Pure Science

MIT Technology Review

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 a 1980s toy robot arm inspired modern robotics —Jon Keegan As a child of an electronic...

MIT Technology Review

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. Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China Last year, China saw a boom in foundation...

MIT Technology Review

Later this month, an inconspicuous 150-kilogram satellite is set to launch into space aboard the SpaceX Transporter 14 mission. Once in orbit, it will test super-accurate next-generation satnav technology designed to make up for the...

MIT Technology Review

This week, I’ve been thinking about the powerful connection between mind and body. Some new research suggests that people with heart conditions have better outcomes when they are more hopeful and optimistic. Hopelessness, on the other...

MIT Technology Review

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more...

MIT Technology Review

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. Crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong is ready to invest in CRISPR baby tech Brian Armstrong,...

MIT Technology Review

The clean cement industry might be facing the end of the road, before it ever really got rolling.  On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced that it was canceling $3.7 billion in funding for 24 projects related to energy and...

MIT Technology Review

Brian Armstrong, the billionaire CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, says he’s ready to fund a US startup focused on gene-editing human embryos. If he goes forward, it would be the first major commercial investment in one of...

MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review

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. What’s next for AI and math The modern world is built on mathematics. Math lets us model...

MIT Technology Review

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. The way DARPA tells it, math is stuck in the past. In April, the...

MIT Technology Review

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. Four reasons to be optimistic about AI’s energy usage Two weeks ago, we launched Power...

MIT Technology Review

After working on it for months, my colleague Casey Crownhart and I finally saw our story on AI’s energy and emissions burden go live last week.  The initial goal sounded simple: Calculate how much energy is used each time we interact...

MIT Technology Review

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 Trump administration has shut down more than 100 climate studies The Trump...

MIT Technology Review

The Trump administration has terminated National Science Foundation grants for more than 100 research projects related to climate change amid a widening campaign to slash federal funding for scientists and institutions studying the rising...

MIT Technology Review

From large language models (LLMs) to reasoning agents, today’s AI tools bring unprecedented computational demands. Trillion-parameter models, workloads running on-device, and swarms of agents collaborating to complete tasks all require a...

MIT Technology Review

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. This benchmark used Reddit’s AITA to test how much AI models suck up to us Back in April,...

MIT Technology Review

Back in April, OpenAIannounced it was rolling back an update to its GPT-4o model that made ChatGPT’s responses to user queries too sycophantic.  An AI model that acts in an overly agreeable and flattering way is more than just...

MIT Technology Review

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. This giant microwave may change the future of war Imagine: China deploys hundreds of...

MIT Technology Review

It’s been a little over a week since we published Power Hungry, a package that takes a hard look at the expected energy demands of AI. Last week in this newsletter, I broke down the centerpiece of that package, an analysis I did with my...

MIT Technology Review

Imagine: China deploys hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones in the air, on the sea, and under the water—all armed with explosive warheads or small missiles. These machines descend in a swarm toward military installations on Taiwan...

MIT Technology Review

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Large language models confidently...

MIT Technology Review

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. OpenAI: The power and the pride OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT 3.5 set in motion an AI arms...

MIT Technology Review

In April, Paul Graham, the founder of the tech startup accelerator Y Combinator, sent a tweet in response to former YC president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman had just bid a public goodbye to GPT-4 on X, and Graham had a...

MIT Technology Review

A California-based company called Magrathea just turned on a new electrolyzer that can make magnesium metal from seawater. The technology has the potential to produce the material, which is used in vehicles and defense applications, with...

MIT Technology Review

A new type of fuel cell that runs on sodium metal could one day help clean up sectors where it’s difficult to replace fossil fuels, like rail, regional aviation, and short-distance shipping. The device represents a departure from...

MIT Technology Review

In the U.S., two-thirds of the country’s 150,000 convenience stores are run by independent operators. Mom-and-pop shops, powered by personal relationships and local knowledge, are the backbone of the convenience sector. These neighborhood...

MIT Technology Review

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. Can nuclear power really fuel the rise of AI? In the AI arms race, all the major players...

MIT Technology Review

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. Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of “China’s Frankenstein” Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui...

MIT Technology Review

This week, two new leaders at the US Food and Drug Administration announced plans to limit access to covid vaccines, arguing that there is not much evidence to support the value of annual shots in healthy people. New vaccines will be made...

MIT Technology Review

Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited...

MIT Technology Review

Anthropic has announced two new AI models that it claims represent a major step toward making AI agents truly useful. AI agents trained on Claude Opus 4, the company’s most powerful model to date, raise the bar for what such systems are...

MIT Technology Review

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 data center boom in the desert In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction...

MIT Technology Review

In 2003, engineers from Germany and Switzerland began building a bridge across the Rhine River simultaneously from both sides. Months into construction, they found that the two sides did not meet. The German side hovered 54 centimeters...

MIT Technology Review

This week, we published Power Hungry, a package all about AI and energy. At the center of this package is the most comprehensive look yet at AI’s growing power demand, if I do say so myself.  This data-heavy story is the result of...

MIT Technology Review

Recorded on May 21, 2025 Big Tech’s appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does even a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate? Hear from MIT Technology...

MIT Technology Review

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. By putting AI into everything, Google wants to make it invisible If you want to know where...

MIT Technology Review

If you want to know where AI is headed, this year’s Google I/O has you covered. The company’s annual showcase of next-gen products, which kicked off yesterday, has all of the pomp and pizzazz, the sizzle reels and celebrity walk-ons, that...

MIT Technology Review

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. We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. It’s well...

MIT Technology Review

It’s been quite a couple weeks for stories about AI in the courtroom. You might have heard about the deceased victim of a road rage incident whose family created an AI avatar of him to show as an impact statement (possibly the first time...

MIT Technology Review

In the AI arms race, all the major players say they want to go nuclear.   Over the past year, the likes of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have sent out a flurry of announcements related to nuclear energy. Some are about...

MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review

The day after his inauguration in January, President Donald Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion initiative to build out AI infrastructure, backed by some of the biggest companies in tech. Stargate aims to accelerate the construction...

MIT Technology Review

When we set out to write a story on the best available estimates for AI’s energy and emissions burden, we knew there would be caveats and uncertainties to these numbers. But, we quickly discovered, the caveats are the story too.  ...

MIT Technology Review

With seemingly no limit to the demand for artificial intelligence, everyone in the energy, AI, and climate fields is justifiably worried. Will there be enough clean electricity to power AI and enough water to cool the data centers that...

MIT Technology Review

The thousands of sprawling acres in rural northeast Louisiana had gone unwanted for nearly two decades. Louisiana authorities bought the land in Richland Parish in 2006 to promote economic development in one of the poorest regions in the...

MIT Technology Review

In the high desert east of Reno, Nevada, construction crews are flattening the golden foothills of the Virginia Range, laying the foundations of a data center city. Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all...

MIT Technology Review

Millions of people argue with each other online every day, but remarkably few of them change someone’s mind. New research suggests that large language models (LLMs) might do a better job. The finding suggests that AI could become a...

MIT Technology Review

AI’s potential to transform business is undeniable, but realizing tangible value remains a challenge. This session explores where AI is driving the greatest returns today, how to set and manage realistic expectations, and approaches to...

MIT Technology Review

AI technologies are reshaping work, but not all workflows or roles will be equally transformed. Discover how AI is changing the way we work, given the technical capabilities and limitations of today’s systems. Through real-world use cases...