MIT Technology Review

The common cold comes for us all-often more than once a year. And there is no way to prevent it. The best you can do is take vitamin C and stay away from people with the sniffles. Now the payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new...

AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technology's potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the relevant information is blocked or unstructured, which limits its use by AI models. To understand this challenge, consider the foundation of the web itself. The web was not designed...

As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan. Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico-based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean's surface, in a wispy-thin...

Brian Sietsema has a favorite word. It's somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He's the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they're given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee-arguably the world's most prestigious competition of its kind. The story of how the word...

The national conversation about the value of education is currently dominated by speculation about the risks and positive potential of AI. Whatever your own perspective on that debate, I hope you'll be glad to know that MIT is also working on a deeply important but comparatively old-fashioned challenge: American high school students' startlingly uneven access...

Right now, MIT alumni and friends are voicing their support for: America's scientific and technological leadership Merit-based admissions and affordable education Advances that increase US health, security, and prosperity Our community is standing up for MIT and its mission to serve the nation and the world. And we need you to join us at this...

With an adaptable fastener designed at CSAIL, pitching a tent or adjusting the cast for a broken bone could be almost as easy as zipping your coat. The researchers, led by associate professor Stefanie Mueller, were inspired by an abandoned prototype for a three-sided zipper that William Freeman, PhD '92 (now an MIT professor), patented...

Our hands are the nimblest parts of our bodies, coordinating 34 muscles, 27 joints, and over 100 tendons and ligaments to perform countless nuanced movements and gestures. So far, robots have been notoriously bad at mimicking that dexterity, in part because researchers struggle to capture what is actually going on under our skin in order...

A technology developed by Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM '93, PhD '97, and colleagues could offer new hope to the thousands of Americans with chronic liver disease who are waiting for an organ transplant or not strong enough to tolerate one. The liver is involved in regulating blood clotting, removing bacteria from the bloodstream, metabolizing drugs,...

The Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade. The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing...

Every few centuries, changes in how information moves reshape how societies govern themselves. The printing press spread vernacular literacy, helping give rise to the Reformation and, eventually, representative government. The telegraph made it possible to administer vast nations like the US, accelerating the growth of the modern bureaucratic state. Broadcast media created shared national audiences,...

The AI market is full of big promises of grand transformation. Health care is a prime target for those promises, beset as it is by financial pressures, labor shortages, and the growing burden of caring for an aging population. AI developers are targeting functions that vary widely, from curing cancer and performing surgery to streamlining...

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. We're in a new era of AI-driven scams When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, it showed how easily generative AI could create human-like text. This quickly caught the eye of...

Pull over!" I order my brother one sunny February afternoon. Our target is in sight: a gaggle of Canada geese, pecking at grass near the dog park. As I approach, tiptoeing over their grayish-white poop, I notice that one bird wears a white cuff around its slender black neck. It's a GPS tracker-part of a...

The AI boom has hit across industries, and public sector organizations are facing pressure to accelerate adoption. At the same time, government institutions face distinct constraints around security, governance, and operations that set them apart from their business counterparts. For this reason, purpose-built small language models (SLMs) offer a promising path to operationalize AI in...

AI-enabled deception now permeates our online lives. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot, like when White House officials recently shared a manipulated image of a protester in Minnesota and then mocked those asking about it. Other times, it slips quietly into social media feeds and racks up views, like the videos that...

Electric vehicles could be economically competitive in Africa sooner than expected. Just 1% of new cars sold across the continent in 2025 were electric, but a new analysis finds that with solar off-grid charging, EVs could be cheaper to own than gas vehicles by 2040. There are major barriers to higher EV uptake in many...

For years, our newsroom has explored AI's limitations and potential dangers, as well as its growing energy needs. And our reporters have looked closely at how generative tools are being used for tasks such as coding and running scientific experiments. But how is AI actually being used in fields like health care, climate tech, education,...

For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website's tagline puts it: Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe." We observed! Launched on January 28 by Matt Schlicht,...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. An experimental surgery is helping cancer survivors give birth An experimental surgical procedure that's helping people have babies after they've had treatment for bowel or rectal cancer. Radiation and chemo can have pretty...

This week I want to tell you about an experimental surgical procedure that's helping people have babies. Specifically, it's helping people who have had treatment for bowel or rectal cancer. Radiation and chemo can have pretty damaging side effects that mess up the uterus and ovaries. Surgeons are pioneering a potential solution: simply stitch those...

Have you ever felt velvetmist"? It's a complex and subtle emotion that elicits feelings of comfort, serenity, and a gentle sense of floating." It's peaceful, but more ephemeral and intangible than contentment. It might be evoked by the sight of a sunset or a moody, low-key album. If you haven't ever felt this sensation-or...

It's getting harder to beat the heat. During the summer of 2025, heat waves knocked out power grids in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Global warming means more people need air-conditioning, which requires more power and strains grids. But a millennia-old idea (plus 21st-century tech) might offer an answer: radiative cooling. Paints, coatings,...

In August 2025, Wang Lei decided it was finally time to say goodbye to his electric vehicle. Wang, who is 39, had bought the car in 2016, when EVs still felt experimental in Beijing. It was a compact Chinese brand. The subsidies were good, and the salesman talked about supporting domestic innovation." At the time,...

