MIT Technology Review

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...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I've thought more about gallium and germanium over the last week than I ever have before (and probably more than anyone ever should). As you may already know, China banned the export...

One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San Clemente, California, operated by Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones and missiles that recently announced a partnership with OpenAI. I went there to witness a new system it's expanding today, which allows external parties to tap into its...

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 rise of Bluesky, and the splintering of social You may have read that it was a big week for Bluesky. If you're not familiar, Bluesky is, essentially, a Twitter clone that publishes...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. David Baker is sleep-deprived but happy. He's just won the Nobel prize, after all. The call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences woke him in the middle of the night....

A new adhesive technology pays homage to one of nature's strongest sources of suction: an octopus tentacle. Researchers replicated an octopus's strong grip and controlled release to create a tool that manipulates a wide array of objects. It could help improve underwater construction methods or find application in everyday devices like an assistive glove. Each...

This sponsored session was presented by MEDC at MIT Technology Review's 2024 EmTech MIT event. Michigan is at the forefront of the clean energy transition, setting an example in mobility and automotive innovation. Other states and organizations can learn from Michigan's approach to public-private partnerships, actionable climate plans, and business-government alignment. Progressive climate policies are...

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. Google DeepMind wins joint Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein prediction AI Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has won a joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry for using artificial intelligence to predict the structures...

In a second Nobel win for AI, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded half the 2024 prize in chemistry to Demis Hassabis, the cofounder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and John M. Jumper, a director at the same company, for their work on using artificial intelligence to predict the structures of proteins. The...

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. AI-generated images can teach robots how to act Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they've recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It's finally here! We've just unveiled our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. This annual project is one the climate team at MIT Technology Review pours a lot of...

Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they've recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias to preserving precious memories. Now, researchers from Stephen James's Robot Learning Lab in London are using image-generating AI models for a new purpose: creating training data for robots. They've developed...

NASA is poised to launch Europa Clipper, a $5.2 billion mission to Jupiter's fourth-largest moon, as early as October 10. The spacecraft will blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It will study Europa, a possible home for extraterrestrial life, through a series of flybys after reaching Jupiter...

Sun King is helping poor households across Asia and Africa access reliable, clean power and healthier ways of cooking. Accessing clean sources of energy has always been a challenge for low-income communities worldwide, given the high up-front costs. At least hundreds of millions of people around the world have unreliable or no access to the...

Ceibo seeks to eliminate a major potential speed bump for the clean-energy transition: the looming global copper shortage. The firm's low-impact extraction technology targets ores that aren't economical to mine today but could help meet the copper demands of an electrified world. Copper wires form the backbone of the clean-energy economy, connecting cars, buildings, and...

Rondo Energy is supplying cheap, zero-emissions heat to factories to replace fossil-fuel-powered boilers, furnaces, and kilns. Its approach of using bricks and iron wire to provide a steady supply of hot air or steam stands out for its simplicity and potential to scale. Finding a clean way to produce the large amounts of heat required...

It may not yet be a household name, but BYD is gaining recognition outside China for its affordable and accessible EVs. Despite regulatory scrutiny in the West, it's determined to lower the boundaries to manufacturing and transporting its vehicles across the globe. Five years ago, BYD was just another Chinese carmaker in a crowded field....

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 it's not broken, don't fix it. That's the approach bad state actors seem to have taken when it comes to how they mess with elections around the world. When the...

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. Some countries are ending support for EVs. Is it too soon? Sales of new electric vehicles in Germany have plummeted, dropping nearly 37% in July 2024 from the same month one year ago....

The power of pornography doesn't lie in arousal but in questions. What is obscene? What is ethical or safe to watch? We don't have to consume or even support it, but porn will still demand answers. The question now is: What is real" porn? Anti-porn crusades have been at the heart of the US culture...

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. When I get home in the evening on a sweltering summer day, the first thing I do is beeline to my window air-conditioning units and crank them up. People across the city,...

As temperatures climb on hot days, many of us are quick to crank up our fans or air conditioners. These cooling systems can be a major stress on electrical grids, which has inspired some inventors to create versions that can store energy as well as use it. Cooling represents 20% of global electricity demand in...

Giddy predictions about AI, from its contributions to economic growth to the onset of mass automation, are now as frequent as the release of powerful new generative AI models. The consultancy PwC, for example, predicts that AI could boost global gross domestic product (GDP) 14% by 2030, generating US $15.7 trillion. Forty percent of our...

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, I've been working on a piece about an AI-based tool that could help guide end-of-life care. We're talking about the kinds of life-and-death decisions that come...

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. Google DeepMind's new AI systems can now solve complex math problems AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, they're nowhere near as good at solving math problems, which...

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 here. Windows PCs have crashed in a major IT outage around the world, bringing airlines, major banks, TV broadcasters, health-care providers, and other businesses to a standstill. Airlines including United,...