MIT Technology Review

The news: England’s revamped covid-19 contact tracing app has finally been launched for testing by the public, after its previous version was scrapped due to technical problems. The new program went live for residents of the Isle of Wight on Thursday, August 13, and will shortly become available for people living in the London borough…

The Chinese company Sinovac Biotech developed an experimental vaccine for SARS back in 2004. That disease went away after killing just 800 people, and the project was shelved. But it meant that when the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, exploded in China last January, the company had a road map for what to do next. Four months…

When Neguine Rezaii first moved to the United States a decade ago, she hesitated to tell people she was Iranian. Instead, she would use Persian. “I figured that people probably wouldn’t know what that was,” she says. The linguistic ambiguity was useful: she could conceal her embarrassment at the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while still…

In January, 1989, my 26-year-old father uprooted his life to move to the other side of the world. He had never been on a plane, let alone outside of China. But an American professor had offered him a postdoc, an opportunity he couldn’t refuse. When he landed, he made only one call at an airport…

In the first of a four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong explores the false arrest of Robert Williams by police in Detroit. The odd thing about Willliams’s ordeal wasn’t that police used face recognition to ID him—it’s that the cops told him about it. There’s no law saying they have to. The episode starts…

The use of facial recognition by police has come under a lot of scrutiny. In part three of our four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong takes you to Sin City, which actually has one of America’s most buttoned-up policies on when cops can capture your likeness. She also finds out why celebrities like Woody…

Clearview AI has built one of the most comprehensive databases of people’s faces in the world. Your picture is probably in there (our host Jennifer Strong’s was). In part two of this four-part series on facial recognition, we meet the CEO of the controversial company who tells us our future is filled with FaceID— regardless…

Police have a history of using FaceID to arrest protestors—something not forgotten by activists since the death of George Floyd. In the last of a four-part series on facial recognition, host Jennifer Strong explores the way forward for the technology and examines what policy might look like. We meet: Artem Kuharenko, NTechLab Deborah Raji, AI…

Gina Assaf was running in Washington, DC, on March 19 when she suddenly couldn’t take another step. “I was so out of breath I had to stop,” she says. Five days earlier, she’d hung out with a friend; within days, that friend and their partner had started showing three classic signs of covid-19: fever, cough,…

The European Union has long been a trendsetter in privacy regulation. Its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and stringent antitrust laws have inspired new legislation around the world. For decades, the EU has codified protections on personal data and fought against what it viewed as commercial exploitation of private information, proudly positioning its regulations in…

The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in hard-hit states. Millions of US residents have been infected by the virus that causes covid-19, and at least 160,000 are dead. One effect is that the pool of…

Russia has cleared a vaccine against covid-19 for emergency use on health-care workers this fall. Fast advance: Russian president Vladimir Putin said during a meeting on Tuesday that the newly registered vaccine “has passed all the necessary tests” and that one of his daughters had received the inoculation. “She has taken part in the…

Mars today is a cold, dry wasteland—but things were likely much different billions of years ago. Since we started launching robotic missions to Mars in the 1970s, scientists have collected evidence that points to a warmer, wetter past for the Red Planet, where the surface was teeming with lakes and oceans that could have been…

The coronavirus pandemic has been a boon for the test proctoring industry. About half a dozen companies in the US claim their software can accurately detect and prevent cheating in online tests. Examity, HonorLock, Proctorio, ProctorU, Respondus and others have rapidly grown since colleges and universities switched to remote classes. While there’s no official tally,…

Jenny’s story is not linear, the way that we like stories to be. She was born in Baltimore in 1975 and had a happy, healthy childhood—her younger brother Danny fondly recalls the treasure hunts she would orchestrate and the elaborate plays she would write and perform with her siblings. In her late teens, she developed…

The world is increasingly banking on green hydrogen fuel to fill some of the critical missing pieces in the clean-energy puzzle. US presidential candidate Joe Biden’s climate plan calls for a research program to produce a clean form of the gas that’s cheap enough to fuel power plants within a decade. Likewise, Japan, South Korea,…

