MIT Technology Review

From the MIT Technology Review art team, here are some of our very favorite illustrations of the year:

This was a year we needed technology to save us. A pandemic raced over the land, there were wildfires, uneasy political divisions, and we gasped in the miasma of social media. In 2020, the ways in which technology can help or hurt never seemed clearer. In the success column we have covid-19 vaccines. But this…

America’s first confirmed wrongful arrest by facial recognition technology happened in January 2020. Robert Williams, a Black man, was arrested in his driveway just outside Detroit, with his wife and young daughter watching. He spent the night in jail. The next day in the questioning room, a detective slid a picture across the table to…

A spacesuit is more like a miniature spacecraft you wear around your body than an item of clothing. It’s pressurized, it’s decked out with life support systems, and it’s likely to look pretty cool. But should the suit fail, you’re toast. No one has ever died because of a faulty spacesuit, but that doesn’t mean…

Valerie Fitzhugh has watched the news a lot more over the past four years, certainly more than she remembers doing at any other point in her life. In the first months of the pandemic, she kept hearing one message, from news outlet to news outlet, that she couldn’t stop thinking about: there weren’t enough people…

When Joe Biden takes over the US presidency on January 20, 2021, he intends to make climate change a centerpiece of his administration. As well as rejoining the Paris agreement, reinforcing the Clean Air Act, and restoring the Clean Power Plan, he will also have an opportunity to strengthen climate research. One way he can…

The consensus is that 2020 has been “the worst.” But there is reason to look back at this year and find the unexpected silver linings of quarantine, particularly when it comes to how we connect with other people. None of these benefits compare with the death and suffering and misery of a terrible year, but…

In 2018, Sam Cole, a reporter at Motherboard, discovered a new and disturbing corner of the internet. A Reddit user by the name of “deepfakes” was posting nonconsensual fake porn videos using an AI algorithm to swap celebrities’ faces into real porn. Cole sounded the alarm on the phenomenon, right as the technology was about…

This spring, while the US government was spinning its wheels on an official covid-19 response, countries around the world were rolling out national contact tracing apps. Beginning with Singapore in mid-March, more than 40 countries have launched digital exposure notification systems, to varying degrees of success. Our Covid Tracing Tracker logs each country’s app and…

Earlier this month a mutated variant of the coronavirus was detected in the UK, setting off alarms across Europe and causing some countries to ban travelers from Britain. But it’s still not clear that the new variant is much more easily transmitted, as some scientists have warned. Moreover, several companies with authorized vaccines or therapeutic…

There are two stories you hear about making a living as an artist in the digital age, and they are diametrically opposed. One comes from Silicon Valley and its boosters in the media. There’s never been a better time to be an artist, it goes. If you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got a recording studio.…

Experts are debating the pros and cons of covid-19 vaccine passports or other types of certification as they attempt to begin reopening public spaces. The idea seems simple on its face: those who can prove they’ve been vaccinated for covid-19 would be able to go places and do things that unvaccinated people would not. There’s…

On November 30, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao pinned an image to his Twitter profile. In it, a soldier stands on an Australian flag and grins maniacally as he holds a bloodied knife to a boy’s throat. The boy, whose face is covered by a semi-transparent veil, carries a lamb. Alongside the image, Zhao…

Many companies expected 2020 to be a challenging year. They anticipated technological shifts that would affect their business—like the transition from combustion to electric vehicles for automotive manufacturers—or ongoing instability due to raging trade wars or Brexit. But the impact of the covid pandemic on top of these challenges has, for many companies, been unprecedented.…

In some stores, sophisticated systems are tracking customers in almost every imaginable way, from recognizing their faces to gauging their age, their mood, and virtually gussying them up with makeup. The systems rarely ask for people’s permission, and for the most part they don’t have to. In our season 1 finale, we look at the…

In part-three of this latest series, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review jump on the court to unpack just how much things are changing. We meet: Donnie Scott, senior vice president of public security, IDEMIA Michael D’Auria, vice president of business development, Second Spectrum Jason Gay, sports columnist, The Wall Street Journal…

What seemed so impossible at the beginning of the pandemic is now real: vaccines are here, in record time. They bring much-needed hope to a holiday season shadowed by death and fear. While authorities work out details for this mass vaccination campaign, though, the public is still waiting for answers to fundamental questions. Who gets…

