MIT Technology Review

Misinformation and social media have become inseparable from one another; as platforms like Twitter and Facebook have grown to globe-spanning size, so too has the threat posed by the spread of false content. In the midst of a volatile election season in the US and a raging global pandemic, the power of information to alter…

Defining what is, or isn’t artificial intelligence can be tricky (or tough). So much so, even the experts get it wrong sometimes. That’s why MIT Technology Review’s Senior AI Reporter Karen Hao created a flowchart to explain it all. In this bonus content our Host Jennifer Strong and her team reimagine Hao’s reporting, gamifying it…

The news: A new AI model for summarizing scientific literature can now assist researchers in wading through and identifying the latest cutting-edge papers they want to read. On November 16, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) rolled out the model onto its flagship product, Semantic Scholar, an AI-powered scientific paper search engine. It provides…

The new series of our AI podcast, In Machines We Trust, is all about face recognition. In part one of the series, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review explore the unexpected ways the technology is being used, including how it is being turned on police. We meet: Christopher Howell, data scientist and…

It’s no secret that machine-learning models tuned and tweaked to near-perfect performance in the lab often fail in real settings. This is typically put down to a mismatch between the data the AI was trained and tested on and the data it encounters in the world, a problem known as data shift. For example, an…

Even though the winner of an American election usually gets announced soon after the vote happens, the result is never actually official on Election Day. It’s not even official once the media makes their result projections, as happened last week. Instead, election results actually become real when state and local election authorities make sure that…

More good news: US drug company Moderna announced today that early trials of its covid-19 vaccine show that it is 94.5% effective. The news comes hot on the heels of a similar announcement last week from Pfizer, which reported that its own covid-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective. With covid-19 having killed 1.3 million…

On November 13, Michael Giusto turned 18 years old. Becoming an adult is always a big moment in any teenager’s life. But Giusto’s landmark birthday comes with added responsibility. Thanks to a quirk in Georgia’s laws that requires at least 50% of the vote to win a US Senate seat, both the state’s Senate races…

What’s your plan for Thanksgiving? Americans caught between the dire reality of an out-of-control pandemic and a desire to celebrate the national holiday with family may be tempted to believe that maybe they can manage the risks. I’ve been thinking through my own planned turkey day gathering, an outdoor event in a rural setting with…

On Thursday, President Donald Trump sent an all-caps tweet claiming that voting machines from a company called Dominion Voting Systems had deleted millions of votes for him around the country. The claim isn’t true, but he is the president—so it has had an impact. Election workers say they fear for their safety. They’re receiving death…

Think of all the subconscious processes you perform while you’re driving. As you take in information about the surrounding vehicles, you’re anticipating how they might move and thinking on the fly about how you’d respond to those maneuvers. You may even be thinking about how you might influence the other drivers based on what they…

I really want a covid-19 vaccine. Like many Americans, I have family members and neighbors who have been sickened and killed by the new coronavirus. My sister is a nurse on a covid-19 ward, and I want her to be able to do her job safely. As a health-care lawyer, I have the utmost confidence…

The news: While the US has been hooked on its election, China has been shopping. From November 1 to 11, the country’s top e-commerce giants, Alibaba and JD, generated $115 billion in sales as part of their annual Singles’ Day shopping bonanza. Alibaba, which started the festival in 2009, accounted for $74.1 billion of those…

The news: Digital contact tracing apps have faced a wide range of difficulties, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon the idea, according to the authors of a new essay in the journal Science. Instead, they argue, successful digital contact tracing needs to be ethical, trustworthy, locally rooted, and adaptive to new data on what…

Several years ago, researchers at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and the University of Cambridge performed a series of simple experiments that could have huge implications for cooling and refrigeration. They placed plastic crystals of neopentyl glycol—a common chemical used to produce paints and lubricants—into a chamber, added oil, and cranked down a piston. As…

Axiom Space has signed three private astronauts to join former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría on Ax-1, the first private mission into orbit and to the International Space Station. The mission: In March, Axiom Space announced plans to launch “history’s first fully private human spaceflight mission to the International Space Station.” The mission, dubbed Ax-1, would…

The news: When a German hospital patient died in September while ransomware disrupted emergency care at the facility, police launched a negligent-homicide investigation and said they might hold the hackers responsible. The case attracted worldwide attention because it could have been the first time law enforcement considered a cyberattack to be directly responsible for a…

