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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 Hydrogen trains could revolutionize how Americans get around Like a mirage speeding across the dusty desert outside Pueblo, Colorado, the first hydrogen-fuel-cell passenger train in the United States is getting warmed up on…

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 votes have been tallied, and the results are in. The winner of the 11th Breakthrough Technology, 2024 edition, is … drumroll please … thermal batteries!  While the editors of MIT Technology…

Like a mirage speeding across the dusty desert outside Pueblo, Colorado, the first hydrogen-fuel-cell passenger train in the United States is getting warmed up on its test track. Made by the Swiss manufacturer Stadler and known as the FLIRT (for “Fast Light Intercity and Regional Train”), it will soon be shipped to Southern California, where…

We’ve all seen videos over the past few years demonstrating how agile humanoid robots have become, running and jumping with ease. We’re no longer surprised by this kind of agility—in fact, we’ve grown to expect it. The problem is, these shiny demos lack real-world applications. When it comes to creating robots that are useful and…

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 great commercial takeover of low-Earth orbit NASA designed the International Space Station to fly for 20 years. It has lasted six years longer than that, though it is showing its age, and…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. I don’t know about you, but I only learned last week that there’s something connecting MSG and computer chips. Inside most laptop and data center chips today, there’s a tiny component called…

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 was supposed to make police bodycams better. What happened? When police departments first started buying and deploying bodycams in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The holy grail of robotics since the field’s beginning has been to build a robot that can do our housework. But for a long time, that has just been a dream.…

On July 25 last year, in circuit court in Dane County, Wisconsin, a motion was filed to dismiss a criminal case as a result of what defense attorneys described as “institutional bad-faith actions” by a local police department. The evidence was unearthed, in part, because of artificial intelligence.  Attorney Jessa Nicholson Goetz had been preparing…

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 to stop a state from sinking In a 10-month span between 2020 and 2021, southwest Louisiana saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, more storms…

We need heat to make everything from steel bars to ketchup packets. Today, a whopping 20% of global energy demand goes to producing heat used in industry, and most of that heat is generated by burning fossil fuels. In an effort to clean up industry, a growing number of companies are working to supply that…

There is more than one way to raise a house.  Many of the mobile homes, Creole cottages, and other dwellings that have been flagged for flood risk along Louisiana’s low-lying coastline can be separated from their foundations and slowly raised into the sky on hydraulic jacks. While a home is held aloft by temporary support…

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, weird history of brainwashing On a spring day in 1959, war correspondent Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.”…

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.  CAR-T therapies, created by engineering a patient’s own cells to fight cancer, are typically reserved for people who have exhausted other treatment options. But last week, the FDA…

On an early spring day in 1959, Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating “the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.” It was the kind of opportunity he relished. A war correspondent who had spent considerable time in Asia, Hunter had achieved brief media stardom in 1951 after his book…

It can be dizzying to try to understand all the complex components of a single computer chip: layers of microscopic components linked to one another through highways of copper wires, some barely wider than a few strands of DNA. Nestled between those wires is an insulating material called a dielectric, ensuring that the wires don’t…

Traditionally, moving up in an organization has meant leading increasingly large teams of people, with all the business and operational duties that entails. As a leader of large teams, your contributions can become less about your own work and more about your team’s output and impact. There’s another path, though. The rapidly evolving fields 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. Is robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment? Henry and Jane Evans are used to awkward houseguests. For more than a decade, the couple, who live in Los Altos Hills, California, 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. Usually when we talk about climate change, the focus is squarely on the role that greenhouse-gas emissions play in driving up global temperatures, and rightly so. But another important, less-known phenomenon is…

Silent. Rigid. Clumsy. Henry and Jane Evans are used to awkward houseguests. For more than a decade, the couple, who live in Los Altos Hills, California, have hosted a slew of robots in their home.  In 2002, at age 40, Henry had a massive stroke, which left him with quadriplegia and an inability to speak.…

Data modernization is squarely on the corporate agenda. In our survey of 350 senior data and technology executives, just over half say their organization has either undertaken a modernization project in the past two years or is implementing one today. An additional one-quarter plan to do so in the next two years. Other studies also…

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 can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed As a six-year-old growing up in Barcelona, Spain, during the 1940s, Maria would visit a neighbor’s apartment in her building…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. If you’re a longtime subscriber to this newsletter, you know that I talk about China’s tech policies all the time. To me, it’s always a challenge to understand and explain the government’s…

Maria grew up in Barcelona, Spain, in the 1940s. Her first memories of her father are vivid. As a six-year-old, Maria would visit a neighbor’s apartment in her building when she wanted to see him. From there, she could peer through the railings of a balcony into the prison below and try to catch a…

The views expressed in this video are those of the speakers, and do not represent any endorsement or sponsorship. Is the open-source approach, which has democratized access to software, ensured transparency, and improved security for decades, now poised to have a similar impact on AI? We dissect the balance between collaboration and control, legal ramifications,…

