When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions. Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state…
To most people, rocks are just rocks. To geologists, they are much, much more: crystal-filled time capsules with the power to reveal the state of the planet at the very moment they were forged. For decades, NASA had been on…
Listen to the session or watch below Sodium-based batteries could be a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium-ion, and the technology is finally making its way into cars—and energy storage arrays on the grid. Sodium-ion batteries are one of MIT Technology…
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. Introducing: the Crime issue Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse.…
The boom of a calving glacier. The crackling rumble of a wildfire. The roar of a surging storm front. They’re the noises of the living Earth, music of this one particular sphere and clues to the true nature of these…
The only reality show that matters The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is one of the best shows on television right now. Not one of the best reality TV shows, but one of the best TV shows, period. Chronicling…
Eons ago, in 2012, I had a weird experience. My iPhone suddenly shut down. When I restarted it, I found it was totally reset—clean, like a new device. This was the early days of iOS, so I wasn’t too concerned…
MIT researchers have developed a new method for designing 3D structures that can spring up from a flat sheet of interconnected tiles with a single pull of a string. The technique could be used to make foldable bike helmets and…
Earth’s a medium-size rock with some water on top, enveloped by gases that keep everything that lives here alive. Just at the edge of that envelope begins a thin but dense layer of human-built, high-tech stuff. People started putting gear…
Every year, poachers shoot hundreds of rhinos, fishing crews haul millions of sharks out of protected seas, and smugglers carry countless animals and plants across borders. This illegal activity is incredibly hard to disrupt, since it’s backed by sophisticated criminal…
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. Want to lose weight? Get shredded? Stay mentally sharp? A wellness…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In January, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, the head of the world’s most valuable company, proclaimed that we are…
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 Chicago’s surveillance panopticon Chicago has tens of thousands of surveillance cameras—up to 45,000, by some estimates. That’s…
Early on the morning of September 2, 2024, a Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line train was the scene of a random and horrific mass shooting. Four people were shot and killed on a westbound train as it approached the suburb…
2025 was a year of reckoning, including how the heads of the top AI companies made promises they couldn’t keep. In this exclusive subscriber-only eBook, you’ll learn more about why we may need to readjust our expectations. This story is…
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. Microsoft has a new plan to prove what’s real and what’s AI online AI-enabled deception now permeates our…
Twenty years ago, Joanna Wakefield-Scurr was having persistent pain in her breasts. Her doctor couldn’t diagnose the cause but said a good, supportive bra could help. A professor of biomechanics, Wakefield-Scurr thought she could do a little research and find…
The bird is a beautiful silver-gray, and as she dies twitching in the lasernet I’m grateful for two things: First, that she didn’t make a sound. Second, that this will be the very last time. They’re called corpse doves—because the…
There’s a measles outbreak happening close to where I live. Since the start of this year, 34 cases have been confirmed in Enfield, a northern borough of London. Most of those affected are children under the age of 11. One…
AI-enabled deception now permeates our online lives. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot, like when White House officials recently shared a manipulated image of a protester in Minnesota and then mocked those asking about it. Other times,…
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 uncrewed narco subs could transform the Colombian drug trade For decades, handmade narco subs have been some…
On a bright morning last April, a surveillance plane operated by the Colombian military spotted a 40-foot-long shark-like silhouette idling in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. It was, unmistakably, a “narco sub,” a stealthy fiberglass vessel that sails…
The United States and the European Union grew into economic superpowers by committing climate atrocities. They have burned a wildly disproportionate share of the world’s oil and gas, planting carbon time bombs that will detonate first in the poorest, hottest…
Thank you for joining us on the “Enterprise AI hub.” In this episode of the Infosys Knowledge Institute Podcast, Dylan Cosper speaks with Prasad Banala, director of software engineering at a large US-based retail organization, about operationalizing agentic AI across…
Thank you for joining us on the “Enterprise AI hub.” In this episode of the Infosys Knowledge Institute Podcast, Dylan Cosper speaks with Sriram Kalyan, head of applications and data at Nutrien Ag Solutions, Australia, about turning a high-risk post-acquisition…
Google DeepMind is calling for the moral behavior of large language models—such as what they do when called on to act as companions, therapists, medical advisors, and so on—to be scrutinized with the same kind of rigor as their ability…
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. Welcome to the dark side of crypto’s permissionless dream Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen, an Australian man in his mid-30s, with…
To be human is, fundamentally, to be a forecaster. Occasionally a pretty good one. Trying to see the future, whether through the lens of past experience or the logic of cause and effect, has helped us hunt, avoid being hunted,…
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 curious case of the disappearing Lamborghinis Across the world, unsuspecting people are unwittingly becoming caught up in…
When Sam Zahr first saw the gray Rolls-Royce Dawn convertible with orange interior and orange roof, he knew he’d found a perfect addition to his fleet. “It was very appealing to our clientele,” he told me. As the director of…
When work went remote, the sound of business changed. What began as a scramble to make home offices functional has evolved into a revolution in how people hear and are heard. From education to enterprises, companies across industries have reimagined…
