MIT Technology Review

The square-faced, three-legged alien shoves and jostles to get at the enormous plant taking over its tiny planet. But each bite just makes the forbidden fruit grow bigger. Suddenly the plant’s weight flips the whole sphere upside down and all the little creatures drop into space. Quick! Reach in and catch one! Agence, a short…

The evidence that the coronavirus spreads through the air has been mounting for months. However, the official guidance from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control is still that droplets are the main route of transmission. In fact, the CDC changed its website last month to acknowledge airborne transmission as a route for…

Elections are a technology. I don’t mean just that they rely on technology, although cybersecurity, voter data, misinformation, and online advertising are all central to how today’s elections are fought. I mean elections are themselves are a technology—an essential mechanism in the running of a healthy society. Elections enable power to alternate between different factions…

Russia’s biggest technology company enjoys a level of dominance that is unparalleled by any one of its Western counterparts. Think Google mixed with equal parts Amazon, Spotify and Uber and you’re getting close to the sprawling empire that is Yandex—a single, mega-corporation with its hands in everything from search to ecommerce to driverless cars. But…

When the 2020 coronavirus pandemic forced workers across the United States to stop congregating in offices and work from home, Siemens USA was prepared to protect its newly remote workforce and identify and repel potential data breaches. It turned to AIOps—artificial intelligence for IT operations—and a specialized security system to immediately secure and monitor 95%…

In the middle of the night on Monday, the two cosmonauts and one astronaut on the International Space Station were woken up by a call from mission control. They were told that there was a hole in a module on the Russian side of the station, responsible for leaking precious air out of the $150-billion…

Ask Stefan Jockusch what a factory might look like in 10 or 20 years, and the answer might leave you at a crossroads between fascination and bewilderment. Jockusch is vice president for strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, which develops applications that simulate the conception, design, and manufacture of products like cell phones or smart…

Four underground reservoirs of water may be sitting below the south pole of Mars. The new findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, suggest Mars is home to even more deposits of liquid water than once thought. The background: In 2018, a group of Italian researchers used radar observations made by the European Space Agency’s Mars…

For evidence that mainstream economists are taking the challenge of covid-19 seriously, look no further than the comments of Gabriela Ramos, chief of staff at the OECD, at a conference in April: “For many institutions, including the OECD, which has traditionally emphasized the need for efficiency, it is not easy to accept that we should build…

SpaceX has already launched more than 700 Starlink satellites, with thousands more due to come online in the years ahead. Their prime mission is to provide high-speed internet virtually worldwide, extending it to many remote locations that have lacked reliable service to date. Now, research funded by the US Army has concluded that the growing mega-constellation…

The covid-19 pandemic shocked the world and generated high levels of economic, political, and social uncertainty. And for many people, the virus compounded the growing sense of uncertainty they already felt in their lives as a result of automation, geopolitical tensions, and widening inequalities. With the many sudden changes that covid-19 has brought, planning for…

Of all the AI models in the world, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has most captured the public’s imagination. It can spew poems, short stories, and songs with little prompting, and has been demonstrated to fool people into thinking its outputs were written by a human. But its eloquence is more of a parlor trick, not to be…

The explosive successes of AI in the last decade or so are typically chalked up to lots of data and lots of computing power. But benchmarks also play a crucial role in driving progress—tests that researchers can pit their AI against to see how advanced it is. For example, ImageNet, a public data set of…

Researchers have spent years trying to crack the mystery of how we express our feelings. Pioneers in the field of emotion detection will tell you the problem is far from solved. But that hasn’t stopped a growing number of companies from claiming their algorithms have cracked the puzzle. In part one of a two-part series…

Automated driving is advancing all the time, but there’s still a critical missing ingredient: trust. Host Jennifer Strong meets engineers building a new language of communication between automated vehicles and their human occupants, a crucial missing piece in the push toward a driverless future. We meet: Dr. Richard Corey and Dr. Nicholas Giudice, founders of…

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has announced plans for the nation to become carbon neutral by 2060, setting a bold goal for the world’s biggest climate polluter. But it’s hard to reconcile Xi’s pledge, made before the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, with the nation’s recent actions. Most notably, China is in the midst of a…

“If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, He would have given man a moon.” The famed rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke uttered those words in 1984. He wanted to highlight how we could use the moon as a springboard to expand human civilization into the rest of the solar system. This was more than…

