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Fall 2021: the season of pumpkins, pecan pies, and peachy new phones. Every year, right on cue, Apple, Samsung, Google, and others drop their latest releases. These fixtures in the consumer tech calendar no longer inspire the surprise and wonder of those heady early days. But behind all the marketing glitz, there’s something remarkable going…

Around the world, citizens, governments, and corporations are mobilizing to reduce carbon emissions. The unprecedented and ongoing climate disasters have put the necessity to decarbonize into sharp relief. In 2021 alone these climate emergencies included a blistering “heat dome” of nearly 50 °C in the normally temperate Pacific Northwest of the United States and Canada,…

The world has changed dramatically in a short amount of time—changing the world of work along with it. The new hybrid remote and in-office work world has ramifications for tech—specifically cybersecurity—and signals that it’s time to acknowledge just how intertwined humans and technology truly are. Enabling a fast-paced, cloud-powered collaboration culture is critical to rapidly…

The news: Surgeons have successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a human patient and watched it start to work, the AP reported today. The pig had been genetically engineered so that its organ was less likely to be rejected. The feat is a potentially huge milestone in the quest to one day use animal organs…

The potential impact of the ongoing worldwide data explosion continues to excite the imagination. A 2018 report estimated that every second of every day, every person produces 1.7 MB of data on average—and annual data creation has more than doubled since then and is projected to more than double again by 2025. A report from…

An endless variety of virtual creatures scamper and scuttle across the screen, struggling over obstacles or dragging balls toward a target. They look like half-formed crabs made of sausages—or perhaps Thing, the disembodied hand from The Addams Family. But these “unimals” (short for “universal animals”) could in fact help researchers develop more general-purpose intelligence in…

Christine McMonigal is director of hyperconverged marketing at Intel Corporation. Never before has the need for businesses to make progress along their digital journeys been more pressing—with more options to evaluate, urgencies to respond to, and complexities to understand in a complex landscape. Shifting demands, fueled in part by the covid-19 pandemic, have driven the…

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, named for an early human ancestor whose skeleton provided insights into our species’ muddled origins, has begun the first leg of its 12-year journey. Lifting off from Cape Canaveral early Saturday morning on an Atlas V rocket, Lucy is headed to study asteroids in an area around Jupiter that’s been relatively unchanged…

The last 20 months turned every dog into an amateur epidemiologist and statistician. Meanwhile, a group of bona fide epidemiologists and statisticians came to believe that pandemic problems might be more effectively solved by adopting the mindset of an engineer: that is, focusing on pragmatic problem-solving with an iterative, adaptive strategy to make things work.…

The importance of data to today’s businesses can’t be overstated. Studies show data-driven companies are 58% more likely to beat revenue goals than non-data-driven companies and 162% more likely to significantly outperform laggards. Data analytics are helping nearly half of all companies make better decisions about everything, from the products they deliver to the markets they target. Data is…

We take it for granted that machines can recognize what they see in photos and videos. That ability rests on large data sets like ImageNet, a hand-curated collection of millions of photos used to train most of the best image-recognition models of the last decade.  But the images in these data sets portray a world…

A warning: Conspiracy theories about covid are helping disseminate anti-Semitic beliefs to a wider audience, warns a new report by the antiracist advocacy group Hope not Hate. The report says that not only has the pandemic revived interest in the “New World Order” conspiracy theory of a secret Jewish-run elite that aims to run the…

Welcome to I Was There When, a new oral history project from the In Machines We Trust podcast. It features stories of how breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and computing happened, as told by the people who witnessed them. In this first episode, we meet Joseph Atick— who helped create the first commercially viable face recognition…

Load up the website This Person Does Not Exist and it’ll show you a human face, near-perfect in its realism yet totally fake. Refresh and the neural network behind the site will generate another, and another, and another. The endless sequence of AI-crafted faces is produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN)—a type of AI…

Sometime in mid-2019, a police contractor in the Chinese city of Kuitun tapped a young college student from the University of Washington on the shoulder as she walked through a crowded market intersection. The student, Vera Zhou, didn’t notice the tapping at first because she was listening to music through her earbuds as she weaved…

The plummeting costs of renewables, the growing strength of the clean energy sector, and the rising influence of activists have begun to shift the politics of climate action in the US, panelists argued during MIT Technology Review’s annual EmTech conference last week. Those forces allowed President Joe Biden to put climate change at the center…

