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Celebrate 125 years of MIT Technology Review! This is a special year for MIT Technology Review, and we could not have reached this milestone without the support of our readers. With the release of our 125th anniversary issue, we are extending our gratitude of your loyalty by offering subscribers a chance to win a complimentary…

Roblox plans to roll out a generative AI tool that will let creators make whole 3D scenes just using text prompts, it announced today.  Once it’s up and running, developers on the hugely popular online game platform will be able to simply write “Generate a race track in the desert,” for example, and the AI…

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. How plants could mine metals from the soil Nickel may not grow on trees—but there’s a chance it could someday be mined using plants. Many plants naturally soak up metal and concentrate it…

Nickel may not grow on trees—but there’s a chance it could someday be mined using plants. Many plant species naturally soak up metal and concentrate it in their tissues, and new funding will support research on how to use that trait for plant-based mining, or phytomining.  Seven phytomining projects just received $9.9 million in funding…

The Human Genome Project, SpaceX’s rocket technology, and Tesla’s Autopilot system may seem worlds apart in form and function, but they all share a common characteristic: the use of open-source software (OSS) to drive innovation. Offering publicly accessible code that can be viewed, modified, and distributed freely, OSS expedites developer productivity and creates a collaborative…

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 brief guide to the greenhouse gases driving climate change Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is used in high-voltage equipment on the grid. It’s also, somewhat inconveniently, a monster greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases are those…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. For the last week or so, I’ve been obsessed with a gas that I’d never given much thought to before. Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is used in high-voltage equipment on the grid. It’s…

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 UK is building an alarm system for climate tipping points The news: The UK’s new moonshot research agency just launched an £81 million ($106 million) program to develop early warning systems to…

The UK’s new moonshot research agency just launched an £81 million ($106 million) program to develop early warning systems to sound the alarm if Earth gets perilously close to crossing climate tipping points. A climate tipping point is a threshold beyond which certain ecosystems or planetary processes begin to shift from one stable state to…

To tackle complex global problems such as preventing disease and mitigating climate change, we’re going to need new ideas from our brightest minds. Every year, MIT Technology Review identifies a new class of Innovators Under 35 taking on these and other challenges.  On September 10, we will honor the 2024 class of Innovators Under 35.…

The Olympic Games in Paris just finished last month and the Paralympics are still underway, so the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles feel like a lifetime from now. But the prospect of watching the games in his home city has Josh Kahn, a filmmaker in the sports entertainment world who has worked in content…

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. AI’s impact on elections is being overblown —Felix M. Simon is a research fellow in AI and News at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism; Keegan McBride is an assistant professor…

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. This back-to-school season marks the third year in which AI models like ChatGPT will be used by thousands of students around the globe (among them my nephews, who tell me with glee each time they…

This year, close to half the world’s population has the opportunity to participate in an election. And according to a steady stream of pundits, institutions, academics, and news organizations, there’s a major new threat to the integrity of those elections: artificial intelligence.  The earliest predictions warned that a new AI-powered world was, apparently, propelling us…

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. How “personhood credentials” could help prove you’re a human online As AI models become better at mimicking human behavior, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between real human internet users and sophisticated systems…

As AI models become better at mimicking human behavior, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between real human internet users and sophisticated systems imitating them.  That’s a real problem when those systems are deployed for nefarious ends like spreading misinformation or conducting fraud, and it makes it a lot harder to trust what you encounter…

The power grid is underpinned by a single gas that is used to insulate a range of high-voltage equipment. The problem is, it’s also a super powerful greenhouse gas, a nightmare for climate change. Sulfur hexafluoride (or SF6) is far from the most common gas that warms the planet, contributing around 1% of warming to…

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. How machine learning is helping us probe the secret names of animals The news: Do animals have names? It seems so, after new research appears to have discovered that small monkeys called marmosets…

A tweak to the way artificial neurons work in neural networks could make AIs easier to decipher. Artificial neurons—the fundamental building blocks of deep neural networks—have survived almost unchanged for decades. While these networks give modern artificial intelligence its power, they are also inscrutable.  Existing artificial neurons, used in large language models like GPT4, work…

Do animals have names? According to the poet T.S. Eliot, cats have three: the name their owner calls them (like George); a second, more noble one (like Quaxo or Cricopat); and, finally, a “deep and inscrutable” name known only to themselves “that no human research can discover.” But now, researchers armed with audio recorders and…

Your breath can give away a lot about you. Each exhalation contains all sorts of compounds, including possible biomarkers for disease or lung conditions, that could give doctors a valuable insight into your health. Now a new smart mask, developed by a team at the California Institute of Technology, could help doctors check your breath…

When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most prosthetics are static, cumbersome, and hard to move. Now a new neural interface developed by MIT researchers and colleagues connects a bionic lower limb to nerve endings in the thigh, allowing it to be controlled by the…

Cloud has become a given for most organizations: according to PwC’s 2023 cloud business survey, 78% of companies have adopted cloud in most or all parts of the business. These companies have migrated on-premises systems to the cloud seeking faster time to market, greater scalability, cost savings, and improved collaboration. Yet while cloud adoption is…

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. Kamala Harris should stand with tech workers, not their bosses —Stephen McMurtry is a Google Software Engineer and Communications Chair of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Tangled up in the contest to be the…

