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 nonprofits and academia are stepping up to salvage US climate programs Nonprofits are...

MIT Technology Review

Nonprofits are striving to preserve a US effort to modernize greenhouse-gas measurements, amid growing fears that the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal programs will obscure the nation’s contributions to climate change. The...

MIT Technology Review

It has been a grim few months for the Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) community. There had been some excitement when, a couple of years ago, a gene therapy for the disorder was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for the...

MIT Technology Review

On Wednesday, President Trump issued three executive orders, delivered a speech, and released an action plan, all on the topic of continuing American leadership in AI.  The plan contains dozens of proposed actions, grouped into three...

MIT Technology Review

Most Americans encounter the Federal Trade Commission only if they’ve been scammed: It handles identity theft, fraud, and stolen data. During the Biden administration, the agency went after AI companies for scamming customers with...

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 role should oil and gas companies play in climate tech? —Casey Crownhart After writing...

MIT Technology Review

This week, I have a new story out about Quaise, a geothermal startup that’s trying to commercialize new drilling technology. Using a device called a gyrotron, the company wants to drill deeper, cheaper, in an effort to unlock geothermal...

MIT Technology Review

Google DeepMind has unveiled new artificial-intelligence software that could help historians recover the meaning and context behind ancient Latin engravings.  Aeneas can analyze words written in long-weathered stone to say when and...

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. Navigating the rise of AI agents AI agents is a buzzy term that essentially refers to AI...

MIT Technology Review

What if we could permanently remove the toxic “forever chemicals” contaminating our water? That’s the driving force behind Michigan-based startup Enspired Solutions, founded by environmental toxicologist Denise Kay and chemical engineer...

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 startup wants to use beams of energy to drill geothermal wells Geothermal startup...

MIT Technology Review

A beam of energy hit the slab of rock, which quickly began to glow. Pieces cracked off, sparks ricocheted, and dust whirled around under a blast of air.  From inside a modified trailer, I peeked through the window as a millimeter-wave...

MIT Technology Review

Last month I gave a talk at SXSW London called “Five things you need to know about AI”—my personal picks for the five most important ideas in AI right now.  I aimed the talk at a general audience, and it serves as a quick tour of how...

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. A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Millions of...

MIT Technology Review

AI companies have now mostly abandoned the once-standard practice of including medical disclaimers and warnings in response to health questions, new research has found. In fact, many leading AI models will now not only answer health...

MIT Technology Review

Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found. Thousands...

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 to run an LLM on your laptop In the early days of large language models, there was a...

MIT Technology Review

This week we heard that eight babies have been born in the UK following an experimental form of IVF that involves DNA from three people. The approach was used to prevent women with genetic mutations from passing mitochondrial diseases to...

MIT Technology Review

Imagine AI so sophisticated it could read a customer’s mind? Or identify and close a cybersecurity loophole weeks before hackers strike? How about a team of AI agents equipped to restructure a global supply chain and circumnavigate looming...

MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Simon Willison has a plan for the end of the world. It’s a USB stick, onto which he has loaded a couple of his favorite open-weight LLMs—models that have been shared...

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. Researchers announce babies born from a trial of three-person IVF Eight babies have been...

MIT Technology Review

I’ll admit that I’ve rarely hesitated to point an accusing finger at air-conditioning. I’ve outlined in many stories and newsletters that AC is a significant contributor to global electricity demand, and it’s only going to suck up more...

MIT Technology Review

Eight babies have been born in the UK thanks to a technology that uses DNA from three people: the two biological parents plus a third person who supplies healthy mitochondrial DNA. The babies were born to mothers who carry genes for...

MIT Technology Review

No one knows exactly how AI will transform our communities, workplaces, and society as a whole. Because it’s hard to predict the impact AI will have on jobs, many workers and local governments are left trying to read the tea leaves to...

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. Google’s generative video model Veo 3 has a subtitles problem As soon as Google launched...