When resident physicians at Stanford Medical Center—many of whom work on the front lines of the covid-19 pandemic—found out that only seven out of over 1,300 of them had been prioritized for the first 5,000 doses of the covid vaccine, they were shocked. Then, when they saw who else had made the list, including administrators…

A rising wave of covid-19 cases in the south of England has been blamed on a new variant of the coronavirus. The new version, which appeared by September, is now behind half the cases in the region. Genomic researchers have found that not only does the variant have a lot of mutations, but several of the genetic…

In the early 1970s, Steve Gorad ’63 had a successful career as a clinical psychologist. He was in charge of the alcohol unit at Boston State Hospital and had a private practice, but he was restless. “It wasn’t enough,” he says. “I was a long-haired hippie writing [draft exemption] letters for people who didn’t want…

Looking back to the start of the pandemic, I am struck by our community’s formidable strength. In March 2020, we did not know what it would take to sustain MIT’s great mission through this crisis. Since then, we have found a way together, and we have made it work. That accomplishment belongs to every member…

From the choir rehearsal in Washington to family gatherings in Chicago, numerous covid-19 “superspreading” events have seen one person infect many others. MIT researchers who studied about 60 such events found that they have a much larger impact than expected. “Superspreading events are likely more important than most of us had initially realized,” says senior…

In October, astrophysicist Andrea Ghez ’87 became the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics and the 38th in the list of MIT graduates with Nobels to their names. Ghez, a professor at UCLA, and Reinhard Genzel, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, share half the prize for the discovery of a supermassive…

The search for extraterrestrial life has largely focused on Mars, but scientists at MIT, Cardiff University, and elsewhere reported surprising findings in September of what may be signs of life in the clouds of Venus. While Venus is similar to Earth in size, mass, and rocky composition, its surface temperatures reach 900 °F, and its…

How did early humans prepare food before they mastered the use of fire? Research led by Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences professor Roger Summons has raised the intriguing possibility that they took advantage of hot springs for boiling. Studying sediments deposited around 1.7 million years ago near Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where anthropologists have discovered…

October 12, 2020—Today I ate lunch outside in Cambridge with three of my friends, all fellow Course 16 seniors. I’ve eaten countless lunches with them before: burritos in the Unified lounge, grain bowls at every picnic table in Kendall Square, sushi in the Stud, Chinese food in the lobby of the Koch building. This time…

Each year, the flu vaccine has to be redesigned to account for new mutations. Researchers at MIT and the Ragon Institute of MIT, Mass. General, and Harvard are hoping for a better way. The problem is that while the vaccine prompts production of antibodies against the flu virus, those antibodies tend to target a viral…

When covid-19 hit and the country enacted widespread social distancing measures, the nature of the traditional workplace seemed to change overnight. Technology was already changing the way we work. The office our parents were accustomed to had expanded to employees’ homes, shared conference rooms, and the neighborhood coffee shop. Though remote work was on the…

This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay. It has been edited for length and clarity. As told to Krithika Varagur. We get our beans from the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia, and right here in Mexico. Since…

One cool fall night 10 years ago, Jessica Krieger went for a run to clear her head. Krieger, then an undergraduate in neuroscience, had just watched a documentary that showed the gruesome ways many animals are slaughtered for food. “The animals were terrified, in pain, dying,” she recalls. Krieger was already worried about the meat…

As a machine operator for the robotics startup FarmWise, Diego Alcántar spends each day walking behind a hulking robot that resembles a driverless Zamboni, helping it learn to do the work of a 30-person weeding crew. On a Tuesday morning in September, I met Alcántar in a gigantic cauliflower field in the hills outside Santa…

We won’t easily forget how we worried about food in the first days of the pandemic: empty shelves, scarce products, and widespread hoarding became an alarming reality around the world. While being reassured that the disruptions were “temporary,” Americans also heard troubling news about farmers plowing crops back into their fields, dairy farmers pouring milk…

There’s a long-running column in Cook’s Illustrated called “What is it?” where we track down the origins of kitchen gadgets that our readers find in their attics or on dusty antique-store shelves. A recent favorite: the Acme Rotary Mincer, vintage 1935, a handheld device featuring 10 stainless-steel rotary blades, which promised to mince herbs and…

Lab-grown meat, artificial human breast milk, genetically modified pigs, a cauliflower field farmed by robots—if that’s the kind of science-fiction-y stuff you expect to read about in a special issue on technology and food, you won’t be disappointed. (And if you like actual science fiction, take a look at this short story by Anjali Sachdeva.) …