When economies across the world shut down earlier this year, it wasn’t only business owners and consumers who had to adapt. Criminals suddenly had a problem on their hands. How to move their money? Profits from organized crime are typically passed through legitimate businesses, often exchanging hands several times and crossing borders, until there is…

Blistering heatwaves are breaking temperature records around the globe this year, from Iraq to the American Southwest. And it’s only going to get worse, as climate change accelerates. By the end of this century, extreme heat spells could kill roughly as many people as all infectious diseases combined, including HIV, malaria and yellow fever, according…

Nurses and patients in some US assisted living facilities will receive an antibody drug to prevent covid-19 infection, according to drug company Eli Lilly. The drug: Early in the coronavirus pandemic, companies searched the blood of covid-19 survivors for potent antibodies against the novel virus. Eli Lilly’s drug is one of these Y shaped proteins—it’s…

At a typical annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the program is a parade of titles like “A Structured Variational Autoencoder for Contextual Morphological Inflection.” The same technical flavor permeates the papers, the research talks, and many hallway chats. At this year’s conference in July, though, something felt different—and it wasn’t just…

In March of 2015, protests broke out at the University of Cape Town in South Africa over the campus statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, a mining magnate who had gifted the land on which the university was built, had committed genocide against Africans and laid the foundations for apartheid. Under the rallying banner…

Last week, European Union leaders approved the most aggressive climate-change plan in history. The eye-catching part was the $600 billion dedicated to green measures, spread across a massive economic recovery package and the seven-year EU budget approved in concert. All of it will be directed toward achieving the previously announced European Green Deal goal of…

The European Union imposed its first-ever sanctions for cyberattacks on Thursday, targeting Russian, Chinese, and North Korean groups connected to several major hacking incidents. The action, which includes travel bans and asset freezes on individuals and organizations connected to ransomware and industrial espionage, follow earlier sanctions put in place by the United States. Retaliation for…

In the past few weeks, a new vocabulary has emerged in parenting groups on social media: pandemic pods, copods, microschools, homeschool pods. All describe cobbled-together groups of students who plan to study at home together this fall as the pandemic creeps into a new academic year. Homeschooling, this is not. As local and federal governments…

Rising tides and storm surges will devastate economies and communities around the globe, if we don’t dramatically cut greenhouse-gas emissions and bolster shoreline protection. By the end of the century, increased coastal flooding driven by swelling ocean levels will endanger more than 250 million people and nearly $13 trillion worth of coastal buildings and infrastructure,…

Computer programming has never been easy. The first coders wrote programs out by hand, scrawling symbols onto graph paper before converting them into large stacks of punched cards that could be processed by the computer. One mark out of place and the whole thing might have to be redone. Nowadays coders use an array of…

Deep down, our drive to explore Mars has always been about figuring out the story of life in our solar system. Are we alone? Were we always? Or is life on Earth descended from Martian progenitors? NASA is now on the verge of launching its most ambitious effort ever to chip away at those questions,…

If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell Technologies CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006 is @theICToptimist. ICT stands for information and communication. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was…

Toronto and the corridor that stretches west to Kitchener and Waterloo is already Canada’s capital of finance and technology—and naturally, the region’s leaders want to set an example for the rest of the world. That’s part of the reason why in 2017, municipal organizations in Toronto tapped Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs to redevelop a…

Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval. What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer. Estep swirled together the mixture and…

The ongoing battle between social-media companies and covid-19 misinformation pushers—including US president Donald Trump—stepped up again this week thanks to a new viral video. And it has exposed, once again, how difficult addressing conspiracy theories is for Facebook, Twitter, and others. The latest video comes from a group called America’s Frontline Doctors, which is sponsored…

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The news: In a new white paper about its plans for AI, translated by China scholars Jeffrey Ding and Caroline Meinhardt, Tencent, the owner of WeChat and one of China’s three largest tech giants, emphasizes that deepfake technology is “not just about ‘faking’ and ‘deceiving,’ but a highly creative and groundbreaking technology.” It urges regulators…