Regina Barzilay, a professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is the first winner of the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, a new prize recognizing outstanding research in AI. Barzilay started her career working on natural-language processing. After surviving breast cancer in 2014, she switched her…

In March, Adobe’s leadership team decided—for the sake of employee well-being—to institute worldwide work-from-home policies to protect against the spread of covid-19. And it was a large undertaking. This content was produced by Adobe. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. Anil Chakravarthy is Executive Vice President and General Manager of Adobe’s…

Over a year ago, scientists unleashed something incredible on the world: the first photo of a black hole ever taken. By putting together radio astronomy observations made with dishes across four continents, the collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope managed to peer 53 million light-years away and look at a supermassive black hole, which…

The news: On September 22, Microsoft announced that it would begin exclusively licensing GPT-3, the world’s largest language model, built by San Francisco–based OpenAI. The model acts like a powerful autocomplete: it can generate essays given the starting sentence, songs given a musical intro, or even web page layouts given a few lines of HTML…

What happens when a major city allows the coronavirus to rage unchecked? If the Brazilian city of Manaus is any answer, it means about two-thirds of the population could get infected and one person in 500 could die before the epidemic winds down. During May, as the virus spread rapidly in Manaus, the equatorial capital…

A dozen or so steep-roofed buildings cling to the edges of an open-pit mine. High above them, on top of an enormous rock arch, sits an inaccessible house. Elsewhere, a railway on stilts circles a group of multicolored tower blocks. Ornate pagodas decorate a large paved plaza. And a lone windmill turns on an island,…

America’s most famous spy agency has a major competitor it can’t quite seem to beat: Silicon Valley. The CIA has long been a place cutting-edge technology is researched, developed, and realized—and it wants to lead in fields like artificial intelligence and biotechnology. However, recruiting and retaining the talent capable of building these tools is a…

Corporations have never been able to cleanly separate their activities from geopolitics. Now, technology firms are finding it increasingly difficult to work across the US-China divide. Try as they might to cross-pollinate through research and investments, the climate between China and the United States continues to deteriorate into political one-upmanship, leaving users to pay the…

Will the US government ban TikTok and WeChat, or won’t it—and why? With the Trump administration issuing vaguely phrased executive orders and policies about the apps, even as legal challenges against potential bans move through the courts and the president gives his “blessing” to a deal to keep TikTok in US app stores, it’s hard…

What’s going on? The US Commerce Department issued an order banning Americans from downloading Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat at the end of last week. A lot has changed since then. First, TikTok: Back in August, President Donald Trump said TikTok had to either be bought by a US entity by September 15 or face…

What’s happening? The US Commerce Department has issued an order banning Americans from downloading Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat; it’s due to come into effect on Sunday, September 20. Existing users in the US will still be able to use the apps, but they won’t receive updates or patches from Sunday onwards, and the apps…

For the first time ever, a patient’s death has been linked directly to a cyberattack. Police have launched a “negligent homicide” investigation after ransomware disrupted emergency care at Düsseldorf University Hospital in Germany. The victim: Prosecutors in Cologne say a female patient from Düsseldorf was scheduled to undergo critical care at the hospital when the…

For the past couple of years, Courtney Cochran hosted a Nashville-based meetup group called the Snail Mail Social Club. Before the pandemic, it involved people gathering, pen and paper in hand, to write letters together. “It was a fun social endeavor,” Cochran says. “You got some face-to-face connecting time with people.” When the coronavirus made…

When it comes to imagining the future, customer service often gets painted in a dystopian light. Take the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report. Tom Cruise’s John Anderton walks into the Gap, an identity recognition system scans him, and a hologram asks about a recent purchase. There’s something unsettling in this vignette—an unsolicited non-human seems to…

Algorithms can change the course of children’s lives. Kids are interacting with Alexas that can record their voice data and influence their speech and social development. They’re binging videos on TikTok and YouTube pushed to them by recommendation systems that end up shaping their worldviews. Algorithms are also increasingly used to determine what their education…

US President Donald Trump has successfully moved the nation backwards on climate change, even as the world grapples with increasingly devastating fires, heat waves and droughts. His rollbacks of major environmental policies, should they survive legal challenges and subsequent administrations, could pump the equivalent of 1.8 billion additional metric tons of carbon dioxide into the…