Few technological advances have generated as much excitement as AI. In particular, generative AI seems to have taken business discourse to a fever pitch. Many manufacturing leaders express optimism: Research conducted by MIT Technology Review Insights found ambitions for AI development to be stronger in manufacturing than in most other sectors. Manufacturers rightly view 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. Why the Chinese government is sparing AI from harsh regulations—for now The way China regulates its tech industry can seem highly unpredictable. The government can celebrate the achievements of Chinese tech companies one…

The way China regulates its tech industry can seem highly unpredictable. The government can celebrate the achievements of Chinese tech companies one day and then turn against them the next. But there are patterns in how China approaches regulating tech, argues Angela Huyue Zhang, a law professor at Hong Kong University and author of the…

Forget Skynet: One of the biggest risks of AI is your organization’s reputation. That means it’s time to put science-fiction catastrophizing to one side and begin thinking seriously about what AI actually means for us in our day-to-day work. This isn’t to advocate for navel-gazing at the expense of the bigger picture: It’s to urge…

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 conversation with Dragoș Tudorache, the politician behind the AI Act Dragoș Tudorache is one of the most important players in European AI policy. He is one of the two lead negotiators of…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Dragoș Tudorache is feeling pretty damn good. We’re sitting in a conference room in a chateau overlooking a lake outside Brussels, sipping glasses of cava. The Romanian liberal member of the…

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 to safely watch and photograph the total solar eclipse On April 8, the moon will pass directly between Earth and the sun, creating a total solar eclipse across much of the United…

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.  A dairy worker in Texas tested positive for avian influenza this week. This new human case of bird flu—the second ever reported in the United…

On April 8, the moon will pass directly between Earth and the sun, creating a total solar eclipse across much of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.  Although total solar eclipses occur somewhere in the world every 18 months or so, this one is unusual because tens of millions of people in North America will…

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 hard lessons of Harvard’s failed geoengineering experiment In March 2017, at a small summit in Washington, DC, two Harvard professors, David Keith and Frank Keutsch, laid out plans to conduct what would…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Aging can be scary. As you get older, you might not be able to do everything you used to, and it can be hard to keep up with the changing times. Just…

In late March of 2017, at a small summit in Washington, DC, two Harvard professors, David Keith and Frank Keutsch, laid out plans to conduct what would have been the first solar geoengineering experiment in the stratosphere. Instead, it became the focal point of a fierce public debate over whether it’s okay to research such…

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 race to fix space-weather forecasting before next big solar storm hits As the number of satellites in space grows, and as we rely on them for increasing numbers of vital tasks on…

A shut-down nuclear power plant in Michigan could get a second life thanks to a $1.52 billion loan from the US Department of Energy. If successful, it will be the first time a shuttered nuclear power plant reopens in the US.   Palisades Power Plant shut down on May 20, 2022, after 50 years of generating…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Like most reporters, I have accounts on every social media platform you can think of. But for the longest time, I was not on Threads, the rival to X (formerly Twitter) released…

Tzu-Wei Fang will always remember February 3, 2022. It was a Thursday just after Groundhog Day, and Fang, a physicist born in Taiwan, was analyzing satellite images of a cloud of charged particles that had erupted from the sun. The incoming cloud was a coronal mass ejection, or CME—essentially a massive burst of magnetized plasma…

In the bygone era of contact centers, the customer experience was tethered to a singular channel—the phone call. The journey began with a pre-recorded message prompting the customer to press a number corresponding to their query. Today’s contact centers have evolved from the confines of just traditional phone calls to multiple channels from emails 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 ASML took over the chipmaking chessboard On a drab Monday February morning in California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference gathered to…

For most people around the world, Meta’s text-based social network Threads is a platform that they haven’t thought of for months. But for Liu, a design professional in Taipei, it’s where she’s receiving unprecedented attention.  “My casual posts often receive a large number of reposts now. It used to only happen every few months on…

Today, interactions matter more than ever. According to data compiled by NICE, once a consumer makes a buying decision for a product or service, 80% of their decision to keep doing business with that brand hinges on the quality of their customer service experience, according to NICE research. Enter AI. “I think AI is becoming…

On a drab Monday morning in San Jose, California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference filed into the main ballroom until all the seats were taken and the crowd began to line the walls along the back and sides of the room. The convention brings…

Alex Reben’s work is often absurd, sometimes surreal: a mash-up of giant ears imagined by DALL-E and sculpted by hand out of marble; critical burns generated by ChatGPT that thumb the nose at all AI art. But its message is relevant to everyone. Reben is interested in the roles humans play in a world filled…

Watermarks for AI-generated text are easy to remove and can be stolen and copied, rendering them useless, researchers have found. They say these kinds of attacks discredit watermarks and can fool people into trusting text they shouldn’t.  Watermarking works by inserting hidden patterns in AI-generated text, which allow computers to detect that the text comes…

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. Justin Graves was managing a scuba dive shop in Louisville, Kentucky, when he first had a seizure. He was talking to someone and suddenly the…