Last month Nature published a damning response written by 31 scientists to a study from Google Health that had appeared in the journal earlier this year. Google was describing successful trials of an AI that looked for signs of breast cancer in medical images. But according to its critics, the Google team provided so little…

The news: There have been increasing numbers of anecdotal reports of a link between surviving covid-19 and developing mental health problems in recent months. Now we have some numbers to back those reports up. A new study, published in Lancet Psychiatry, has found that almost one in five people who have had covid-19 go on…

Artificial intelligence has become such a big part of our lives, you’d be forgiven for losing count of the algorithms you interact with. But the AI powering your weather forecast, Instagram filter, or favorite Spotify playlist is a far cry from the hyper-intelligent thinking machines industry pioneers have been musing about for decades. Deep learning,…

How do organizations best ensure a resilient cyber ecosystem–from assessing risk to implementing and managing controls to ensuring compliance internally and with external partners? Is it possible for defensive technologies to catch up and move ahead of attackers? Join us at CyberSecure, our inaugural virtual event on the business of cyber risk, to hear how smart companies are striking preemptively, and what emerging technologies are proven to…

From espionage to elections, from blackouts to data breaches, from million-dollar ransoms to staged supply-chain disruption; cyber warfare is transforming statecraft and national security policy. In this session, you’ll hear from Ben Buchanan, author of The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics, on the very real geopolitical pursuit of nation-state cyber advantage. Purchase your…

Every internet-connected laptop, server, and device offers an opportunity for a hacker to infiltrate and compromise your organization. Having a robust cyber-resilience plan for your organization is as fundamental as having a marketing, financial, and business strategy plan. If you are grappling with the far-reaching business implications of this reality, you need to attend CyberSecure, MIT Technology…

A species of bacteria can successfully pull out rare Earth elements from rocks, even in microgravity environments, a study on the International Space Station has found. The new findings, published in Nature Communications today, suggest a new way we could one day use microbes to mine for valuable metals and minerals off Earth. Why bacteria:…

During this pandemic, every activity in an indoor public place involves some level of risk, but some venues are far riskier than others—especially if they’re small and crowded. We already knew that restaurants can easily become covid hot spots, but a new paper published in Nature today quantifies just how dangerous they really are: four…

Our 35 Innovators Under 35 competition for 2021 is now open for nominations. You can nominate great candidates from now until 10 p.m. EST on February 3, 2021. We’ve been publishing a list of young innovators for more than two decades now. Today, many of the people we’ve selected over the years—such as Andrew Ng,…

Throughout his campaign to win the White House, President-elect Joe Biden has been relatively quiet about the technology industry. In a revealing January 2020 interview with the New York Times editorial board, Biden said that he wanted to revoke Section 230; suggested that he disagreed with how friendly the Obama administration became with Silicon Valley;…

On midnight of October 26, Facebook stopped accepting all new advertisements about “social issues, elections, or politics in the US.” The intention was to prevent Facebook from being overwhelmed by a blitz of last-minute ads that would require fact-checking, and to limit the ability of political groups to sow confusion or violence. Advertisers were not…

President-elect Joe Biden wasted little time setting a new tone on climate change. On Sunday, one day after major outlets called the presidential election for the former vice president, the Biden-Harris transition team released documents laying out the incoming administration’s early priorities, including a blueprint for “tackling the climate crisis.” Most of the details were…

In 1979, a federally commissioned study led by meteorology pioneer and MIT professor Jule Charney helped alert the world to the processes driving global warming—at the time, a looming but not yet imminent threat. Today, climate change is no longer a challenge for some distant future; it is a present and accelerating crisis requiring swift,…

Seniors arriving on campus for the fall term headed to MIT’s custom-designed covid testing trailer, which lets caregivers swab noses using gloves protruding through height-adjustable panels. On August 31, MIT Medical administered over 2,700 tests—more than many states did that day—and topped that with a record 4,979 tests on September 14. Of the 22,176 tests…

Jeffrey Gum remembers his early-career surgeries with wonder. “We dissected a lot of muscle off the bone,” says Gum, an adult and pediatric spine surgeon at the Norton Leatherman Spine Center in Louisville, Kentucky. That resulted in “more blood loss than we’d prefer and big reconstructive surgeries.” With a traditional, open surgery, a patient could…

The European Union has agreed to stricter rules on the sale and export of cyber-surveillance technologies like facial recognition and spyware. After years of negotiations, the new regulation will be announced today in Brussels. Details of the plan were reported in Politico last month. The regulation requires companies to get a government license to sell…

