Even amidst stay-at-home orders and restricted mobility, the photographers commissioned for stories this year were able to connect us with events around the world.

From the MIT Technology Review art team, here are some of our very favorite illustrations of the year:

This was a year we needed technology to save us. A pandemic raced over the land, there were wildfires, uneasy political divisions, and we gasped in the miasma of social media. In 2020, the ways in which technology can help or hurt never seemed clearer. In the success column we have covid-19 vaccines. But this…

America’s first confirmed wrongful arrest by facial recognition technology happened in January 2020. Robert Williams, a Black man, was arrested in his driveway just outside Detroit, with his wife and young daughter watching. He spent the night in jail. The next day in the questioning room, a detective slid a picture across the table to Williams of a different Black man who had been caught on...

A spacesuit is more like a miniature spacecraft you wear around your body than an item of clothing. It’s pressurized, it’s decked out with life support systems, and it’s likely to look pretty cool. But should the suit fail, you’re toast.  No one has ever died because of a faulty spacesuit, but that doesn’t mean current models are perfect. Whether it’s for launch into space or...

When Joe Biden takes over the US presidency on January 20, 2021, he intends to make climate change a centerpiece of his administration. As well as rejoining the Paris agreement, reinforcing the Clean Air Act, and restoring the Clean Power Plan, he will also have an opportunity to strengthen climate research. One way he can do that is by bolstering Earth observation (EO) programs—the orbital...

Valerie Fitzhugh has watched the news a lot more over the past four years, certainly more than she remembers doing at any other point in her life. In the first months of the pandemic, she kept hearing one message, from news outlet to news outlet, that she couldn’t stop thinking about: there weren’t enough people of color, particularly Black people, participating in clinical trials for the wave...

The consensus is that 2020 has been “the worst.” But there is reason to look back at this year and find the unexpected silver linings of quarantine, particularly when it comes to how we connect with other people. None of these benefits compare with the death and suffering and misery of a terrible year, but here’s a list of the small wins that we can hold onto and nurture as we finally...

In 2018, Sam Cole, a reporter at Motherboard, discovered a new and disturbing corner of the internet. A Reddit user by the name of “deepfakes” was posting nonconsensual fake porn videos using an AI algorithm to swap celebrities’ faces into real porn. Cole sounded the alarm on the phenomenon, right as the technology was about to explode. A year later, deepfake porn had spread far beyond...

This spring, while the US government was spinning its wheels on an official covid-19 response, countries around the world were rolling out national contact tracing apps. Beginning with Singapore in mid-March, more than 40 countries have launched digital exposure notification systems, to varying degrees of success. Our Covid Tracing Tracker logs each country’s app and the technologies used,...

Earlier this month a mutated variant of the coronavirus was detected in the UK, setting off alarms across Europe and causing some countries to ban travelers from Britain. But it’s still not clear that the new variant is much more easily transmitted, as some scientists have warned. Moreover, several companies with authorized vaccines or therapeutic drugs for covid-19—Moderna,...

There are two stories you hear about making a living as an artist in the digital age, and they are diametrically opposed. One comes from Silicon Valley and its boosters in the media. There’s never been a better time to be an artist, it goes. If you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got a recording studio.…

Experts are debating the pros and cons of covid-19 vaccine passports or other types of certification as they attempt to begin reopening public spaces. The idea seems simple on its face: those who can prove they’ve been vaccinated for covid-19 would be able to go places and do things that unvaccinated people would not. There’s early evidence that the vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug...

On November 30, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao pinned an image to his Twitter profile. In it, a soldier stands on an Australian flag and grins maniacally as he holds a bloodied knife to a boy’s throat. The boy, whose face is covered by a semi-transparent veil, carries a lamb. Alongside the image, Zhao tweeted, “Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian...

Many companies expected 2020 to be a challenging year. They anticipated technological shifts that would affect their business—like the transition from combustion to electric vehicles for automotive manufacturers—or ongoing instability due to raging trade wars or Brexit. But the impact of the covid pandemic on top of these challenges has, for many companies, been unprecedented. Never before...

In some stores, sophisticated systems are tracking customers in almost every imaginable way, from recognizing their faces to gauging their age, their mood, and virtually gussying them up with makeup. The systems rarely ask for people’s permission, and for the most part they don’t have to. In our season 1 finale, we look at the…

In part-three of this latest series, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review jump on the court to unpack just how much things are changing.  We meet: Donnie Scott, senior vice president of public security, IDEMIA Michael D’Auria, vice president of business development, Second Spectrum Jason Gay, sports columnist, The Wall Street Journal…

What seemed so impossible at the beginning of the pandemic is now real: vaccines are here, in record time. They bring much-needed hope to a holiday season shadowed by death and fear. While authorities work out details for this mass vaccination campaign, though, the public is still waiting for answers to fundamental questions. Who gets the vaccine? Who will know if we’ve gotten it? Will...

When resident physicians at Stanford Medical Center—many of whom work on the front lines of the covid-19 pandemic—found out that only seven out of over 1,300 of them had been prioritized for the first 5,000 doses of the covid vaccine, they were shocked. Then, when they saw who else had made the list, including administrators and doctors seeing patients remotely from home, they were angry....

A rising wave of covid-19 cases in the south of England starting in September caused genomic researchers to look more closely. What they found was disturbing: a new virus variant is causing half the cases. Not only does it have a lot of mutations, but several of the genetic alterations are predicted to make possibly significant changes to its spike protein, a part of the virus that plays a key...

In the early 1970s, Steve Gorad ’63 had a successful career as a clinical psychologist. He was in charge of the alcohol unit at Boston State Hospital and had a private practice, but he was restless. “It wasn’t enough,” he says. “I was a long-haired hippie writing [draft exemption] letters for people who didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I had doubts about what we really knew about...

Looking back to the start of the pandemic, I am struck by our community’s formidable strength. In March 2020, we did not know what it would take to sustain MIT’s great mission through this crisis. Since then, we have found a way together, and we have made it work. That accomplishment belongs to every member of our community—and thanks to our immense shared effort, MIT is still MIT. We forge...

From the choir rehearsal in Washington to family gatherings in Chicago, numerous covid-19 “superspreading” events have seen one person infect many others. MIT researchers who studied about 60 such events found that they have a much larger impact than expected.  “Superspreading events are likely more important than most of us had initially realized,” says senior author James...

The search for extraterrestrial life has largely focused on Mars, but scientists at MIT, Cardiff University, and elsewhere reported surprising findings in September of what may be signs of life in the clouds of Venus.  While Venus is similar to Earth in size, mass, and rocky composition, its surface temperatures reach 900 °F, and its atmosphere is suffused with thick clouds of sulfuric...