Five of California’s 10 largest fires in modern history are all burning at once. Together, this year’s wildfires have already destroyed 4,200 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, and scorched more than 3.2 million acres across the state. That’s larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks combined, and nearly half…

Leading discussions about the global rules to regulate digital privacy and surveillance is a somewhat unusual role for a developing country to play. But Brazil had been doing just that for over a decade. Edward Snowden’s bombshell in 2014 detailing the US National Security Agency’s digital surveillance activities changed all that. It included revelations that the…

Venus has long played second fiddle to its redder, smaller, and more distant sibling. Given how inhospitable we’ve learned Venus to be, we’ve spent the majority of the last century pinning some of our biggest hopes of finding signs of extraterrestrial life on Mars. That all changed this week. On Monday it was announced that a…

In the 1950s, Albert Sabin was searching for an improved polio vaccine. To that end, his lab infected the brains of mice, chimpanzees, and monkeys with the virus that causes the disease. They wanted to see if the pathogen would change and if weakened forms might arise. They eventually isolated versions of the polio virus…

America has successfully launched national innovation missions time and again. These missions have delivered life-saving drugs, sparked the computer and internet revolutions, and put humans on the moon. Most recently, the US government has poured billions of dollars into a national innovation campaign to help pharmaceutical companies develop vaccines and therapeutics for covid-19. Yet the…

If you ever found yourself on Venus, you’d be destroyed in moments. The pressure at the surface is thought to be up to 100 times greater than what is found on Earth, temperatures are around 464 °C, and the air is more than 96% carbon dioxide. And yet, life on Venus suddenly isn’t the most…

The news: An international consortium of medical experts has introduced the first official standards for clinical trials that involve artificial intelligence. The move comes at a time when hype around medical AI is at a peak, with inflated and unverified claims about the effectiveness of certain tools threatening to undermine people’s trust in AI overall. …

NASA announced today that it was seeking proposals from private companies interested in collecting samples from the moon and making them available for purchase by the agency. The news: As part of the new initiative, one or more companies will launch a mission to the moon and collect between 50 and 500 grams of lunar…

Facebook unveiled a new product today called Facebook Campus: “a college-only space designed to help students connect with fellow classmates over shared interests.” Sound familiar? Campus appears to be a throwback to the first days of Facebook, when a person had to have a college email address and attend a select group of universities to…

Russian military hackers responsible for cyberattacks against Democratic targets during the 2016 American election are now targeting over 200 organizations in the United States (including political parties, think tanks, and consultants serving both Democrats and Republicans), according to Microsoft, which is increasingly calling out Russian cyber espionage. In the final weeks before the November 3…

Brazil is grappling with a crisis of misinformation. To solve it, the country should be investing in education and holding the financiers of fake-news networks accountable. Instead, Brazil’s National Congress is considering legislation that would violate the privacy and freedom of expression of the country’s 137 million internet users. Several members and supporters of President…

Earlier this year, before the pandemic and lockdowns, audio engineer Stéphane Pigeon received an unusual request: would he consider making sounds that replicated the office? “I said, ‘No, no, no, I will not do it!’” says Pigeon, the creator of myNoise.net, which has become a cult resource among people looking for background noise to help…

Every week, the readers of our space newsletter, The Airlock, send in their questions for space reporter Neel V. Patel to answer. This week: How the average person can go to space. What are the opportunities for ordinary citizens to go into space? If there is so much being done to help make space more accessible, why aren’t…

US president Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, agree on at least one issue: the arcane federal law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. On September 8, Trump tweeted that Republican lawmakers should “repeal Section 230, immediately.” With similar urgency, Biden had told the New York Times last December that…

The news: AstraZeneca has paused its global phase 3 covid-19 vaccine trial after a UK participant fell seriously ill. It’s unclear if the suspected “serious adverse reaction” was a result of receiving the vaccine or coincidental, but the person affected is expected to recover, according to STAT. We also don’t know how long the trial…

Over the past six months, central banks and governments have unlocked financial floodgates to deal with the economic fallout of covid-19. As early as April, 106 countries had introduced or adapted social protection programs, mostly cash transfers, to help those affected by the pandemic. A McKinsey analysis of 54 countries estimates that governments had committed $10 trillion by June,…

On September 6, China successfully landed a reusable spacecraft the country had launched into orbit just two days before, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. “The successful flight marked the country’s important breakthrough in reusable spacecraft research and is expected to offer convenient and low-cost round trip transport for the peaceful use of the…