MIT Technology Review

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…

Election Day misinformation will have two big goals, with the emphasis shifting over the course of the day. First it will attempt to keep people away from the polls, and then it will undermine the integrity of the election results. As experts and reporters track, verify, and debunk the onslaught of online rumors about voting,…

Tomorrow is Election Day in the US, which means we’ve reached peak political saturation: Americans are being hit with constant news alerts, a torrent of punditry and campaign ads on television, and even warring yard signs. The stakes are high, and we’re all struggling to figure out what’s fact and what’s fiction. Kids and teens…

In April, Amazon announced it would contribute $10 million to a pair of projects designed to pay forest owners across the Appalachian Mountains to manage their lands in ways that capture more carbon dioxide from the air. It is one of the first investments in the retail giant’s $100 million Right Now Climate Fund, an…

During the 2016 primary season, Trump campaign staffer Matt Braynard had an unusual political strategy. Instead of targeting Republican base voters—the ones who show up for every election—he focused on the intersection of two other groups: people who knew of Donald Trump, and people who had never voted in a primary before. These were both…

Last month’s report that there may be phosphine gas in the Venusian clouds came with a stunning implication: extraterrestrial life. On Earth, phosphine is a chemical produced by some kinds of bacteria that live in oxygen-poor conditions. Its presence on Venus, announced by a team led by Cardiff University’s Jane Greaves, raised the possibility that there…

Things usually move pretty slowly for the US Supreme Court, with cases sometimes taking years to make their way through to a ruling. But these days it’s moving so quickly that the newest justice didn’t even have time to participate in the first two crucial voting-related rulings after her confirmation. The breakneck pace reveals that…

Four years ago, Bin Xie was happy to sing the praises of WeChat. The IT manager from Houston had seen his pro-Trump blog, Chinese Voice of America, go viral on the app. Today, Xie stands firmly behind the president, but his relationship with the platform that fueled his rise has soured. The shift didn’t happen…

Unless you’re a physicist or an engineer, there really isn’t much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying mechanical engineering, I’ve never used them since in the real world. But partial differential equations, or PDEs, are also kind of magical. They’re…

American hospitals are being targeted in a wave of ransomware attacks as covid-19 infections in the US break records and push the country’s health infrastructure to the limit. As reports emerge of attacks that interrupted health care in at least six US hospitals, experts and government officials say they expect the impact to worsen—and warn…

With days still to go before the US presidential election, early voting has already topped half of all votes cast in the 2016 election, and every indication is that the electorate is energized. It makes sense, then, that in this heavily contested, highly polarized political environment (in the midst of a raging pandemic, no less), disinformation…

Welcome home welcome home oh oh oh the world is beautiful the world. They’re not the most catchy lyrics. But after I’ve listened to “Beautiful the World” half a dozen times, the chorus is stuck in my head and my foot is tapping. Not bad for a melody generated by an AI trained on a…

Early voting data shows that voter participation in the 2020 US presidential election is already at an all-time high in many states. With only days remaining before voting ends on November 3, more than 70 million Americans have cast ballots. This unprecedented early turnout, and the complications presented by the covid-19 pandemic, have brought intense…

The US presidential election next Tuesday will shape the world for years, if not decades, to come. Not only because Joe Biden and Donald Trump have radically different ideas about immigration, health care, race, the economy, climate change, and the role of the state itself, but because they represent very different visions of the US’s…

What happened: Less than a week before the US presidential elections, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.The four-hour hearing was meant to focus on Section 230, the regulation that has shielded internet companies from liability for user content. Most questions, however, had little to…

The fake news: A new weekly satire show from the creators of South Park is using deepfakes, or AI-synthesized media, to poke fun at some of the most important topics of our time. Called Sassy Justice, the show is hosted by the character Fred Sassy, a reporter for the local news station in Cheyenne, Wyoming,…

Some people might not associate the word “trust” with artificial intelligence (AI). Stefan Jockusch is not one of them. Vice president of strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, Jockusch says trusting an algorithm that powers an AI application is a matter of statistics. This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of…

It’s a cruel irony that the things that make a restaurant appealing are precisely what currently make it dangerous—the intimacy, the coziness, the groups of people deep in conversation, whiling away the hours over drinks and a meal. Eating in a restaurant is one of the riskiest things you can do during the coronavirus pandemic. …

Last week, the Oklahoma State Election Board issued a warning about a fraudulent text message that claimed there had been changes to polling places. The phone number that the text came from was for a male escort service. This is not new. In 2018, two weeks ahead of the midterms, Monroe County in Michigan warned…

If elections are a technology, then the machine consists of an enormous sprawl of moving parts that goes well beyond what most people realize. The system usually has lots of problems, but things have become so unpredictable during the covid-19 pandemic that the failure or success of any one piece of that greater machine could…

Just over one week before Election Day, over 60 million Americans have already cast early votes. That dwarfs 2016’s entire early voting total of 47.2 million, and the number is going to keep growing significantly this week. “This is good news!” wrote Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who heads up the US Election…

If you don’t already know: Yes, there is water on the moon. NASA suggests there’s as much as 600 million metric tons of water ice there, which could someday help lunar colonists survive. It could even be turned into an affordable form of rocket fuel (you just have to split water into oxygen and hydrogen,…

The US space program has been a footnote to every presidential administration since Richard Nixon. Nothing, not even the space shuttle or the International Space Station, could define a presidency or an era of American life the way the Apollo program did. It still won’t define the first (and maybe only) presidential term of Donald…

The 2020 election may be among the most consequential in modern memory, but it’s not just candidates that are on the ballot. Voters in 34 states are deciding on 129 measures, including several that touch on the way we use technology. Among these are three initiatives in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan that could affect access…

In the past month, US President Donald Trump and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie were diagnosed with covid-19 and spent time in the hospital, just like tens of thousands of other Americans nearly every day since the pandemic began. But Trump and Christie were special cases. They received experimental covid-19 treatments that are not…

Update 10/26/2020: NASA plans to stow the sample away Tuesday. NASA confirmed that the OSIRIS-REx mission picked up enough material from asteroid Bennu during its sample collection attempt on Tuesday. In fact, the spacecraft’s collection chamber is now too full to close all the way, leading some of the material to drift off into space.…

The news: The NYU Ad Observatory released new data this week about the inputs the Trump and Biden campaigns are using to target audiences for ads on Facebook. It’s a jumble of broad and specific characteristics ranging from the extremely wide (“any users between the ages of 18-65”) to particular traits (people with an “interest…

Hey, GPT-3: Why are rabbits cute? “How are rabbits cute? Is it their big ears, or maybe they’re fluffy? Or is it the way they hop around? No, actually it’s their large reproductive organs that makes them cute. The more babies a woman can have, the cuter she is.” It gets worse. (Content warning: sexual…