MIT Technology Review

The end could be coming soon for cars as we know them. To limit global warming to 1.5 °C, the 2015 international Paris climate agreement set 2050 as a worldwide deadline to reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. That means gas-powered vehicles will need to be largely off the road by then. And since cars typically have…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The US Postal Service is finally going electric. The USPS announced Tuesday that it plans to acquire at least 66,000 electric delivery vehicles between now and 2028, and all purchases after 2026 will…

We’re going back to the moon—again—in 2023. Multiple uncrewed landings are planned for the next 12 months, spurred on by a renewed effort in the US to return humans to the lunar surface later this decade. Both private space companies and national agencies are set to make the 240,000-mile trek to our celestial neighbor, where…

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. I just watched Biggie Smalls perform ‘live’ in the metaverse For a moment on Friday, Biggie Smalls was the only man on stage. A spotlight shone on him in his red velvet suit,…

This sentence was written by an AI—or was it? OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT, presents us with a problem: How will we know whether what we read online is written by a human or a machine? Since it was released in late November, ChatGPT has been used by over a million people. It has the AI…

For a moment on Friday, Biggie Smalls was the only man on stage. A spotlight shone on him in his red velvet suit, and amid pre-recorded cheers, he rapped the lyrics to “Mo Money Mo Problems,” swiveling to the beat in his orange sneakers. You wouldn’t be wrong to be confused. Smalls died in 1997…

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. Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone? It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around…

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been at the heart of the San Francisco–based firm since cofounding it with Elon Musk and others in 2015. His vision for the future of AI and how to get there has shaped not only what OpenAI does, but also the direction in which AI research is heading in general.…

Artists will have the chance to opt out of the next version of one of the world’s most popular text-to-image AI generators, Stable Diffusion, the company behind it has announced. Stability.AI will work with Spawning, an organization founded by artist couple Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, who have built a website called HaveIBeenTrained that allows…

It was clear that OpenAI was on to something. In late 2021, a small team of researchers was playing around with an idea at the company’s San Francisco office. They’d built a new version of OpenAI’s text-to-image model, DALL-E, an AI that converts short written descriptions into pictures: a fox painted by Van Gogh, perhaps,…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. For the past five years or so, barely a week has gone by without a study, comment, or press release about the potential benefits of psychedelic drugs landing in my inbox. Psychedelics…

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 witnessing the brain death of TwitterThe state of Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover feels like a brain death: the processes that keep it online are somehow still beating, but what Twitter was…

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. What fusion’s breakthrough means for clean energy The news: After decades of trying, scientists have reached a milestone in fusion research, finally running a reaction that created more energy than was put in…

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. MIT Technology Review’s biggest stories of the year As 2022 starts to draw to a close, we thought it was high time to take a look back over the most popular stories we’ve…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Like many other people, I’m pretty sure I don’t get enough sleep. In my case, it’s partly because my four-year-old likes to wake me up for a chat at some point between…

In early 2021, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia announced The Line: a “civilizational revolution” that would house up to 9 million people in a zero-carbon megacity, 170 kilometers long and half a kilometer high but just 200 meters wide. Within its mirrored, car-free walls, residents would be whisked around in underground trains…

Correction: this story has been updated to include Uber’s response. The opening has been amended to remove an anecdote about a specific driver’s experience based on that response. Uber drivers in India say that problems with the facial recognition they use to access their apps is costing them work. In a survey conducted by MIT…

Editor’s note: This is a translation of a story about a Chinese painter based in Italy who became a critical source of information for many in China during recent protests against the country’s zero-covid policy. Find the English language version here. 过去一周，随着针对中国新冠防疫政策的抗议席卷了社交媒体，一个推特账号@李老师不是你老师 变成了各种相关信息来源的“集散地”。中国各地民众纷纷通过私信发来抗议视频和实时消息，而该账号帮投稿人隐去身份，匿名将这些消息发布出来。 这个账户背后只有一个人：李（大家称他为李老师），出于安全考虑，他要求只透露姓氏。他是一位居住在意大利的中国画家，且从未在新闻行业工作过，但这并没有阻止他把自己的推特账号变成了一个单人值守的新闻直播间。 针对新冠清零政策的抗议活动在 11 月的最后一个周末达到了高峰，李老师每秒钟都会收到十几条私信，他也在尽可能在收到投稿的一瞬间分辨、过滤掉不实信息。尽管在过去的一年里，他一直在发布关注者们的匿名私信，但这对他来说，也是一次完全不同的经历。 长期以来，他一直在网上关注并谈论中国的社会问题。2021 年的时候，他开始在微博上收到私信，这些人担心暴露自己的身份，希望通过他将这些信息发布出去。 但是后来，他发布的消息开始被审查和删帖；到今年2月，他的账户被封禁。之后的两个月中，他又有 49 个账户陆续被禁。但他的关注者们大方地让他使用自己的手机号去注册更多的账号（来发布信息）。今年 4 月，他被微博禁止访问，于是辗转到了推特。也正是在推特上，他收到了大量国际账户以及翻墙访问推特的中国用户的关注。 上周，郑州富士康工厂的工人与管理层爆发冲突，李老师开始通过中国社交媒体和他的关注者提供的信息来跟踪事态走向。那一晚，他只休息了 3…