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. Hackers made death threats against this security researcher. Big mistake. In April 2024, a mysterious someone using the…
When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, César de la Fuente compiled a list of the world’s biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve…
The threats started in spring. In April 2024, a mysterious someone using the online handles “Waifu” and “Judische” began posting death threats on Telegram and Discord channels aimed at a cybersecurity researcher named Allison Nixon. “Alison [sic] Nixon is gonna…
There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling’s song begins to play. It’s a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It’s Darling’s first…
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. US deputy health secretary: Vaccine guidelines are still subject to change Over the past year, Jim O’Neill has…
Making a movie is a lot like pulling off a heist. That’s what Steven Soderbergh—director of the Ocean’s franchise, among other heist-y classics—said a few years ago. You come up with a creative angle, put together a team of specialists,…
Following publication of this story, Politico reported Jim O’Neill would be leaving his current roles within the Department of Health and Human Services. Over the past year, Jim O’Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health.…
Americans have a new set of diet guidelines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken an old-fashioned food pyramid, turned it upside down, and plonked a steak and a stick of butter in prime positions. Kennedy and his Make America Healthy…
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 is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse. Just as software engineers are using…
EVs are getting cheaper and more common all over the world. But the technology still faces major challenges in some markets, including many countries in Africa. Some regions across the continent still have limited grid and charging infrastructure, and those…
Anton Cherepanov is always on the lookout for something interesting. And in late August last year, he spotted just that. It was a file uploaded to VirusTotal, a site cybersecurity researchers like him use to analyze submissions for potential viruses…
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 past year has marked a turning point for Chinese AI. Since…
AI agents are a risky business. Even when stuck inside the chatbox window, LLMs will make mistakes and behave badly. Once they have tools that they can use to interact with the outside world, such as web browsers and email…
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 “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software…
Electric vehicles could be economically competitive in Africa sooner than expected. Just 1% of new cars sold across the continent in 2025 were electric, but a new analysis finds that with solar off-grid charging, EVs could be cheaper to own…
In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot’s coding…
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 first look at Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s new AI newsletter Are you interested in learning…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Lots of influential people in tech last week were describing Moltbook, an online hangout populated by AI…
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. Moltbook was peak AI theater For a few days recently, the hottest new hangout on the internet was…
For years, our newsroom has explored AI’s limitations and potential dangers, as well as its growing energy needs. And our reporters have looked closely at how generative tools are being used for tasks such as coding and running scientific experiments. …
For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website’s tagline puts it: “Where AI agents share, discuss,…
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. An experimental surgery is helping cancer survivors give birth An experimental surgical procedure that’s helping people have babies…
This week I want to tell you about an experimental surgical procedure that’s helping people have babies. Specifically, it’s helping people who have had treatment for bowel or rectal cancer. Radiation and chemo can have pretty damaging side effects that…
For decades, enterprises reacted to shifting business pressures with stopgap technology solutions. To rein in rising infrastructure costs, they adopted cloud services that could scale on demand. When customers shifted their lives onto smartphones, companies rolled out mobile apps to…
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 is the most misunderstood graph in AI Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic drops a new frontier…
Nuclear power continues to be one of the hottest topics in energy today, and in our recent online Roundtables discussion about next-generation nuclear power, hyperscale AI data centers, and the grid, we got dozens of great audience questions. These ran…
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. Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic drops a new frontier large…
The previous article in this series, “Rules fail at the prompt, succeed at the boundary,” focused on the first AI-orchestrated espionage campaign and the failure of prompt-level control. This article is the prescription. The question every CEO is now getting…
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. Why AI companies are betting on next-gen nuclear AI is driving unprecedented investment for massive data centers and…
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. Microbes could extract the metal needed for cleantech In a pine forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the only…
In a pine forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the only active nickel mine in the US is nearing the end of its life. At a time when carmakers want the metal for electric-vehicle batteries, nickel concentration at Eagle Mine is…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. What would it take to convince you that the era of truth decay we were long warned…
Many organizations rushed into generative AI, only to see pilots fail to deliver value. Now, companies want measurable outcomes—but how do you design for success? At Mistral AI, we partner with global industry leaders to co-design tailored AI solutions that…
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 marketplace powering bespoke AI deepfakes of real women Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated…
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. Demand for electric vehicles and the batteries that power them has never…
Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by…
