Two NASA astronauts have just launched into space aboard SpaceX’s brand new Crew Dragon vehicle, en route to the International Space Station. It is the first time the company has sent humans into space, and the first time in nine years Americans have launched into space from US soil.  What happened: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Crew Dragon was launched at 3:22 p.m. Eastern Time from...

The news: The United Nations is endorsing a computer simulation tool that it believes will help governments tackle the world’s biggest problems, from gender inequality to climate change. Global challenges: In 2015, UN member states signed up for a set of 17 sustainable-development goals that are due to be reached by 2030. They include things like “zero poverty,” “no hunger,” and...

The news: Twitter placed a warning label on a tweet from US President Donald Trump early on May 29, saying that it violated the platform’s rules against “glorifying violence.” In the tweet, sent at 12:53 a.m., the president called Minneapolis protesters demonstrating against the death of a black man in police custody “THUGS,” threatened military intervention, and said that “When the...

An experimental tool helps researchers wade through the overwhelming amount of coronavirus literature to check whether emerging studies follow scientific consensus. Why it matters: Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a flood of relevant preprints and papers, produced by people with varying degrees of expertise and vetted through varying degrees of peer review. This has...

Four years ago, a Breitbart writer famed for championing a harassment campaign targeting women in video games used his air time during a White House press briefing to blast Twitter. He was angry that he’d lost his verification badge, that little blue check mark, after the company said he had repeatedly violated the platform’s rules against inciting harassment. But he insisted that Twitter was...

The news: Two days after Twitter added fact-checking labels to US President Donald Trump’s misleading tweets about mail-in voting, the president has signed an executive order aimed at weakening protections for social-media companies that moderate user content. Why: Trump has promoted a long-running belief among conservatives that social-media companies are biased against their political...

Perhaps the single biggest implication of reopening national economies is that responsibility and thus liability for dealing with the covid-19 pandemic will shift from the public to the private sector. Fortune 500 CEOs right through to small business owners will soon be making decisions that affect not only the health of their business but also their people—employees, contractors, customers,...

About a month after shelter-in-place orders began in her area, Shaylee Mansfield—an 11-year-old deaf actress in Austin, Texas—posted a video on Twitter. For over 30 years, DHH people fought for captioning. More people r now relying on technology during coronavirus. Shaylee Mansfield, Deaf girl, had enough! She sends a loud message to @instagram to add #instacaptioning on their platform for...

The news: Twitter added a fact checking label to two tweets from US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Tuesday. The tweets from @realDonaldTrump (the president’s popular personal account that also serves as his main social media presence) claimed that mail-in voting would be “substantially fraudulent” and lead to a “Rigged Election.”  It is the first time that Twitter has...

The news: Misinformation on social media is often fueled by older adults, who share fake news and dubious links more than other age groups—up to seven times more than their younger counterparts. But a new analysis suggests people often make incorrect assumptions about why this might be, which leads some attempts at halting the spread of misinformation to failure.  Ageist stereotypes: Nadia...

This week on Radio Corona, join us for a discussion about digital contract tracing initiatives with Gideon Lichfield, our editor-in-chief, Danny Weitzner of MIT’s CSAIL, and Bobbie Johnson, a Tech Review Senior Editor. Bobbie is part of the team at TR that has been reporting on contact tracing apps around the world. Danny has been working on a privacy preserving protocol for these apps at...

The news: Virgin Orbit failed in the first test of its LauncherOne rocket yesterday, after seven years of development and testing. The rocket was transported by a Boeing 747 and released over the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California. It was supposed to fall for a few seconds, ignite, and then propel itself into low Earth orbit. Instead, it ignited and fell into the sea. The flight had been...

The moonshot program to come up with a vaccine against covid-19 is advancing faster than anyone could have hoped. At least four experimental vaccines have been shown to protect monkeys, and three of those are already being given to brave human volunteers. The aim is a vaccine by January, and money is no object. On May 21, the US said it would throw $1.2 billion behind a vaccine from Oxford...

This report is part of “The global AI agenda,” a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and challenges, and seeks to understand how organizations...

In a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey, a handful of people stand around the base of a white box as big as a house. Every few seconds a plastic bin emerges from an opening in its sleek walls. Someone reaches in and grabs an item of lingerie or swimwear, and then the bin is gone again—whisked back inside the box to be restacked among 33,000 others arranged in row upon row of floor-to-ceiling...

On Wednesday, May 27, at 4:33 p.m. US Eastern Time, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are scheduled to launch into orbit for a rendezvous with the International Space Station. This is standard stuff, except for three important facts: it will be the first time in almost nine years that American astronauts have flown to space from American soil; it will be the first time in history...

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two of the most hyped drugs being studied as treatments for covid-19, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump’s repeated promotion during his public appearances. Trump told reporters this week he had been taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure. But a new study published Friday in The Lancet suggests not just that the drugs don’t offer...

Brandon Moak felt as if a freight train had hit him.  It was mid-March, and the cofounder and CTO of the autonomous- trucking startup Embark Trucks had been keeping tabs on the emergence of covid-19. As a shelter-in-place order went into effect throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, where Embark is based, Moak and his team were forced to ground almost all their 13 self-driving semi-trucks (a...

A day in the life of Salesforce workers will look very different when they return to the software company’s offices. The San Francisco–based business says all of its 49,000 employees can continue working from home for the rest of the year. But as regions relax stay-at-home rules and the company reopens in phases, employees who are cleared to return will start their day by...

Kathleen M. Carley and her team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity have been tracking bots and influence campaigns for a long time. Across US and foreign elections, natural disasters, and other politicized events, the level of bot involvement is normally between 10 and 20%, she says. But in a new study, the researchers have found that bots...

The news: North Dakota was one of the first American states to launch a coronavirus contact tracing app, in April. Now, several weeks into the process of reopening the state, the government in Bismarck says it will take advantage of the newly released Apple-Google exposure notification system—but that doing so will require it to run two separate apps. That even one of the...

Studies on macaques suggest that infection with the coronavirus grants some immunity to catching it again—and that vaccines also seem to offer some protection. The questions: Does getting infected by the coronavirus make you immune? And can a vaccine do the same job? In two studies published today in Science, a group led by researchers at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess...

Apple and Google are releasing their much-anticipated “exposure notification” technology to help global health authorities track the coronavirus pandemic. Governments around the world can now use the technology in their own contact tracing apps, subject to approval by the two tech giants.  Contact tracing—tracking down those who may have been exposed to an infectious person—is an...

The news: Astronomers have made what are possibly the first ever observations of a planet in the process of being born. The newly-released images are of a very young star system called AB Aurigae, about 520 light-years away. They feature a massive disc of swirling gas and dust. The disc features a prominent twist that could indicate where a new planet is being born. The findings were reported...