MIT Technology Review

In June 2023, technology leaders and IT services executives had a lightning bolt headed their way when McKinsey published the “The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier” report. It echoed a moment from the...

MIT Technology Review

Adaptive production is more than a technological upgrade: it is a paradigm shift. This new frontier enables the integration of cutting-edge technologies to create an increasingly autonomous environment, where interconnected manufacturing...

MIT Technology Review

As soon as Google launched its latest video-generating AI model at the end of May, creatives rushed to put it through its paces. Released just months after its predecessor, Veo 3 allows users to generate sounds and dialogue for the first...

MIT Technology Review

When Darren Riley moved to Detroit seven years ago, he didn’t expect the city’s air to change his life—literally. Developing asthma as an adult opened his eyes to a much larger problem: the invisible but pervasive impact of air pollution...

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. AI text-to-speech programs could one day “unlearn” how to imitate certain people The news:...

MIT Technology Review

A technique known as “machine unlearning” could teach AI models to forget specific voices—an important step in stopping the rise of audio deepfakes, where someone’s voice is copied to carry out fraud or scams. Recent advances in artificial...

MIT Technology Review

School’s out and it’s high summer, but a bunch of teachers are plotting how they’re going to use AI this upcoming school year. God help them.  On July 8, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic announced a $23 million partnership with one of...

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. California is set to become the first US state to manage power outages with AI California’s...

MIT Technology Review

California’s statewide power grid operator is poised to become the first in North America to deploy artificial intelligence to manage outages, MIT Technology Review has learned.  “We wanted to modernize our grid operations. This fits...

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. Cybersecurity’s global alarm system is breaking down Every day, billions of people trust...

MIT Technology Review

Every day, billions of people trust digital systems to run everything from communication to commerce to critical infrastructure. But the global early warning system that alerts security teams to dangerous software flaws is showing critical...

MIT Technology Review

This week I’m sending congratulations to two sets of parents in South Africa. Babies Milayah and Rossouw arrived a few weeks ago. All babies are special, but these two set a new precedent. They’re the first to be born following...

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 tool strips away anti-AI protections from digital art The news: A new technique called...

MIT Technology Review

China is the dominant force in next-generation energy technologies today. It’s pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into putting renewable sources like wind and solar on its grid, manufacturing millions of electric vehicles, and...

MIT Technology Review

A new technique called LightShed will make it harder for artists to use existing protective tools to stop their work from being ingested for AI training. It’s the next step in a cat-and-mouse game—across technology, law, and culture—that...

MIT Technology Review

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4 was chock full of controversial policies—Medicaid work requirements, increased funding for ICE, and an end to tax credits for clean energy and vehicles, to...

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. Inside OpenAI’s empire: A conversation with Karen Hao In a wide-ranging Roundtables...

MIT Technology Review

In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, AI journalist and author Karen Hao spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. She talked with executive editor...

MIT Technology Review

Michigan may be best known as the birthplace of the American auto industry, but its innovation legacy runs far deeper, and its future is poised to be even broader. From creating the world’s largest airport factory during World War II at...

MIT Technology Review

From a cluster of call centers in Canada, a criminal network defrauded elderly victims in the US out of $21 million in total between 2021 and 2024. The fraudsters used voice over internet protocol technology to dupe victims into...

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. Inside the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever If you were told that the odds of something...

MIT Technology Review

Today’s AI landscape is defined by the ways in which neural networks are unlike human brains. A toddler learns how to communicate effectively with only a thousand calories a day and regular conversation; meanwhile, tech companies are...

MIT Technology Review

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and...

MIT Technology Review

If you were told that the odds of something were 3.1%, it really wouldn’t seem like much. But for the people charged with protecting our planet, it was huge.  On February 18, astronomers determined that a 130- to 300-foot-long...

MIT Technology Review

When a historic UK-based retailer set out to modernize its IT environment, it was wrestling with systems that had grown organically for more than 175 years. Prior digital transformation efforts had resulted in a patchwork of hundreds of...