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. DHS is using Google and Adobe AI to make videos The news: The US Department of Homeland Security…
For the last couple of years, I’ve been following the progress of a group of individuals who believe death is humanity’s “core problem.” Put simply, they say death is wrong—for everyone. They’ve even said it’s morally wrong. They established what…
Everyone is panicking because AI is very bad; everyone is panicking because AI is very good. It’s just that you never know which one you’re going to get. Grok is a pornography machine. Claude Code can do anything from building…
The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared with the public, a new document reveals. It comes as immigration agencies have flooded social media with content to…
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 the Vitalists: the hardcore longevity enthusiasts who believe death is “wrong” Last April, an excited crowd gathered…
The eastern half of the US saw a monster snowstorm over the weekend. The good news is the grid has largely been able to keep up with the freezing temperatures and increased demand. But there were some signs of strain,…
“Who here believes involuntary death is a good thing?” Nathan Cheng has been delivering similar versions of this speech over the last couple of years, so I knew what was coming. He was about to try to convince the 80…
AI is driving unprecedented investment for massive data centers and an energy supply that can support its huge computational appetite. One potential source of electricity for these facilities is next-generation nuclear power plants, which could be cheaper to construct and…
The ability to remember you and your preferences is rapidly becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents. Earlier this month, Google announced Personal Intelligence, a new way for people to interact with the company’s Gemini chatbot that…
From the Gemini Calendar prompt-injection attack of 2026 to the September 2025 state-sponsored hack using Anthropic’s Claude code as an automated intrusion engine, the coercion of human-in-the-loop agentic actions and fully autonomous agentic workflows are the new attack vector for…
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 first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin “shortly” Life Biosciences, a small Boston startup founded…
When Elon Musk was at Davos last week, an interviewer asked him if he thought aging could be reversed. Musk said he hasn’t put much time into the problem but suspects it is “very solvable” and that when scientists discover…
OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science, has been up to. The firm has released a free LLM-powered tool for scientists called Prism, which embeds ChatGPT in a text editor for writing scientific papers. The idea…
Today, an estimated 2.2 billion people still have either limited or no access to the internet, largely because they live in remote places. But that number could drop this year, thanks to tests of stratospheric airships, uncrewed aircraft, and other…
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 big play for science —Will Douglas Heaven In the three years since ChatGPT’s explosive debut, OpenAI’s…
In the three years since ChatGPT’s explosive debut, OpenAI’s technology has upended a remarkable range of everyday activities at home, at work, in schools—anywhere people have a browser open or a phone out, which is everywhere. Now OpenAI is making…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. How do tech companies check if their users are kids? This question has taken on new urgency…
In an era where business, education, and even casual conversations occur via screens, sound has become a differentiating factor. We obsess over lighting, camera angles, and virtual backgrounds, but how we sound can be just as critical to credibility, trust,…
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 the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens How large is a large language model? We now coexist…
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. “Dr. Google” had its issues. Can ChatGPT Health do better? For the past two decades, there’s been a…
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. In the final weeks of 2025, the battle over regulating artificial…
This week marked a rather unpleasant anniversary: It’s a year since Texas reported a case of measles—the start of a significant outbreak that ended up spreading across multiple states. Since the start of January 2025, there have been over 2,500…
For the past two decades, there’s been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online. The practice was so common that it gained the pejorative moniker “Dr. Google.” But times are changing,…
This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in tech by Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands. It’s supposed to be frigid in Davos this…
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. Yann LeCun’s new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models Yann LeCun is a Turing Award…
In 2026, I’m going to be closely watching the price of lithium. If you’re not in the habit of obsessively tracking commodity markets, I certainly don’t blame you. (Though the news lately definitely makes the case that minerals can have…
Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry’s current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately…
There are many paths AI evolution could take. On one end of the spectrum, AI is dismissed as a marginal fad, another bubble fueled by notoriety and misallocated capital. On the other end, it’s cast as a dystopian force, destined…
Governments plan to pour $1.3 trillion into AI infrastructure by 2030 to invest in “sovereign AI,” with the premise being that countries should be in control of their own AI capabilities. The funds include financing for domestic data centers, locally…
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. All anyone wants to talk about at Davos is AI and Donald Trump —Mat Honan, MIT Technology Review’s…
This story first appeared in The Debrief, our subscriber-only newsletter about the biggest news in tech by Mat Honan, Editor in Chief. Subscribe to read the next edition as soon as it lands. Hello from the World Economic Forum annual meeting…
The story of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is really a story of businesses learning to organize themselves around the latest, greatest technology of the times. In the 1960s through the ’80s, mainframes, material requirements planning (MRP), and manufacturing resource planning…
AI agents are moving beyond coding assistants and customer service chatbots into the operational core of the enterprise. The ROI is promising, but autonomy without alignment is a recipe for chaos. Business leaders need to lay the essential foundations now.…