The moon may have been more volcanically active than we realized. Lunar samples that China’s Chang’e 5 spacecraft brought to Earth are revealing new clues about volcanoes and lava plains on the moon’s surface. In a study published today in Science, researchers describe the youngest lava samples ever collected on the moon.   The samples were taken from Oceanus Procellarum, a region known for having had huge lakes of…

After the Taliban took over Kabul in mid-August, a black-bearded man with a Kalashnikov appeared on the streets. He visited former politicians and gave a sermon during Friday prayers at the capital’s historic Pul-e-Khishti mosque. But the man, passionate and seemingly victorious, was no mere Taliban fighter among tens of thousands of others: he was…

Plastic is an environmental scourge, and most isn’t recycled. Enzymes, nature’s catalysts, may be able to help. In late September, Carbios, a French startup, opened a demonstration plant in central France to test this idea. The facility will use enzymes to recycle PET, one of the most common single-use plastics and the material used to…

On Sunday night, the primary source for the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files, an investigative series based on internal Facebook documents, revealed her identity in an episode of 60 Minutes. Frances Haugen, a former product manager at the company, says she came forward after she saw Facebook’s leadership repeatedly prioritize profit over safety. Before quitting…

What if managers and leaders at companies focused on a new goal: to elevate the human experience? This paradigm shift is something Amelia Dunlop, chief experience officer at Deloitte Digital, advocates for. She and her team have worked hard to measure the amount of humanity in the workplace—a measurement that often depends on how much…

In the early days of the pandemic, as billions of dollars poured into the hunt for novel treatments and vaccines, veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch did what he’s always done: He went looking for an underdog.  Since making a fortune as the founder of Infoseek, an early search engine that was the Google of…

One of the last messages that Vaiva Bezhan sent on Facebook Messenger on Monday afternoon, Central European Time, was a bit of a cliffhanger—and incredibly time sensitive. The Lithuanian photojournalist is co-organizer of the Afghan Support Group, one of many volunteer initiatives trying by any means possible to help evacuate vulnerable Afghans in the wake…

Sarah, a 36-year-old woman living in California, had lived with chronic depression for five years. She felt suicidal multiple times an hour and was unable to make decisions about basic questions like what to eat. Nothing she had tried to treat it, including electroconvulsive therapy, had helped. Then, in June 2020, she had an implant…

On September 28, Amazon introduced Astro, a “household robot.” Amazon’s launch video promises that the $999 robot, which is squat with two wheels and a rectangular screen that features two orbs for eyes, will be able to do things like watch your home or join impromptu dance parties. This being Amazon, there’s good reason to be…

We’re keeping track of the covid vaccine apps rolling out in the US and some of the ways people can now prove they’re vaccinated. But there’s a lot of conflicting and confusing information, and a lot of developers are vying to provide the go-to solution. Here, we’ve gathered answers to some common questions. The basics…

First protein folding, now weather forecasting: London-based AI firm DeepMind is continuing its run applying deep learning to hard science problems. Working with the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, DeepMind has developed a deep-learning tool called DGMR that can accurately predict the likelihood of rain in the next 90 minutes—one of weather forecasting’s toughest…

From chess to Jeopardy to e-sports, AI is increasingly beating humans at their own games. But that was never the ultimate goal. In this first episode of season three of In Machines We Trust, we dig into the symbiotic relationship between games and AI. We meet the big players in the space, and we take…

There’s never been more happening in space than there is today. Commercial activity has exploded over the past five years as private space companies have launched rockets, put satellites into orbit, and bid on missions to the moon.   But some experts worry this surge of activity is getting too far ahead of international agreements governing who can do what in space. Most such policies were…

At first glance, JB, an artist based in Los Angeles, perhaps doesn’t look much like the picture on their driver’s license. For one thing, the ID photo is from a few years ago. Hair that was once long and dark is now buzzed and bleached. And there’s the fact that JB is transgender and has…

Pulling methane out of the atmosphere has the potential to help slow global warming in the next few decades—but researchers are still trying to figure out if it’s really feasible. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and human activities like natural-gas extraction and agriculture have more than doubled its concentration since the preindustrial era. Removing…

The US booster program is about to get underway, after the CDC backed additional shots for a large swath of the American public. The agency now recommends that people aged 65 years and older, adults in long-term care, and those over 50 with underlying medical conditions get a third Pfizer-BioNTech shot. (Those whose first shot…

The news: The White House is set to kick off its booster shot campaign today, after Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky overruled her own agency’s advisors in favor of recommending third doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for frontline workers. Who gets it: There are three groups of Americans now eligible for…