In the depths of a downturn that has wiped out millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth, a wide range of voices in the US are calling for a green stimulus to kick-start growth and lay the foundation for a more sustainable economy. That sentence could have been written a decade ago as…

Biotech company Moderna has been making some pretty promising strides in developing and testing its covid-19 vaccine. The company just announced it was working with the US National Institutes of Health to launch what will be one of the largest covid-19 vaccine trials, a phase 3 study enrolling tens of thousands of American volunteers to…

Twitter recently announced it would take action against accounts posting information related to the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents follow the “breadcrumbs” left by a mysterious figure known as Q in cryptic messages posted about the Trump administration on anonymous online message boards. In response to their spread of misinformation and harassment, more than 7,000…

The European Union’s economic recovery plan is notable for its focus on climate action, sustainable investments, and a just transition fund. As part of this deal, the EU is also proposing a carbon border adjustment, also known as a carbon border tax, on imports by 2023. In the simplest terms, a carbon border adjustment is…

Twitter is perfect as a megaphone for the far right: its trending topics are easy to game, journalists spend way too much time on the site, and—if you’re lucky—the president of the United States might retweet you. QAnon, the continuously evolving pro-Trump conspiracy theory, is good at Twitter in the same way as other successful…

Since the onset of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have turned to AI to assist with their hiring. The most common systems involve using face-scanning algorithms, games, questions, or other evaluations to help determine which candidates to interview. While activists and scholars warn that these screening tools can perpetuate discrimination, the makers themselves…

When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed. Now a network of seismic monitoring stations around the world has quantified this unprecedented period of quiet. The resulting research into “seismic silence,” published in Science today, has shown just…

The US Space Command has announced it’s found evidence that Russia recently conducted a test of anti-satellite weapons, albeit one that did not destroy or harm any objects. SpaceCom claims that on July 15, Russian satellite Kosmos 2543 deployed a new object into its own orbit, similar to a previous anti-satellite demonstration in 2017. What does…

The news: China’s Tianwen-1 mission to Mars successfully lifted off shortly before 1 p.m. local time on Thursday, July 23, Chinese media reported. The mission, which includes a lander, rover, and orbiter, is expected to arrive at the Red Planet in February 2021. China is the first nation to try to transport all three components…

The first time the US went to the moon, it put down an estimated $283 billion to do it alone. That’s not the case with Artemis, the new NASA program to send humans back. Although it’s a US-led initiative, Artemis is meant to be a much more collaborative effort than Apollo. Japan is quickly emerging as…

It’s impossible to contain covid-19 without knowing who’s infected: until a safe and effective vaccine is widely available, stopping transmission is the name of the game. While testing capacity has increased, it’s nowhere near what’s needed to screen patients without symptoms, who account for nearly half of the virus’s transmission. Our research points to a…

The news: Facebook says it is setting up new internal teams to look for racial bias in the algorithms that drive its main social network and Instagram, according to the Wall Street Journal. In particular, the investigations will address the adverse effects of machine learning—which can encode implicit racism in training data—on Black, Hispanic, and…

An international group of researchers have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that were recently active and are likely still active today. The results, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, upend long-held assumptions that the second planet from the sun is largely dormant. What we thought: Unlike Earth, Venus doesn’t have plate tectonics that are constantly…

“Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days to OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI. OpenAI first described GPT-3 in a research paper published in May. But last week it…

The UAE launched its Emirates Mars Mission on Monday, from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center at 6:58 a.m. local time (Sunday evening US Eastern Time). If the mission successfully reaches Mars, the UAE will join a very small list of nations to have gone to the Red Planet. What’s the mission about? An orbital spacecraft named…

The concept: When we look at a chair, regardless of its shape and color, we know that we can sit on it. When a fish is in water, regardless of its location, it knows that it can swim. This is known as the theory of affordance, a term coined by psychologist James J. Gibson. It…

Earlier this week as a pandemic raged across the United States, residents were cut off from the only publicly available source of aggregated data on the nation’s intensive care and hospital bed capacity. When the Trump administration stripped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of control over coronavirus data, it also took that…