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. A new app aims to help the millions of people living with long covid The news: A new app could help people with long covid cope with their condition by giving them a…

This week, dozens of companies are expected to compete for the right to lease the first commercial wind power sites off the coast of California in a federal online auction that could kick-start the state’s next clean energy boom. Collectively, the winners will pay at least tens of millions of dollars for exclusive rights to…

A new app could help people with long covid cope with their condition by giving them a clearer understanding of what helps—and hinders—their health. People with long covid, defined by the World Health Organization as a post-covid illness lasting two months or more, suffer from symptoms that include headaches, fatigue, weakness, and fever. Some use…

In late September, Bianca Bahman snorkeled above a seagrass meadow off the western coast of Flores, a scorpion-shaped volcanic island in eastern Indonesia. As she flutter-kicked over the green seabed, Bahman steered an underwater camera suspended on a pair of small pontoons. The stereoscopic camera captures high-resolution footage from two slightly different angles, creating a…

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. Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people…

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. Twitter may have lost more than a million users since Elon Musk took over The news: In the days since Elon Musk confirmed his purchase of Twitter on October 27, tweeting “the bird…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. Sending a jolt of electricity through a person’s brain can do remarkable things. You only have to watch the videos of people with Parkinson’s disease who have electrodes implanted in their brains.…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Hello hello and welcome back to The Spark! This edition of the newsletter is coming to you with impeccable fall vibes from Boston. I’m in town for our first annual ClimateTech event, and…

Russian troops have been bringing death and destruction to Ukraine since they invaded on February 24. But there’s a risk they could cause a nuclear accident too, according to Vadim Chumak, head of the external exposure dosimetry lab at Ukraine’s National Research Center for Radiation Medicine in the country’s capital, Kyiv. Russia has taken control…

Today we’ve got a first look at how the White House plans to tackle America’s cybersecurity woes. And we have part 2 of our big investigation into how police in Minnesota monitored protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Inside the plan to fix America’s never-ending cybersecurity failures What’s happening: Some of the US’s…

The 2021 hack of Colonial Pipeline, the biggest fuel pipeline in the United States, ended with thousands of panicked Americans hoarding gas and a fuel shortage across the eastern seaboard. Basic cybersecurity failures let the hackers in, and then the company made the unilateral decision to pay a $5 million ransom and shut down much…

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. The online volunteers hunting for war crimes in Ukraine Read the full version of this story. Like many people, Aeden felt helpless when Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. He was a 23-year-old…

Sercompe Business Technology provides essential cloud services to roughly 60 corporate clients, supporting a total of about 50,000 users. So, it’s crucial that the Joinville, Brazil, company’s underlying IT infrastructure deliver reliable service with predictably high performance. But with a complex IT environment that includes more than 2,000 virtual machines and 1 petabyte—equivalent to a…

A Chinese company is selling its surveillance technology to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, police, and military, according to a new report by IPVM, a surveillance research group. The firm, called Tiandy, is one of the world’s largest video surveillance companies, reporting almost $700 million in sales in 2020. The company sells cameras and accompanying AI-enabled software,…

The internet of things and smart devices are everywhere, which means computing needs to be everywhere, too. And this is where edge computing comes in, because as companies pursue faster, more efficient decision-making, all of that data needs to be processed locally, in real time—on device at the edge. “The type of processing that needs…

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) seems almost unbounded in its ability to derive and drive new sources of customer, product, service, operational, environmental, and societal value. If your organization is to compete in the economy of the future, then AI must be at the core of your business operations. A study by Kearney titled “The Impact…

How we built it. What the Department of Justice changed on its China Initiative webpage. How our database is organized. Our transparency and conflict-of-interest report. Since the US government launched the China Initiative in 2018, the main source of information about it has been press releases on the Department of Justice’s China Initiative webpage announcing…

Wildfires raging across the US West Coast have filled the air with enough carbon dioxide to wipe out more than half of the region’s pandemic-driven emissions reductions last year. And that was just in July. The numbers illustrate a troubling feedback loop. Climate change creates hotter, drier conditions that fuel increasingly frequent and devastating fires—which,…