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 are getting organoids pregnant with human embryos At first glance, it looks like the start of a…
Enterprises are sitting on vast quantities of unstructured data, from call records and video footage to customer complaint histories and supply chain signals. Yet this invaluable business intelligence, estimated to make up as much as 90% of the data generated…
For offshore wind power in the US, the new year is bringing new legal battles. On December 22, the Trump administration announced it would pause the leases of five wind farms currently under construction off the US East Coast. Developers…
When the concept of “Web 3.0” first emerged about a decade ago the idea was clear: Create a more user-controlled internet that lets you do everything you can now, except without servers or intermediaries to manage the flow of information.…
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. Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers deployed an invisible automated intelligence…
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. I am writing this because one of my editors woke up…
Nandan Nilekani can’t stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state capacity that started with Aadhaar—the world’s largest digital identity system. Aadhaar means “foundation” in Hindi, and…
As MIT navigates a difficult and constantly changing higher education landscape, I believe our best response is not easy but simple: Keep doing our very best work. The presidential initiatives we’ve launched since fall 2024 are a vital part of…
Jaden Chizuruoke May ’29 worked with teammates Rihanna Arouna ’29 and Marian Akinsoji ’29 to design the chemically powered model car whose framework he is building in this scene from the Huang-Hobbs BioMaker Space, where students have a chance to…
Ever since nuclear fusion was discovered in the 1930s, scientists have wondered if we could somehow replicate and harness the phenomenon behind starlight—the smashing together of hydrogen atoms to form helium and a stupendous amount of clean energy. Fusing hydrogen…
Few people, if any, contemplate stars—celestial or cinematic—the way Aomawa Shields does. An astronomer and astrobiologist, Shields explores the potential habitability of planets beyond our solar system. But she is also a classically trained actor—and that’s helped shape her professional…
Water shortages in Southern California made an indelible impression on Evelyn Wang ’00 when she was growing up in Los Angeles. “I was quite young, perhaps in first grade,” she says. “But I remember we weren’t allowed to turn our…
When business leaders talk about digital transformation, their focus often jumps straight to cloud platforms, AI tools, or collaboration software. Yet, one of the most fundamental enablers of how organizations now work, and how employees experience that work, is often…
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 Kenya’s Great Carbon Valley: a bold new gamble to fight climate change In June last year,…
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 an industry in constant flux, sticking your neck out to…
The Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has been preparing for a surgery that might never happen. His idea? Swap a sick person’s head—or perhaps just the brain—onto a younger, healthier body. Canavero caused a stir in 2017 when he announced that…
The most amazing drummer on the internet My daughter introduced me to El Estepario Siberiano’s YouTube channel a few months back, and I have been obsessed ever since. The Spanish drummer (real name: Jorge Garrido) posts videos of himself playing…
Have you ever felt “velvetmist”? It’s a “complex and subtle emotion that elicits feelings of comfort, serenity, and a gentle sense of floating.” It’s peaceful, but more ephemeral and intangible than contentment. It might be evoked by the sight of…
We’re in the midst of a global mental-health crisis. More than a billion people worldwide suffer from a mental-health condition, according to the World Health Organization. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is growing in many demographics, particularly young people,…
Pollution from textile production—dyes, chemicals, and heavy metals like lead and cadmium—is common in the waters of the Buriganga River as it runs through Dhaka, Bangladesh. It’s among many harms posed by a garment sector that was once synonymous with…
It’s been a busy and productive year here at MIT Technology Review. We published magazine issues on power, creativity, innovation, bodies, relationships, and security. We hosted 14 exclusive virtual conversations with our editors and outside experts in our subscriber-only series,…
It’s getting harder to beat the heat. During the summer of 2025, heat waves knocked out power grids in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Global warming means more people need air-conditioning, which requires more power and strains grids.…
If the past 12 months have taught us anything, it’s that the AI hype train is showing no signs of slowing. It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of the year, DeepSeek had yet to turn the entire industry…
Climate news hasn’t been great in 2025. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit record highs (again). This year is set to be either the second or third warmest on record. Climate-fueled disasters like wildfires in California and flooding in Indonesia and Pakistan…
In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. When he landed in Illinois, he took a taxi to a mall and headed directly to the Apple Store to purchase a new…
At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses gently into the receptive lining of the uterus and then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of a future placenta appear. This…
Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. Then something impossible happens. JD Vance shows up at…
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, summed it up in three words: “This is embarrassing.” Hassabis was replying on X to an overexcited post by Sébastien Bubeck, a research scientist at the rival firm OpenAI, announcing that two mathematicians had…
The earth around Lake Naivasha, a shallow freshwater basin in south-central Kenya, does not seem to want to lie still. Ash from nearby Mount Longonot, which erupted as recently as the 1860s, remains in the ground. Obsidian caves and jagged…
At some point next month, a handful of volunteers will be injected with two experimental gene therapies as part of an unusual clinical trial. The drugs are potential longevity therapies, says Ivan Morgunov, the CEO of Unlimited Bio, the company…
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. China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries. In the past decade,…
In August 2025, Wang Lei decided it was finally time to say goodbye to his electric vehicle. Wang, who is 39, had bought the car in 2016, when EVs still felt experimental in Beijing. It was a compact Chinese brand.…