Tangled up in the contest to be the next US president, there is another battle brewing: Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Valley. In Donald Trump’s corner are venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, along with executives like Elon Musk. In the other are execs like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and SV Angel investing mogul…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Last year’s Canadian wildfires smashed records, burning about seven times more land in Canada’s forests than the annual average over the previous four decades. Eight firefighters were killed and 180,000 people displaced. …

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. Introducing: the 125th Anniversary issue With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines.…

The magazine you now hold in your hands is 125 years old. Not this actual issue, of course, but the publication itself, which launched in 1899. Few other titles can claim this kind of heritage—the Atlantic, Harper’s, Audubon (which is also turning 125 this year), National Geographic, and Popular Science among them. MIT Technology Review…

The year is 2149 and people mostly live their lives “on rails.” That’s what they call it, “on rails,” which is to live according to the meticulous instructions of software. Software knows most things about you—what causes you anxiety, what raises your endorphin levels, everything you’ve ever searched for, everywhere you’ve been. Software sends messages…

Last year, as the harvest season drew closer, Olabokunde Tope came across an unpleasant surprise.  While certain spots on his 70-hectare cassava farm in Ibadan, Nigeria, were thriving, a sizable parcel was pale and parched—the result of an early and unexpected halt in the rains. The cassava stems, starved of water, had withered to straw. …

“If a machine is to interact intelligently with people, it has to be endowed with an understanding of human life.”  —Dreyfus and Dreyfus Bold technology predictions pave the road to humility. Even titans like Albert Einstein own a billboard or two along that humbling freeway. In a classic example, John von Neumann, who pioneered modern…

Much of the western United States relies on winter snowpack to supply its rivers and reservoirs through the summer months. But with warming temperatures, less and less snow is falling—a recent study showed a 23% decline in annual snowpack since 1955. By some estimates, runoff from snowmelt in the western US could decrease by a…

DJ Tan, cofounder of the Singaporean startup Prefer Coffee, pops open a bottle of oat latte and pours some into my cup. The chilled drink feels wonderfully refreshing in Singapore’s heat—and it tastes just like coffee. And that’s impressive, because there isn’t a single ounce of coffee in it.  It turns out that our beloved…

In 1983, while on a field recording assignment in Kenya, the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause noticed something remarkable. Lying in his tent late one night, listening to the calls of hyenas, tree frogs, elephants, and insects in the surrounding old-growth forest, Krause heard what seemed to be a kind of collective orchestra. Rather…

If you took a walk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco’s epicenter of AI froth, and asked the first dude-bro you saw wearing a puffer vest about the future of the interface, he’d probably say something about the movie Her, about chatty virtual assistants that will help you do everything from organize your email to book…

While AI is accelerating cloud adoption, organizations’ reasons for migrating their systems and applications to the cloud remain relatively consistent: a desire to lower capital expenditures, increase agility in a fast-paced business environment, and improve availability of business-critical resources. Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report underscores organizations’ consistent desire to make the most 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. Maybe you will be able to live past 122 How long can humans live? This is a good time to ask the question. The longevity scene is having a moment, thanks to a…

Around 2012, at a bakery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Skylar Tibbits noticed someone wearing a shirt with the logo of a 3D-printing company. Tibbits, a designer and computer scientist, approached her and posed a question: “Why can’t I print something that walks off the machine?” The idea kicked off a multiyear collaboration between the industrial 3D-printing…

By the end of this decade, AI will likely surpass humans at all cognitive tasks, igniting the scientific revolution that futurists have long imagined. Digital scientists will have perfect memory of every research paper ever published and think a million times faster than we can. Our plodding progress in fields like robotics, nanotechnology, and genomics…

Prominent AI researchers expect the arrival of artificial general intelligence anywhere between “the next couple of years” and “possibly never.” At the same time, leading economists disagree about the potential impact of AI: Some anticipate a future of perpetually accelerating productivity, while others project more modest gains. But most experts agree that technological advancement, however…

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. We are living in “humanoid summer” right now, if you didn’t know. Or at least it feels that way to Ken Goldberg, a roboticist extraordinaire who leads research in the field at the University of…

Rapid advancements in AI technology offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance business operations, customer and employee engagement, and decision-making. Executives are eager to see the potential of AI realized. Among 100 c-suite respondents polled in WNS Analytics’ “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI” report, 76% say they are already implementing or planning to implement generative…

Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually…

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…

The UK’s Office of National Statistics has an online life expectancy calculator. Enter your age and sex, and the website will, using national averages, spit out the age at which you can expect to pop your clogs. For me, that figure is coming out at 88 years old. That’s not too bad, I figure, given…

The other day I idly opened TikTok to find a video of a young woman refinishing an old hollow-bodied electric guitar. It was a montage of close-up shots—looking over her shoulder as she sanded and scraped the wood, peeled away the frets, expertly patched the cracks with filler, and then spray-painted it a radiant purple.…

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. Andrew Ng’s new model lets you play around with solar geoengineering to see what would happen AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the…

As a lifelong disabled person who constantly copes with multiple conditions, I have a natural tendency to view emerging technologies with skepticism. Most new things are built for the majority of people—in this case, people without disabilities—and the truth of the matter is there’s no guarantee I’ll have access to them. There are certainly exceptions…

AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the dials of a solar geoengineering model, exploring what might happen if nations attempt to counteract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere. The concept of solar geoengineering was born from the realization that the planet has…

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. This week, we’re acknowledging a special birthday. It’s 100 years since EEG (electroencephalography) was first used to measure electrical activity in a person’s brain. The finding was revolutionary.…