Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine will be tested in a new global trial, AstraZeneca’s CEO, Pascal Soriot, has told Bloomberg. Previously it had been expected to just add an arm to its existing US trial. The news comes amid criticism of the way it has collected and presented its data so far. The specifics:…

Julia Borges was at her cousin’s 12th birthday party when she was shot. The 17-year-old had been standing on a third-floor balcony when a stray bullet hit her in the back, lodging in the muscle between her lungs and aorta. That was November 8. Luckily, Borges was taken to hospital and has since recovered. Many…

Astronaut Scott Kelly famously lived and worked on the International Space Station for 340 days—the longest time an American has spent in space. His mission gave scientists some vital insight into what happens to the human body during long-duration stays in orbit. That’s because Kelly has an identical twin, Mark (also an astronaut, and now…

In the last few days, a cascade of election results from battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan have been certified—delivering key defeats to President Trump in his continued but failed attempts to block the result. Certifications will continue in the coming days before the Electoral College, and later Congress, make the results official. This…

Lisa Long is immunosuppressed and suffers from chronic pain. That means that since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the US in March, she and her family, which includes her two daughters, 11 and 14, have been isolating at home outside St. Louis, save for the occasional doctor’s visit. Visiting family is out of…

Turbulent times can expose weaknesses in distribution chains, putting stress on chokepoints and reducing access to critical components, suppliers, and capital. The ability to respond to changes rapidly and effectively depends on a variety of assets and business capabilities: replacing or augmenting supply sources in response to partner inventory issues or trade war-induced tariffs or…

President-elect Joe Biden named John Kerry to the newly created role of climate czar, a move that underscores the incoming administration’s commitment to an international-focused approach to the issue and recognition of its strategic importance. Kerry, the former secretary of state, is a diplomatic heavyweight who helped piece together the landmark Paris climate agreement during…

China launched its Chang’e 5 mission to the moon early Tuesday morning local time from the country’s launch site on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. The country is seeking to bring soil and rock samples from the lunar surface back to Earth for the first time in its history, for scientific study. What’s…

Many countries launched contact tracing and exposure notification apps early in the pandemic to help slow the spread of covid-19. Now some of the most prominent are beginning to change their approach to privacy and transparency, according to MIT Technology Review’s covid tracing tracker. The tracker, which launched in May, looks at the policies and…