Blockchain Chicken Farm, a new book from Oakland-based writer, designer, and scholar Xiaowei Wang, explores technology in rural China and the surprising ripple effects of the country’s food supply chain on people all around the world. The book connects, for example, an AI-driven pig-farming operation in Guangdong to Silicon Valley surveillance culture, while avoiding the…

This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay. It has been edited for length and clarity. As told to Krithika Varagur. The National Agricultural Statistics Service is used to set nationwide estimates of agricultural commodities. We have 12 regions across the country,…

When he was growing up, Venkatesh Mannar and his siblings treated the family saltworks as their playground: they would slide down mountains of salt drying in the sun the way other children might sled down snow-covered hillsides. The salt operation, in the southern Indian port city of Thoothukudi, had been founded by his grandfather’s grandfather.…

Forty attorneys general representing both Republican- and Democratic-led states and territories have filed a new antitrust lawsuit against Google claiming that the company has “virtually untrammeled power over internet search traffic” as a result of its “overwhelming and durable monopoly in general internet searches.” The move comes one day after another complaint filed by Texas…

The first covid-19 vaccine developed as part of Operation Warp Speed is likely to be authorized for emergency use this week in the US following an all-day meeting of federal medical advisors today, December 17. The shot, called mRNA-1273, was developed by the biotech company Moderna, and the US is relying heavily on it to…

Nine members of the US Congress have sent a letter to Google asking it to clarify the circumstances around its former ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru’s forced departure. Led by Representative Yvette Clarke and Senator Ron Wyden, and co-signed by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, the letter sends an important signal about how Congress…

Cloud computing is at a critical juncture. Millions of companies now use it to store data and run applications and services remotely. This has reduced costs and sped operations. But a new trend threatens the benefits that cloud computing has unlocked. “Digital sovereignty” describes the many ways governments try to assert more control over the…

Nobel Prizes are rarely awarded without controversy. The prestige usually hatches a viperous nest of critics who deride the credentials of the winner, complain about the unmentioned collaborators who’ll be sidelined by history, or point to the more deserving recipients who’ve been unfairly snubbed. So when the Norwegian committee decided to award the 2020 Nobel…

So what happened? Texas and nine other Republican-led states have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company has monopolized digital advertising by means that include anti-competitive agreements with Facebook. Google, the suit alleges, not only connects ad buyers and sellers; it operates the exchange and manipulates the rules and algorithms to favor…

China’s Chang’e 5 mission successfully delivered samples of lunar rock and dust to Earth on December 17. It marks the first time in 44 years that moon rocks have been brought back to our planet, since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976. It’s also the first time China has ever pulled off a…

Over the past year, we’ve seen a rise in robotaxis and autonomous vehicle use. Companies such as Waymo, Cruise, and Baidu have all made strong headway as industry pioneers. In China specifically, 2020 headlines regularly featured major autonomous vehicle announcements, such as the public launch of Baidu Apollo robotaxi services in the cities of Beijing,…

On November 3, Tina Barton ran into a problem. It was Election Day in the US and Barton, a Republican, was city clerk for Rochester Hills, Michigan, a conservative-leaning community near Detroit. As her team was uploading voting results, a technical issue resulted in the double counting of some votes. The error wasn’t initially realized,…

We’re now six weeks past Election Day, and electors in every state followed the will of the voters and confirmed the victory of Joe Biden. But while the Electoral College made the results official, President Donald Trump is continuing to protest them, despite having lost dozens of court cases within the past month. In any…

By now, we’ve all heard some version of the story. On December 2, after a protracted disagreement over the release of a research paper, Google forced out its ethical AI co-lead, Timnit Gebru. The paper was on the risks of large language models, AI models trained on staggering amounts of text data, which are a…

With thousands of developers, publishers, authors, designers, production houses and distributors, Microsoft’s Xbox gaming platform is a complex ecosystem of relationships. Collaboration across this ecosystem is key to producing a high-quality product that attracts the best talent and satisfies consumers—but Microsoft recognized points of friction that needed to be addressed. A multitude of manual processes…

Thousands of companies and governments are racing to discover whether they have been hit by the Russian hackers who reportedly infiltrated several US government agencies. The initial breach, reported on December 13, included the Treasury as well as the Departments of Commerce and Homeland Security. But the stealthy techniques the hackers used mean it could…