A zero-day exploit—a way to launch a cyberattack via a previously unknown vulnerability—is just about the most valuable thing a hacker can possess. These exploits can carry price tags north of $1 million on the open market. And this year, cybersecurity defenders have caught the highest number ever, according to multiple databases, researchers, and cybersecurity…

For years, civil rights groups have accused the US Department of Justice of racial profiling against scientists of Chinese descent. Today, a new report provides data that may quantify some of their claims.  The study, published by the Committee of 100, an association of prominent Chinese-American civic leaders, found that individuals of Chinese heritage were…

A version of this story was originally published at the COVID-19 Data Dispatch. It’s impossible to overstate how controversial school reopening has become in the US this past year. After a spring of universal Zoom school, opinions diverged: some administrators, parents, and scientists pushed to get kids back in classrooms, while others lobbied for covid…

In early 2021, Americans living on the East Coast got a sharp lesson on the growing importance of cybersecurity in the energy industry. A ransomware attack hit the company that operates the Colonial Pipeline—the major infrastructure artery that carries almost half of all liquid fuels from the Gulf Coast to the eastern United States. Knowing…

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, where Eileen Guo is an Ida B. Wells Fellow, and is being co-published by MIT Technology Review and Consumer Reports. A few hours before dawn in early May of last year, four police officers were dispatched to an address that they had come to know: the…

Every 10 years, US astronomers have to make some tough decisions. Outlined in a plan called the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics, a set of studies produced by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, these decisions determine the next decade’s scientific priorities for the field.   The Decadal Survey has set the stage for big leaps in space exploration since the early…

In late January, Elon Musk tweeted that he planned to give $100 million to promising carbon removal technologies, stirring the hopes of researchers and entrepreneurs. A few weeks later, Arin Crumley, a filmmaker who went on to develop electric skateboards, announced that a team was forming on Clubhouse, the audio app popular in Silicon Valley,…

In the run-up to the 2020 election, the most highly contested in US history, Facebook’s most popular pages for Christian and Black American content were being run by Eastern European troll farms. These pages were part of a larger network that collectively reached nearly half of all Americans, according to an internal company report, and…

When the United Arab Emirates paid over $1.3 million for a powerful and stealthy iPhone hacking tool in 2016, the monarchy’s spies—and the American mercenary hackers they hired—put it to immediate use. The tool exploited a flaw in Apple’s iMessage app to enable hackers to completely take over a victim’s iPhone. It was used against…

When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, it didn’t feel like a stretch to dream of lounging in a space hotel, sipping a martini while watching Earth drift by. This vision got a boost in the early 1980s, when the space shuttle program heralded a future of frequent and routine trips to orbit. And when the first…

At the end of August, KT Volkova got an abortion in central Texas, where she lives. She was nearly six weeks pregnant.  “Time was of the essence,” she says. Just a few days later, on September 1, SB8 became law in Texas. SB8 effectively bans abortion in the state by making the procedure illegal when…

Last week Facebook released its new $299 “Ray-Ban Stories” glasses. Wearers can use them to record and share images and short videos, listen to music, and take calls. The people who buy these glasses will soon be out in public and private spaces, photographing and recording the rest of us, and using Facebook’s new “View”…

Calithera Biosciences is a small, Northern California immunotherapy company with a pipeline of drugs in various stages of premarket development for cancer and cystic fibrosis. Like any manufacturer creating complex new products, Calithera keeps track of lots of data. But unlike advanced technology companies in other fields, drug discovery companies have the US Food and…

Exposure notification apps were developed at the start of the pandemic, as technologists raced to help slow the spread of covid. The most common system was developed jointly by Google and Apple, and dozens of apps around the world were built using it—MIT Technology Review spent much of 2020 tracking them. The apps, which run…

The website is eye-catching for its simplicity. Against a white backdrop, a giant blue button invites visitors to upload a picture of a face. Below the button, four AI-generated faces allow you to test the service. Above it, the tag line boldly proclaims the purpose: turn anyone into a porn star by using deepfake technology…

The news: President Joe Biden has signed an executive order that will require millions of American workers to get vaccinated against covid-19. The order mandates all companies with more than 100 workers to require employees to be vaccinated or get tested weekly. Employers will have to provide paid time off for employees to get their…

The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, so when an asteroid headed toward Earth with their name on it 65 million years ago, they had no warning and no way to defend themselves. We know how that turned out. Humans are, understandably, keen to avoid the same fate. Later this year, NASA will launch a…