In just a couple of weeks, we'll be bidding farewell to 2025. And what a year it has been! Artificial intelligence is being incorporated into more aspects of our lives, weight-loss drugs have expanded in scope, and there have been some real omg" biotech stories from the fields of gene therapy, IVF, neurotech, and more....

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what's coming next. You can read more from the series here. In July, a widely cited MIT study claimed that 95% of organizations that invested in generative AI were getting zero return." Tech stocks briefly plunged. While...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The State of AI: Welcome to the economic singularity -David Rotman and Richard Waters Any far-reaching new technology is always uneven in its adoption, but few have been more uneven than generative AI....

Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday for the next two weeks, writers from both publications will debate one aspect of the generative AI revolution reshaping global power. This week, Richard Waters, FT columnist and former West Coast editor, talks with MIT...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. An AI model trained on prison phone calls now looks for planned crimes in those calls A US telecom company trained an AI model on years of inmates' phone and video calls and...

We have some exciting news: Nominations are now open for MIT Technology Review's 2026 Innovators Under 35 competition. This annual list recognizes 35 of the world's best young scientists and inventors, and our newsroom has produced it for more than two decades. It's free to nominate yourself or someone you know, and it only takes...

A US telecom company trained an AI model on years of inmates' phone and video calls and is now piloting that model to scan their calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes. Securus Technologies president Kevin Elder told MIT Technology Review that the company began building its AI tools in...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. What we still don't know about weight-loss drugs Weight-loss drugs have been back in the news this week. First, we heard that Eli Lilly, the company behind Mounjaro and Zepbound, became the first...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. This year's UN climate talks avoided fossil fuels, again Over the past few weeks in Belem, Brazil, attendees of this year's UN climate talks dealt with oppressive heat and flooding, and at one...

If we didn't have pictures and videos, I almost wouldn't believe the imagery that came out of this year's UN climate talks. Over the past few weeks in Belem, Brazil, attendees dealt with oppressive heat and flooding, and at one point a literal fire broke out, delaying negotiations. The symbolism was almost too much to...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. What's next for AlphaFold: A conversation with a Google DeepMind Nobel laureate In 2017, fresh off a PhD on theoretical chemistry, John Jumper heard rumors that Google DeepMind had moved on from game-playing...

Used in aviation, book and claim offers companies the ability to financially support the use of SAF even when it is not physically available at their locations. As companies that ship goods by air or provide air freight related services address a range of climate goals aiming to reduce emissions, the importance of sustainable aviation...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess An emerging field of science is seeking to use cell analysis to predict what kind of a person an embryo might...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral Wikipedia is the most ambitious multilingual project after the Bible: There are editions in over 340 languages, and a further 400...

This week, Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced it has another customer for its first commercial fusion power plant, in Virginia. Eni, one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, signed a billion-dollar deal to buy electricity from the facility. One small detail? That reactor doesn't exist yet. Neither does the smaller reactor Commonwealth is building...

At roughly midday on Monday, April 28, the lights went out in Spain. The grid blackout, which extended into parts of Portugal and France, affected tens of millions of people-flights were grounded, cell networks went down, and businesses closed for the day. Over a week later, officials still aren't entirely sure what happened, but some...

It's not easy being one of Silicon Valley's favorite benchmarks. SWE-Bench (pronounced swee bench") launched in November 2024 to evaluate an AI model's coding skill, using more than 2,000 real-world programming problems pulled from the public GitHub repositories of 12 different Python-based projects. In the months since then, it's quickly become one of the most...

In 2021, the Maryland Department of Health and the state police were confronting a crisis: Fatal drug overdoses in the state were at an all-time high, and authorities didn't know why. There was a general sense that it had something to do with changes in the supply of illicit drugs-and specifically of the synthetic opioid...

Nuclear reactors could someday power a chemical plant in Texas, making it the first with such a facility onsite. The factory, which makes plastics and other materials, could become a model for power-hungry data centers and other industrial operations going forward. The plans are the work of Dow Chemical and X-energy, which last week applied...

The Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads. The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotruck, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin's performance...

This is today's edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Welcome to robot city The city of Odense, in Denmark, is best known as the site where King Canute, Denmark's last Viking king, was murdered during the 11th century. Today, Odense it's also...

Studies have indicated that psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin and MDMA, have swift-acting and enduring antidepressant effects. Though the US Food and Drug Administration denied the first application for medical treatments involving psychedelics (an MDMA-based therapy) last August, these drugs appear to be on the road to mainstream medicine. Research into psilocybin led by the...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,sign up here. While DOGE's efforts to shutter federal agencies dominate news from Washington, the Trump administration is also making more global moves. Many of these center on China. Tariffs on goods from the country...

Lisa Holligan already had two children when she decided to try for another baby. Her first two pregnancies had come easily. But for some unknown reason, the third didn't. Holligan and her husband experienced miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage. Like many other people struggling to conceive, Holligan turned to in vitro fertilization, or IVF. The...

This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Review'sweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here. This week marks a strange anniversary-it's five years since most of us first heard about a virus causing a mysterious pneumonia." A virus that we later learned could...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. If you drove by one of the 2,990 data centers in the United States, you'd probably think little more than Huh, that's a boring-looking building." You might not even notice it...