MIT Technology Review

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,...

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. A widespread Windows outage is affecting airlines, banks, and TV broadcasters What's happening? Windows PCs have crashed around the world, bringing airlines, major banks, TV broadcasters, healthcare providers and other businesses to a...

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 is poised to automate today's most mundane manual warehouse task Before almost any item reaches your door, it traverses the global supply chain on a pallet. More than 2 billion pallets are...

Before almost any item reaches your door, it traverses the global supply chain on a pallet. More than 2 billion pallets are in circulation in the United States alone, and $400 billion worth of goods are exported on them annually. However, loading boxes onto these pallets is a task stuck in the past: Heavy loads...

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review's newsletter about technology in China.Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. There's been so much news coming out of China's autonomous-vehicle industry lately that it's hard to keep track. The government is finally allowing Tesla to bring its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature to...

In tropical waters, coral reefs shelter marine life and buffer islands from stormy seas-but these natural structures are threatened by the effects of climate change, which is also multiplying the extreme weather events that leave coastal communities vulnerable to flooding and erosion. An MIT team now hopes to fortify coastlines with architected" reefs-sustainable offshore structures...

In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT has confirmed an astonishing discovery: light can cause water to evaporate without involvement from any source of heat. The phenomenon can occur at any surface where air and water meet, whether it's flat like a pond or curved like a droplet of...

Meta is releasing a new transparency product called the Meta Content Library and API, according to an announcement from the company today. The new tools will allow select researchers to access publicly available data on Facebook and Instagram in an effort to give a more overarching view of what's happening on the platforms. The move...

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. Large language models aren't people. Let's stop testing them as if they are. In the past few years, multiple researchers claim to have shown that large language models can pass cognitive tests designed...

Children who attend preschool at age four are significantly more likely to go to college, according to an empirical study led by MIT economist Parag Pathak. To conduct the study, Pathak and his colleagues followed more than 4,000 students who took part from 1997 to 2003 in a lottery the Boston public school system conducted…

MIT took all five top spots in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition for the third year in a row and won the prize for the top woman for the fourth time in as many years. Seventy of the top 100 in the December event were MIT students, including 21 of the top 25. The…

For years, the Indonesian government sent 10-kilo bags of rice to villages, where local leaders were supposed to distribute them to poor residents every month. But starting about five years ago, recipients were instead sent debit cards to buy the food themselves. The result, according to a study led in part by MIT economists, was…

Priscilla King Gray, the wife of former MIT president Paul Gray ’54, SM ’55, ScD ’60, and cofounder of the MIT Public Service Center (since renamed the PKG Center), died February 8 at age 89. In more than 50 years at the Institute, beginning when her husband joined the faculty in 1960, Gray made an…

(This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here.) Advances in artificial intelligence tend to be followed by anxieties around jobs. This latest wave of AI models, like ChatGPT and OpenAI’s new GPT-4, is…

When computer science students and faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research returned to campus in the summer of 2020, there was a lot to adjust to. Beyond the inevitable strangeness of being around colleagues again after months of social distancing, the department was also moving into a brand-new building: the 90,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art…

To say that semiconductor technology is part of the fabric of modern society is not an overstatement—it underpins everything from our cars to our phones to our home appliances. In 2021, the semiconductor industry shipped a record 1.15 trillion chips, and sales topped half a trillion dollars worldwide, while thousands of new chip designs entered…

This article is from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here. What are chemical pollutants doing to our bodies? It’s a question that’s been on my mind this week, for a few reasons. Last week, people in Philadelphia cleared grocery shelves of bottled…

Repairing a human liver using lab-grown cells. Using oral antibiotics to treat cystic fibrosis patients. Producing a single-dose treatment for breast cancer that’s proving highly effective. Predicting cancer with AI. All of this innovation came out of the UK life sciences industry. “It’s really the only industry that can both improve the health of your…

Investors today no longer reward companies for incremental changes in their core business. Embracing digital throughout the business can help traditional companies exponentially increase value and their ability to compete with digital natives, if done correctly. However, an EY-Parthenon report finds that 70% of digital investments don’t capture their intended value and only 16% of…

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 watermark for chatbots can spot text written by an AI What’s happened: A new method could help us to spot AI-generated texts. Watermarking buries hidden patterns in the text that are invisible…

Hidden patterns purposely buried in AI-generated texts could help identify them as such, allowing us to tell whether the words we’re reading are written by a human or not. These “watermarks” are invisible to the human eye but let computers detect that the text probably comes from an AI system. If embedded in large language…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. As a climate reporter, I sometimes hesitate to admit this, but I feel it’s time that I came clean on something … I love flying. It’s not even just about traveling and seeing…

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…