A promising vaccine against covid-19 has proved 90% effective, protecting most people who get it, according to the drug maker Pfizer. If the results hold up, it would mean a potential path out of the covid-19 crisis, which has shuttered business and schools across the world. However, supplies of the vaccine are likely to be…

The news: President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris have revealed the members of their covid-19 task force. Its 10 members are mostly former government health officials, top medical figures, and academics. The task force will have three cochairs: David Kessler, who ran the Food and Drug Administration under Presidents George H.W. Bush and…

Though the counts aren’t finished and the legal challenges could drag on for weeks, Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential election is looking increasingly likely. If he does triumph, it will also be a win for action on climate change. But his ability to push through any sweeping legislation will be seriously constrained if,…

Nearly 4,300 exoplanets have been discovered by astronomers, and it’s quite obvious now our galaxy is filled with them. But the point of looking for these new worlds is more than just an exercise in stamp collecting—it’s to find one that could be home to life, be it future humans who have found a way…

Back in 2016, I could count on one hand the kinds of interventions that technology companies were willing to use to rid their platforms of misinformation, hate speech, and harassment. Over the years, crude mechanisms like blocking content and banning accounts have morphed into a more complex set of tools, including quarantining topics, removing posts…

You’ve probably heard us say this countless times: GPT-3, the gargantuan AI that spews uncannily human-like language, is a marvel. It’s also largely a mirage. You can tell with a simple trick: Ask it the color of sheep, and it will suggest “black” as often as “white”—reflecting the phrase “black sheep” in our vernacular. That’s…

The election process is working. A long-building “chaos” narrative being pushed by President Donald Trump suggests that the election is fatally flawed, fraud is rampant, and no institutions other than Trump himself can be trusted. There is no evidence for any of that, and as the election math increasingly turns against him, the actual election systems around…

So Election Day is over, but the election continues. The world’s attention has turned to a set of swing states still counting important mail-in votes, particularly Pennsylvania. So what exactly is happening today? How are counts happening? Is the election fair and secure? “I urge everyone to remain patient,” Pennsylvania secretary of state Kathy Boockvar…

As the US election process wore on from Tuesday evening into Wednesday, multiple counties across the country are broadcasting the ballot counting process. What it is: Given the closeness of the election, it’s not surprising that voters and candidates alike are nervous about how votes are being tallied. So officials across the country have taken…

While the presidential election is still in the balance, several ballot initiatives with broad implications for how we use technology have passed. Ballot initiatives pose questions to voters and can—if passed—create, amend, or repeal existing state laws. In total, there were 129 statewide ballot initiatives across the country in this presidential election, including many related…

Fast radio bursts are among the strangest mysteries in space science. These pulses last less than five milliseconds but release more energy than the sun does in days or weeks. Since they were first recorded in 2001 (and written about in 2007), scientists have discovered dozens of FRBs. Most are one-off signals, but a few…

In a move that everyone knew was coming, President Trump announced in a speech at 2:21 a.m. EST this morning that he had won—long before enough votes were in to make that call. “We were getting ready to win this election,” he said. “Frankly, we did win the election.” He called for the counting of…

Millions of voters across the US received robocalls and texts encouraging them to stay at home on Election Day, in what experts believe were clear attempts at suppressing voter turnout in the closely contested 2020 political races. Employing such tactics to spread disinformation and sow confusion amid elections isn’t new, and it’s not yet clear…

Online platforms have made bans on political advertising a core part of their plans to mitigate the spread of disinformation around the US elections. Twitter moved early, banning political ads in October 2019. Facebook stopped accepting new ads last week and will indefinitely remove all political ads, old and new, after the polls close on…

The election results will start to come in as early as 7 p.m. US Eastern Time on Tuesday, when seven states begin closing the polls. The next few hours will see more polls close around the country, more votes processed, more counts updated. But we won’t have the final result that night. This isn’t unusual:…

There were 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents reported in the US in 2019—a record-breaking year as tracked by the Anti-Defamation League, and almost double the rate reported in 2016. The resurgence of anti-Semitism is partly attributed to the mainstreaming of QAnon, a rise in hate speech more broadly, and the radicalization of many political spaces online. A…

There was a time when misinformation was thought of as something that fought its way from the fringes into the mainstream, as if it lived in a darker parallel reality that was waiting to invade our own. That’s never been quite right, but in 2020 it’s an obvious misconception. Cornell researchers recently identified President Trump…