MIT Technology Review

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…

A large geometric concrete structure sits on the busy corner of Canal and West Streets in Lower Manhattan. Passersby wondering at its function may guess it’s a museum, or an art gallery. Few are likely to hit on the reality: a salt shed. And that was exactly the intent, says Richard Dattner ’60, lead designer…

Many years after meeting in a freshman fencing class, Tom and Betsy (Beliveau) Davis were reacquainted and eventually married. Their shared undergraduate experience led them to establish the Tom and Betsy Davis Scholarship Fund, which has helped two students attend MIT. A bequest plan—developed with the MIT Office of Gift Planning—ensures that the fund will…

When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would stop accepting political advertising in the week before the US presidential election, he was responding to widespread fear that social media has outsize power to change the balance of an election. Political campaigns have long believed that direct voter contact and personalized messaging are effective tools to convince people to vote for a particular candidate. But in 2016, it seemed that social media was amplifying…

On August 31, Airbnb launched Project Lighthouse, an initiative meant to “uncover, measure, and overcome discrimination” on the home-sharing platform. According to the company, Project Lighthouse will identify discrimination by measuring whether a renter’s perceived race correlates with differences in the rate or quality of that person’s bookings, cancellations, or reviews. This project comes amid…

About a year after graduating from college, I packed my possessions into a rental van I’d split with a near stranger and departed my home state of Ohio. We steered onto I-70 West, bound for San Francisco. At the time, I was less drawn to California in any specific way than determined to escape a…

Amba Kak was in law school in India when the country rolled out the Aadhaar project in 2009. The national biometric ID system, conceived as a comprehensive identity program, sought to collect the fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs of all residents. It wasn’t long, Kak remembers, before stories about its devastating consequences began to spread.…

Back in July, OpenAI’s latest language model, GPT-3, dazzled with its ability to churn out paragraphs that look as if they could have been written by a human. People started showing off how GPT-3 could also autocomplete code or fill in blanks in spreadsheets. In one example, Twitter employee Paul Katsen tweeted “the spreadsheet function…

The Google Magenta team, which makes machine-learning tools for the creative process, has made models that help you compose melodies, and tools that help you sketch cats. Mostly because it’s fun, but also to explore how AI can make creation more accessible. Its latest project now gives anyone a chance to make quarantine tunes to…

Long before the world had ever heard of covid-19, Kay Tye set out to answer a question that has taken on new resonance in the age of social distancing: When people feel lonely, do they crave social interactions in the same way a hungry person craves food? And could she and her colleagues detect and…

In a high-level report precipitated by the birth of CRISPR babies in China in 2018, scientists say the technology’s next medical use should be narrowly restricted to prospective parents who can’t otherwise have a healthy child, such as Black couples who both have sickle-cell disease. The 200-plus-page report, from the US National Academies and the…

The news: Since April, the Delphi research group at Carnegie Mellon University has been compiling one of the world’s largest databases for covid-19 symptom tracking. Now it’s launching a new challenge with Facebook and other partners to crowdsource data projects for improving the nation’s pandemic response. The data: The Delphi group, one of the best…

When Kyle Rittenhouse shot and murdered protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, it wasn’t just the act of a lone vigilante; it was a direct consequence of white militia groups’ organizing on social media. Since June, right-wing media makers have recorded and circulated videos of violent altercations at protests in cities including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los…

Sara Garner had a nagging feeling something wasn’t quite right. A software engineer, she was revamping her personal site, but it just didn’t feel like her. Sure, it had the requisite links to her social media and her professional work, but it didn’t really reflect her personality. So she created a page focused on museums,…

For the first time ever, EmTech MIT, our flagship event on emerging technologies and trends, will be held virtually. Going virtual has given us the opportunity to offer the MIT Inside Track, which includes these exciting new interactive experiences: Meet the Researcher: MIT’s Computer and Artificial Intelligence Lab: Chat with researchers inside MIT’s world-class research lab and learn…

Marc Benioff is a true pioneer of cloud computing; under his leadership, Salesforce is the #1 provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software globally. Benioff has been named Innovator of the Decade by Forbes, one of the 10 Best-Performing CEOs by Harvard Business Review, and one of the World’s 25 Greatest Leaders by Fortune. Hear…

Now is the time to reset, rethink, and rebuild. Join us virtually at EmTech MIT, our annual flagship event on technology strategies for leadership in a changed world. This year’s program focuses on the road ahead for the technology that underpins our lives and businesses, including AI, biomedicine, cloud, and cybersecurity. We’ll also examine the forces of change altering the…

Here’s a life-or-death question: Do apps that notify people of potential exposure to the coronavirus help save lives, or are they a waste of precious time and money? A new study from Oxford University and Google says contact tracing apps reduce infections, hospitalizations, and deaths at almost any level of adoption, showing that the technology…

The astronomy community is on edge. The growing number of satellites streaming through low Earth orbit is making it almost impossible to get a clear view of the sky. The true threat these mega-constellations pose to the astronomy community is only just beginning to be understood. A report released last week by the American Astronomical Society…

The world’s most populous democracy is now also the world leader in internet shutdowns. India has imposed hundreds of internet blackouts in different parts of the country over the past few years, including cutting off connectivity throughout the disputed state of Kashmir for six months. Home to over 12 million people, the region has suffered…

The news: Apple and Google have announced they’re expanding their coronavirus exposure warning system so health agencies can take part without needing to create a customized app. It’s a significant upgrade to the system, which uses Bluetooth to work out if people have spent extended periods of time near each other and then notifies the…

As record-breaking heat waves baked Californians last month, the collective strain of millions of air conditioners forced the state’s grid operators to plunge hundreds of thousands of households into darkness. The rolling blackouts offered just a small hint of what’s likely to come in California and far beyond. Growing populations, rising incomes, increasing urbanization, and…

Remember all those articles you read in January with headlines like “2020 trends to watch in your industry?” You tossed those predictions out long ago. But while everyone knows that the coronavirus pandemic changed everything, none of us is sure how. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review.…

American citizens are inundated with political messages—on social networks, in their news feeds, through email, text messages, and phone calls. It’s not an accident that people get bombarded: political groups prefer a “multimodal” voter contact strategy, where they use many platforms and multiple attempts to persuade a citizen to engage with their cause or candidate.…

Rock-climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. See radar with superhuman vision. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness, and mental illness. Those are just a few of the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his four-year-old neuroscience company Neuralink believe electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about. None…

The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while working from home. How it works: The online lab platform allows scientists to log on through a web browser. On a blank…

Nobody knows what will happen in the future, but some guesses are a lot better than others. A kicked football will not reverse in midair and return to the kicker’s foot. A half-eaten cheeseburger will not become whole again. A broken arm will not heal overnight. By drawing on a fundamental description of cause and…

Grace Windheim had heard of deepfakes before. But she had never considered how to make one. It was a viral meme using the technology that led her to research the possibility—and discover that it was super easy and completely free. Within a day, she had created a step-by-step YouTube tutorial to walk others through the…

Hacking isn’t all 1s and 0s—more often than you’d think, it’s about people. A Tesla employee was offered a $1 million bribe in early August to install ransomware on the car company’s networks in Nevada, a scheme that could have netted a cybercrime gang many more millions in extortion, according to a newly unsealed US…

On Sunday evening, Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. By Tuesday, a 16-year-old Texan, Kel, had built a one-page website, Justice for Jacob Blake, that offered context, templates for contacting officials, mental-health resources, and donation links. To build it, Kel turned to Carrd, a simple tool that lets anyone…