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The complexity of biology has long been a double-edged sword for scientific and medical progress. On one hand, the intricacy of systems (like the human immune response) offers countless opportunities for breakthroughs in medicine and healthcare. On the other hand, that very complexity has often stymied researchers, leaving some of the most significant medical challenges—like…

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 AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could…

Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas.  A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work 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. Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology.  But it’s high…

Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds…

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 Africa needs to do to become a major AI player Africa is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies. But researchers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for…

Rather than analyzing the news this week, I thought I’d lift the hood a bit on how we make it.  I’ve spent most of this year being pretty convinced that Donald Trump would be the 47th president of the United States. Even so, like most people, I was completely surprised by the scope of his…

Kessel Okinga-Koumu paced around a crowded hallway. It was her first time presenting at the Deep Learning Indaba, she told the crowd gathered to hear her, filled with researchers from Africa’s machine-learning community. The annual weeklong conference (‘Indaba’ is a Zulu word for gathering), was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University…

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 could eat quantum computing’s lunch Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse…

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. Earlier this week, Americans cast their votes in a seminal presidential election. But it wasn’t just the future president of the US that was on the ballot. Ten…

Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics. Those expectations have been especially high in physics and chemistry, where the weird effects of quantum mechanics come into play. In theory, 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. Trump’s win is a tragic loss for climate progress —James Temple Donald Trump’s decisive victory is a stunning setback for the fight against climate change. The Republican president-elect’s return to the White House…

Donald Trump’s decisive victory is a stunning setback for the fight against climate change. The Republican president-elect’s return to the White House means the US is going to squander precious momentum, unraveling hard-won policy progress that was just beginning to pay off, all for the second time in less than a decade.  It comes at…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Voters have elected Donald Trump to a second term in the White House. In the days leading up to the election, I kept thinking about what four years means for climate change…

The world’s first barcode, designed in 1948, took more than 25 years to make it out of the lab and onto a retail package. Since then, the barcode has done much more than make grocery checkouts faster—it has remade our understanding of how physical objects can be identified and tracked, creating a new pace 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. Life-seeking, ice-melting robots could punch through Europa’s icy shell At long last, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is on its way. It launched on October 14 and is now en route to its target:…

At long last, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission is on its way. After overcoming financial and technological hurdles, the $5 billion mission launched on October 14 from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. It is now en route to its target: Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa, whose frozen shell almost certainly conceals a warm saltwater ocean. When the spacecraft…

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 do jumping spiders find sexy? How DIY tech is offering insights into the animal mind. Studying the minds of other animals comes with a challenge that human psychologists don’t usually face: Your…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI’s Olivier Godement, head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, are on a whistle-stop tour around the world. Last week, I sat down with the…

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 breakthrough gene-editing tool will help the world cope with climate change Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple…

Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions. “The potential is huge,” says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry…

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 brought a new web search tool to ChatGPT The news: ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries. Previously it was restricted to generating answers from…

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. Over the past month or so, I’ve been working on a story about exosomes. You might have seen them advertised—they’re being touted as a hot new beauty treatment,…