In just a couple of weeks, we’ll be bidding farewell to 2025. And what a year it has been! Artificial intelligence is being incorporated into more aspects of our lives, weight-loss drugs have expanded in scope, and there have been…
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 8 worst technology flops of 2025 Welcome to our annual list of the worst, least successful, and…
Welcome to our annual list of the worst, least successful, and simply dumbest technologies of the year. This year, politics was a recurring theme. Donald Trump swept back into office and used his executive pen to reshape the fortunes of…
Judging from headlines and social media posts in recent years, one might reasonably assume that AI is going to fix the power grid, cure the world’s diseases, and finish my holiday shopping for me. But maybe there’s just a whole…
Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of the family’s most vital chores: fetching water. Like most homes in his Palestinian…
Rolling out enterprise-grade AI means climbing two steep cliffs at once. First, understanding and implementing the tech itself. And second, creating the cultural conditions where employees can maximize its value. While the technical hurdles are significant, the human element can…
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 great AI hype correction of 2025 Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app…
Can I ask you a question: How do you feel about AI right now? Are you still excited? When you hear that OpenAI or Google just dropped a new model, do you still get that buzz? Or has the shine…
In late September, a Spanish military plane carrying the country’s defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly the subject of a kind of attack—not by a rocket or anti-aircraft rounds, but by radio transmissions that jammed its GPS…
When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing’s Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn’t yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars…
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 AI Hype Correction package AI is going to reproduce human intelligence. AI will eliminate disease. AI…
It’s a weird time to be an AI doomer. This small but influential community of researchers, scientists, and policy experts believes, in the simplest terms, that AI could get so good it could be bad—very, very bad—for humanity. Though many…
Each time you’ve heard a borderline outlandish idea of what AI will be capable of, it often turns out that Sam Altman was, if not the first to articulate it, at least the most persuasive and influential voice behind it. …
Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets software projects up for serious long term-maintenance problems. The problem 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. Expanded carrier screening: Is it worth it? Carrier screening tests would-be parents for hidden genetic mutations that might…
It’s a scorching October day in Bangkok and I’m wandering through the exhibits at the Thai Space Expo, held in one of the city’s busiest shopping malls, when I do a double take. Amid the flashy space suits and model…
This week I’ve been thinking about babies. Healthy ones. Perfect ones. As you may have read last week, my colleague Antonio Regalado came face to face with a marketing campaign in the New York subway asking people to “have your best…
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. Solar geoengineering startups are getting serious Solar geoengineering aims to manipulate the climate by bouncing sunlight back into…
Solar geoengineering aims to manipulate the climate by bouncing sunlight back into space. In theory, it could ease global warming. But as interest in the idea grows, so do concerns about potential consequences. A startup called Stardust Solutions recently raised…
In this exclusive subscriber-only eBook, you’ll learn about a new method that scientists have uncovered to look at the ways our bodies are aging. by Jessica Hamzelou October 14, 2025 Table of Contents: Related Stories: Access all subscriber-only eBooks:
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 one controversial startup hopes to cool the planet Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change—for…
At a regional hospital, a cardiac patient’s lab results sit behind layers of encryption, accessible to his surgeon but shielded from those without strictly need-to-know status. Across the street at a credit union, a small business owner anxiously awaits the…
Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change—for a price. The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once…
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 State of AI: A vision of the world in 2030 There are huge gulfs of opinion when…
Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday, writers from both publications debate one aspect of the generative AI revolution reshaping global power. You can read the rest of…
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. 4 technologies that didn’t make our 2026 breakthroughs list If you’re a longtime reader, you probably know that…
If you’re a longtime reader, you probably know that our newsroom selects 10 breakthroughs every year that we think will define the future. This group exercise is mostly fun and always engrossing, but at times it can also be quite…
The past year has marked a turning point in the corporate AI conversation. After a period of eager experimentation, organizations are now confronting a more complex reality: While investment in AI has never been higher, the path from pilot 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. AI chatbots can sway voters better than political advertisements The news: Chatting with a politically biased AI model is…
One day this fall, I watched an electronic sign outside the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in Manhattan switch seamlessly between an ad for makeup and one promoting the website Pickyourbaby.com, which promises a way for potential parents to use genetic tests…
In January 2024, the phone rang in homes all around New Hampshire. On the other end was Joe Biden’s voice, urging Democrats to “save your vote” by skipping the primary. It sounded authentic, but it wasn’t. The call was a…
In 2024, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, Shamaine Daniels, used an AI chatbot named Ashley to call voters and carry on conversations with them. “Hello. My name is Ashley, and I’m an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels’s run…
Most organizations feel the imperative to keep pace with continuing advances in AI capabilities, as highlighted in a recent MIT Technology Review Insights report. That clearly has security implications, particularly as organizations navigate a surge in the volume, velocity, 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. OpenAI has trained its LLM to confess to bad behavior What’s new: OpenAI is testing a new way…
