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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. Andrew Ng’s new model lets you play around with solar geoengineering to see what would happen AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the…

As a lifelong disabled person who constantly copes with multiple conditions, I have a natural tendency to view emerging technologies with skepticism. Most new things are built for the majority of people—in this case, people without disabilities—and the truth of the matter is there’s no guarantee I’ll have access to them. There are certainly exceptions…

AI pioneer Andrew Ng has released a simple online tool that allows anyone to tinker with the dials of a solar geoengineering model, exploring what might happen if nations attempt to counteract climate change by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere. The concept of solar geoengineering was born from the realization that the planet has…

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. This week, we’re acknowledging a special birthday. It’s 100 years since EEG (electroencephalography) was first used to measure electrical activity in a person’s brain. The finding was revolutionary.…

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. Beyond gene-edited babies: the possible paths for tinkering with human evolution Editing human embryos is restricted in much of the world—and making an edited baby is fully illegal in most countries surveyed by…

Open-source AI is everywhere right now. The problem is, no one agrees on what it actually is. Now we may finally have an answer. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the self-appointed arbiters of what it means to be open source, has released a new definition, which it hopes will help lawmakers develop regulations to protect…

In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because it was so easy to use. With its discovery, Doudna explained, humanity had achieved the…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. On a sunny morning in late spring, I found myself carefully examining an array of somewhat unassuming-looking rocks at the American Museum of Natural History.  I’ve gotten to see some cutting-edge technologies…

Even the most capable robots aren’t great at sensing human touch; you typically need a computer science degree or at least a tablet to interact with them effectively. That may change, thanks to robots that can now sense and interpret touch without being covered in high-tech artificial skin. It’s a significant step toward robots that…

In 2019, an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense released a call for research projects to help the military deal with the copious amount of plastic waste generated when troops are sent to work in remote locations or disaster zones. The agency wanted a system that could convert food wrappers and water bottles, among…

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 rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources For nearly as long as we’ve extracted materials from our planet, we’ve been trying to predict how long they will be…

Leaving aside meteorites that strike Earth’s surface and spacecraft that get flung out of its orbit, the quantity of materials available on this planet isn’t really changing all that much. That simple fact of our finite resources becomes clearer and more daunting as the pace of technological change advances and our society requires an ever…

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 fine-tune AI for prosperity Predictions abound on how the growing list of generative AI models will transform the way we work and organize our lives, providing instant advice on everything from…

When it comes to climate breakdown and the extinction crisis, the question I get most often is: How can we have hope?  People ask me this in a range of contexts—in Q&A sessions, in emails, and on podcasts and radio shows, whether I’m doing outreach for my novels, like A Children’s Bible or Dinosaurs, or…

When Chad Syverson loads the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website these days looking for the latest data on productivity, he does so with a sense of optimism that he hasn’t felt in ages. The numbers for the last year or so have been generally strong for various financial and business reasons, rebounding from the…

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. If you follow drone news closely—and you’re forgiven if you don’t—you may have noticed over the last few months that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been quite busy. For decades, the agency had been…

Whether pursuing digital transformation, exploring the potential of AI, or simply looking to simplify and optimize existing IT infrastructure, today’s organizations must do this in the context of increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. These complicated architectures are here to stay—2023 research by Enterprise Strategy Group, for example, found that 87% of organizations expect their applications 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. The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands…

There is a photo of my daughter that I love. She is sitting, smiling, in our old back garden, chubby hands grabbing at the cool grass. It was taken in 2013, when she was almost one, on an aging Samsung digital camera. I originally stored it on a laptop before transferring it to a chunky…

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 the future holds for those born today Happy birthday, baby. You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your…

Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to “paranormal dark cabaret afternoon” and “synth space,” and streaming has become the default. Radio DJs have been replaced by artificial intelligence, and the ritual of discovering something new is neatly…

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. Drones have been a mainstay technology among militaries, hobbyists, and first responders alike for more than a decade, and in that time the range available has skyrocketed.…

A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death. His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain.  Jean Hébert, a new hire with the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is expected to lead a major new initiative around “functional…

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. This week I came across research that suggests aging hits us in waves. You might feel like you’re on a slow, gradual decline, but, at the molecular level,…