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Minnesota’s Highway 210 threads through the tiny towns of Aitkin County, a poor and sparsely populated stretch of forests, lakes, and wetlands that reaches just into the northeastern corner of the state. A short drive off the highway, due south past the Tamarack Church, delivers you to Jackson’s Hole, the last remaining business in the…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week the AI world was buzzing over a new paper in Nature from Google DeepMind, in which the lab managed to create an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems.…

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. Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments. The news: For tens of millions of people, a case of covid is the beginning of a chronic…

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. The Iowa caucuses on January 15 officially kicked off the 2024 presidential election. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—the biggest story of this…

For many people, covid is an illness that blusters in and out of our lives as cases spike and recede. But for tens of millions of others, a case of covid is the beginning of a chronic and sometimes debilitating illness that persists for months or even years.  What makes individuals with long covid different…

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 brain-dead man was attached to a gene-edited pig liver for three days Surgeon Abraham Shaked thinks he has probably carried out more than 2,500 liver transplants. But in December 2023, the team…

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. Hooked up to a ventilation machine, a person can be dead in the eyes of the law, medical professionals, and loved ones, yet still alive enough…

Raesetje Sefala grew up sharing a bedroom with her six siblings in a cramped township in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The township’s inhabitants, predominantly Black people, had inadequate access to schools, health care, parks, and hospitals.  But just a few miles away in Limpopo, white families lived in big, attractive houses, with easy…

Surgeon Abraham Shaked thinks he has probably carried out more than 2,500 liver transplants. But in December 2023, a team he oversees at the University of Pennsylvania did something he’d never tried before.  Working on the body of a brain-dead man, they attached his veins to a refrigerator-size machine with pig liver mounted in 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. Exascale computers: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 In May 2022, the global supercomputer rankings were shaken up by the launch of Frontier. It’s the fastest supercomputer in the world, and can perform as many…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I’ve got nuclear power on the brain this week.  The workings of nuclear power plants have always fascinated me. They’re massive, technically complicated, and feel a little bit magic (splitting the atom—what…

For more than a month in total, 12 metric tons of molten salt coursed through pipes at Kairos Power in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company is developing a new type of nuclear reactor that will be cooled using this salt mixture, and its first large-scale test cooling system just completed 1,000 hours of operation in…

In business, the acceleration of change means enterprises have to live in the future, not the present. Having the tools and technologies to enable forward-thinking and underpin digital transformation is key to survival. Supply chain procurement leaders are tasked with improving operational efficiencies and keeping an eye on the bottom line. For Raimundo Martinez, global…

A new AI system could help detect the most common form of pancreatic cancer, new research has found. Pancreatic cancer is a difficult disease to detect. The pancreas itself is hidden by other organs in the abdomen, making it tough to spot tumors during tests. Patients also rarely experience symptoms in the early stages, meaning…

Google DeepMind has created an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems. It’s a significant step towards machines with more human-like reasoning skills, experts say.  Geometry, and mathematics more broadly, have challenged AI researchers for some time. Compared with text-based AI models, there is significantly less training data for mathematics because it is symbol…

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 killers: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 For the better part of 17 years, the roiling, rolling, fractious, sometimes funny, sometimes horrifying, never-ever-ending global conversation had a central home: Twitter. If you wanted to…

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. Last year was a banner year for artificial intelligence. Thanks to products like ChatGPT, many millions of people are now directly interacting with AI, talking about it, and grappling with its impact…

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. Apple Vision Pro: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 History is littered with doomed face computers. Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens, and even Meta’s Quest line all flopped. Now, it’s Apple’s turn to try.  At the…

There was one individual Olympic spot left. According to the intricate set of rules governing who gets slots for the games, it would come down to who placed highest in the high bar final: Croatia’s Tin Srbić or Brazil’s Arthur Nory Mariano. They were at the 2023 World Championships in Antwerp, Belgium, last October. Mariano…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Welcome back to The Algorithm!  I have a chair of shame at home. By that I mean a chair in my bedroom onto which I pile used clothes that aren’t quite…

In 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby said, “data is the new oil.” While the phrase is almost a cliché, the advent of generative AI is breathing new life into this idea. A global study on the Future of Enterprise Data & AI by WNS Triange and Corinium Intelligence shows 76% of C-suite leaders and decision-makers are planning or…

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. Super-efficient solar cells: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024 In November 2023, a buzzy solar technology broke yet another world record for efficiency. The previous record had existed for only about five months—and it likely…

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. We’re only a few weeks into 2024, and violations of people’s privacy are already making some big headlines! First we had the continued drama with…

Sophisticated robots don’t have to cost a fortune. Even relatively cheap robots can do complex manipulation tasks and learn new skills quickly using AI, a new study has shown. With just $32,000, researchers from Stanford University managed to build a wheeled robot that can cook a three-course Cantonese meal with human supervision. Then they used…