Sometimes geothermal hot spots are obvious, marked by geysers and hot springs on the planet’s surface. But in other places, they’re obscured thousands of feet underground. Now AI could help uncover these hidden pockets of potential power. A startup company…
As many of us are ramping up with shopping, baking, and planning for the holiday season, nuclear power plants are also getting ready for one of their busiest seasons of the year. Here in the US, nuclear reactors follow predictable…
OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company can make an LLM produce what they call a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out…
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. Everything you need to know about AI and coding AI has already transformed how code is written, but…
In 1913, Henry Ford cut the time it took to build a Model T from 12 hours to just over 90 minutes. He accomplished this feat through a revolutionary breakthrough in process design: Instead of skilled craftsmen building a car…
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 State of AI: Welcome to the economic singularity —David Rotman and Richard Waters Any far-reaching new technology…
Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday for the next two weeks, writers from both publications will debate one aspect of the generative AI revolution reshaping global…
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 AI model trained on prison phone calls now looks for planned crimes in those calls A US…
We have some exciting news: Nominations are now open for MIT Technology Review’s 2026 Innovators Under 35 competition. This annual list recognizes 35 of the world’s best young scientists and inventors, and our newsroom has produced it for more than…
A US telecom company trained an AI model on years of inmates’ phone and video calls and is now piloting that model to scan their calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes. Securus Technologies president…
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 we still don’t know about weight-loss drugs Weight-loss drugs have been back in the news this week.…
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. Weight-loss drugs have been back in the news this week. First, we heard…
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 year’s UN climate talks avoided fossil fuels, again Over the past few weeks in Belem, Brazil, attendees…
If we didn’t have pictures and videos, I almost wouldn’t believe the imagery that came out of this year’s UN climate talks. Over the past few weeks in Belem, Brazil, attendees dealt with oppressive heat and flooding, and at one…
Today’s IT leaders face competing mandates to do more (“make us an ‘AI-first’ enterprise—yesterday”) with less (“no new hires for at least the next six months”). VMware has become a focal point of these dueling directives. It remains central 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. How AI is changing the economy There’s a lot at stake when it comes to understanding how AI…
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. Last year, the fantasy author Joanna Maciejewska went…
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 AlphaFold: A conversation with a Google DeepMind Nobel laureate In 2017, fresh off a PhD…
For decades, business continuity planning meant preparing for anomalous events like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, or regional power outages. In anticipation of these rare disasters, IT teams built playbooks, ran annual tests, crossed their fingers, and hoped they’d never have to…
Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday, writers from both publications debate one aspect of the generative AI revolution reshaping global power. In this week’s conversation MIT…
In 2017, fresh off a PhD on theoretical chemistry, John Jumper heard rumors that Google DeepMind had moved on from building AI that played games with superhuman skill and was starting up a secret project to predict the structures of…
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 man building a starter kit for civilization You live in a house you designed and built…
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’re learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies At a checkup a few years ago,…
It has started to get really wintry here in London over the last few days. The mornings are frosty, the wind is biting, and it’s already dark by the time I pick my kids up from school. The darkness in…
Everything is a conspiracy theory now. MIT Technology Review’s series, “The New Conspiracy Age,” explores how this moment is changing science and technology. Watch a discussion with our editors and Mike Rothschild, journalist and conspiracy theory expert, about how we…
Digital resilience—the ability to prevent, withstand, and recover from digital disruptions—has long been a strategic priority for enterprises. With the rise of agentic AI, the urgency for robust resilience is greater than ever. Agentic AI represents a new generation of…
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. Three things to know about the future of electricity The International Energy Agency recently released the latest version…
One of the dominant storylines I’ve been following through 2025 is electricity—where and how demand is going up, how much it costs, and how this all intersects with that topic everyone is talking about: AI. Last week, the International Energy…
Manufacturing is getting a major system upgrade. As AI amplifies existing technologies—like digital twins, the cloud, edge computing, and the industrial internet of things (IIoT)—it is enabling factory operations teams to shift from reactive, isolated problem-solving to proactive, systemwide optimization.…
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. Quantum physicists have shrunk and “de-censored” DeepSeek R1 The news: A group of quantum physicists at Spanish firm…
A group of quantum physicists claims to have created a version of the powerful reasoning AI model DeepSeek R1 that strips out the censorship built into the original by its Chinese creators. The scientists at Multiverse Computing, a Spanish firm…
The Ryder Cup is an almost-century-old tournament pitting Europe against the United States in an elite showcase of golf skill and strategy. At the 2025 event, nearly a quarter of a million spectators gathered to watch three days of fierce…
Training an AI model to predict equipment failures is an engineering achievement. But it’s not until prediction meets action—the moment that model successfully flags a malfunctioning machine—that true business transformation occurs. One technical milestone lives in a proof-of-concept deck; the…
Google today unveiled Gemini 3, a major upgrade to its flagship multimodal model. The firm says the new model is better at reasoning, has more fluid multimodal capabilities (the ability to work across voice, text or images), and will work…