The Download: a history of brainwashing, and America’s chipmaking ambitions
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 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.”…
MIT Technology ReviewThe effort to make a breakthrough cancer therapy cheaper
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. 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…
MIT Technology ReviewA brief, weird history of brainwashing
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…
MIT Technology ReviewThis US startup makes a crucial chip material and is taking on a Japanese giant
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…
MIT Technology ReviewScaling individual impact: Insights from an AI engineering leader
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…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: AI is making robots more helpful, and the problem with cleaning up pollution
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. 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…
MIT Technology ReviewIs robotics about to have its own ChatGPT moment?
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.…
MIT Technology ReviewThe inadvertent geoengineering experiment that the world is now shutting off
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…
MIT Technology ReviewModernizing data with strategic purpose
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…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: generating AI memories, and China’s softening tech regulation
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. 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…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: our eclipse guide, and what you need to know about bird flu
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. 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…
MIT Technology ReviewNew bird flu infections: Here’s what you need to know
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…
MIT Technology ReviewHow 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 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…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: Harvard’s geoengineering failure, and extending nuclear plants’ lifetimes
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. 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…
MIT Technology ReviewWhy the lifetime of nuclear plants is getting longer
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…
MIT Technology ReviewThe hard lessons of Harvard’s failed geoengineering experiment
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…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: fixing space weather-forecasting, and reopening a nuclear power plant
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. 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…
MIT Technology ReviewHow to reopen a nuclear power plant
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…
MIT Technology ReviewThreads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics
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. 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…
MIT Technology ReviewThe race to fix space-weather forecasting before next big solar storm hits
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…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: the future of AI moviemaking, and what to know about plug-in hybrids
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. What’s next for generative video When OpenAI revealed its new generative video model, Sora, last month, it invited a handful of filmmakers to try it out. This week the company published the results:…
MIT Technology ReviewHow three filmmakers created Sora’s latest stunning videos
In the last month, a handful of filmmakers have taken Sora for a test drive. The results, which OpenAI published this week, are amazing. The short films are a big jump up even from the cherry-picked demo videos that OpenAI used to tease its new generative model just six weeks ago. Here’s how three of…
MIT Technology ReviewWhat’s next for generative video
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. When OpenAI revealed its new generative video model, Sora, last month, it invited a handful of filmmakers to try it out. This week the company published…
MIT Technology ReviewWhat to expect if you’re expecting a plug-in hybrid
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. If you’ve ever eaten at a fusion restaurant or seen an episode of Glee, you know a mashup can be a wonderful thing. Plug-in hybrid vehicles should be the mashup that the…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: the problem with plug-in hybrids, and China’s AI talent
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. The problem with plug-in hybrids? Their drivers. Plug-in hybrids are supposed to be the best of both worlds—the convenience of a gas-powered car with the climate benefits of a battery electric vehicle. But…
MIT Technology ReviewFour things you need to know about China’s AI talent pool
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. In 2019, MIT Technology Review covered a report that shined a light on how fast China’s AI talent pool was growing. Its main finding was pretty interesting: the number of elite AI…
MIT Technology ReviewThe problem with plug-in hybrids? Their drivers.
Plug-in hybrids are supposed to be the best of both worlds—the convenience of a gas-powered car with the climate benefits of a battery electric vehicle. But new data suggests that some official figures severely underestimate the emissions they produce. According to new real-world driving data from the European Commission, plug-in hybrids produce roughly 3.5 times…
MIT Technology ReviewAI could make better beer.Here’show.
Crafting a good-tasting beer is a difficult task. Big breweries select hundreds of trained tasters from among their employees to test their new products. But running such sensory tasting panels is expensive, and perceptions of what tastes good can be highly subjective. What if artificial intelligence could help lighten the load? New AI models can…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: Adobe’s AI ambitions, and how work is changing
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. How Adobe’s bet on non-exploitative AI is paying off Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, there has been a fight over how large AI models are trained. In one camp sit…
MIT Technology ReviewMeet the MIT Technology Review AI team in London
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 UK is home to AI powerhouse Google DeepMind, a slew of exciting AI startups, and some of the world’s best universities. It’s also where I live, along with quite a…
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