Here’s the defense tech at the center of US aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next.You can read more from the series here. After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President Joe Biden signed a $95.3 billion aid package into…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: how to tell when a chatbot is lying, and RIP my biotech plants
Chatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust. The news: Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth…
MIT Technology ReviewMy biotech plants are dead
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. Six weeks ago, I pre-ordered the “Firefly Petunia,” a houseplant engineered with genes from bioluminescent fungi so that it glows in the dark. After years of writing about…
MIT Technology ReviewChatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust.
Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth the risk. A new tool created by Cleanlab, an AI startup spun out of a quantum computing lab at…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: hyperrealistic deepfakes, and clean energy’s implications for mining
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. An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make…
MIT Technology ReviewWant less mining? Switch to clean energy.
Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies. But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to a new…
MIT Technology ReviewHydrogen could be used for nearly everything. It probably shouldn’t be.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. From toaster ovens that work as air fryers to hair dryers that can also curl your hair, single tools that do multiple jobs have an undeniable appeal. In the climate world, hydrogen…
MIT Technology ReviewAn AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary
I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity? This makes it sound like I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today…
MIT Technology ReviewA new kind of gene-edited pig kidney was just transplanted into a person
A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from New Jersey, has become the second. Her new kidney has just a single genetic modification—an approach that researchers hope…
MIT Technology ReviewAlmost every Chinese keyboard app has a security flaw that reveals what users type
Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and…
MIT Technology ReviewThe Download: introducing the Build issue
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. Introducing: the Build issue Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by…
MIT Technology ReviewThree takeaways about the state of Chinese tech in the US
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. I’ve wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was…
MIT Technology ReviewWhat tech learned from Daedalus
Today’s climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity—which has discharged greenhouse-gas emissions into Earth’s atmosphere for centuries—but reversing course and taming nature’s growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. Yet the dream of human-powered flight—of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of mortal limbs—was…
MIT Technology ReviewThis creamy vegan cheese was made with AI
As Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn serves up a plate of vegan brie, feta, and blue cheese in his offices in Emeryville, California, I’m keeping my expectations modest. Most vegan cheese falls into an edible uncanny valley full of discomforting not-quite-right versions of the real thing. But the brie I taste today is smooth, rich,…
MIT Technology ReviewJob titles of the future: AI prompt engineer
The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. Companies define it in different ways, but its principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations. Danai Myrtzani of Sleed, a digital marketing agency in Greece, describes herself as more prompter than engineer.…
MIT Technology ReviewHow we transform to a fully decarbonized world
In 1856, Napoleon III commissioned a baby rattle for his newborn son, to be made from one of the most precious metals known at the time: light, silvery, and corrosion-resistant aluminum. Despite its abundance—it’s the third most common element in Earth’s crust—the metal wasn’t isolated until 1824, and the complexity and cost of the process…
MIT Technology ReviewQuartz, cobalt, and the waste we leave behind
Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard’s hat near the northwestern corner of…
MIT Technology ReviewBuilding momentum
One of the formative memories of my youth took place on a camping trip at an Alabama state park. My dad’s friend brought an at-the-time gee-whiz gadget, a portable television, and we used it to watch the very first space shuttle launch from under the loblolly pines. It was thrilling. And it was hard not…
MIT Technology ReviewThe 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…
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