Remember all those articles you read in January with headlines like “2020 trends to watch in your industry?” You tossed those predictions out long ago. But while everyone knows that the coronavirus pandemic changed everything, none of us is sure how. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s...

American citizens are inundated with political messages—on social networks, in their news feeds, through email, text messages, and phone calls. It’s not an accident that people get bombarded: political groups prefer a “multimodal” voter contact strategy, where they use many platforms and multiple attempts to persuade a citizen to engage with their cause or candidate. An ad is followed by...

Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a few the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his neuroscience company Neuralink, formed in 2016, believe that electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about. While none of...

The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while working from home. How it works: The online lab platform allows scientists to log on through a web browser. On a blank canvas, they draw the skeletal structure of the molecular compounds they want to...

Nobody knows what will happen in the future, but some guesses are a lot better than others. A kicked football will not reverse in midair and return to the kicker’s foot. A half-eaten cheeseburger will not become whole again. A broken arm will not heal overnight. By drawing on a fundamental description of cause and effect found in Einstein’s theory of special relativity, researchers from...

Grace Windheim had heard of deepfakes before. But she had never considered how to make one. It was a viral meme using the technology that led her to research the possibility—and discover that it was super easy and completely free. Within a day, she had created a step-by-step YouTube tutorial to walk others through the process. “Making one of these deepfakes and overlaying audio is not as...

Hacking isn’t all 1s and 0s—more often than you’d think, it’s about people. A Tesla employee was offered a $1 million bribe in early August to install ransomware on the car company’s networks in Nevada, a scheme that could have netted a cybercrime gang many more millions in extortion, according to a newly unsealed US Justice Department indictment (pdf). Egor Igorevich Kriuchkov, a...

On Sunday evening, Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. By Tuesday, a 16-year-old Texan, Kel, had built a one-page website, Justice for Jacob Blake, that offered context, templates for contacting officials, mental-health resources, and donation links. To build it, Kel turned to Carrd, a simple tool that lets anyone throw together a site in minutes. All it takes is...

What weird bugs did you pick up last time you rode a subway train? Just as the covid-19 pandemic was taking off, a global network of scientists began mapping the DNA of urban microbes and using AI to look for patterns. Join host Jennifer Strong as she rides along on a subway-swabbing mission and talks to scientists racing to find an existing drug that might treat the disease. We meet:...

Quantum computing has the potential to handle complex problems at hyper-fast speeds. What makes this possible is the way it exploits qubits—typically subatomic particles such as electrons—that use quantum properties to represent numerous combinations beyond the 0 or 1 of conventional bits. When pairs of qubits are “entangled,” they can change each other’s state...

The first family to quit Pastor Clark Frailey’s church during the pandemic did it by text message. It felt to Frailey like a heartbreaking and incomplete way to end a years-long relationship. When a second young couple said they were doubting his leadership a week later, Frailey decided to risk seeing them in person, despite…

Human rights advocates filed a new court petition against the Israeli phone hacking company Cellebrite, urging Israel’s Ministry of Defense to halt the firm’s exports to Hong Kong where security forces have been using the technology in crackdowns against dissidents as China takes greater control of Hong Kong. Hong Kong police documents show the use of Cellebrite to hack and unlock phones of...

NASA has released new photos of Comet NEOWISE taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, revealing a close-up view of the brightest comet observed in decades after it passed around the sun this summer.  What happened: The new image, taken on August 8, centers on the comet’s coma, the outer shell of gas and dust expelled as the comet is heated by the sun. It’s one of the best photos Hubble...

The AI community is finally waking up to the fact that machine learning can cause disproportionate harm to already oppressed and disadvantaged groups. We have activists and organizers to thank for that. Now, machine-learning researchers and scholars are looking for ways to make AI more fair, accountable, and transparent—but also, recently, more participatory. One of the most exciting and...

The 33-year-old-man arrived by plane in Hong Kong on August 15. After disembarking, he headed to one of the airport’s covid-19 testing stations. Someone swabbed his throat, and then he waited for the results. The man had come down with the coronavirus in March, suffered fever and headaches, and spent two weeks in a hospital. So he probably didn’t expect to test positive again just 142 days...

The US has approved wide emergency use of blood plasma from covid-19 survivors as a treatment for coronavirus infection, despite limited evidence it helps. Blood drug: The therapy, which the White House touted as a “breakthrough,” involves giving plasma from survivors to those battling the infection. It has been tried since early in the year in China, the Netherlands, and also in the US,...

Since OpenAI first described its new AI language-generating system called GPT-3 in May, hundreds of media outlets (including MIT Technology Review) have written about the system and its capabilities. Twitter has been abuzz about its power and potential. The New York Times published an op-ed about it. Later this year, OpenAI will begin charging companies…

In June 2019, Facebook’s AI lab, FAIR, released AI Habitat, a new simulation platform for training AI agents. It allowed agents to explore various realistic virtual environments, like a furnished apartment or cubicle-filled office. The AI could then be ported into a robot, which would gain the smarts to navigate through the real world without crashing. In the year since, FAIR has rapidly...

At the MIT community vigil held in June 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death, Corban Swain, a PhD student in biological engineering, read two of his poems on racism. Listen here. Courtesy of Corban Swain

Check out the virtual MIT campus on this guided tour by Amanda Shayna Ahteck ’23. Courtesy of Amanda Shayna Ahteck ’23

Companies of all sizes and maturity levels, from startups to multinational corporations, have at least this in common: they know that using data effectively is a key driver of innovation, competitive advantage, and growth. Now that expensive hardware and software are no longer prerequisites for innovation, thanks to the rise of cloud computing, startups can play on the same field as, and sometimes...

When the UK first set out to find an alternative to college entrance exams, the premise seemed perfectly reasonable. Covid-19 had derailed any opportunity for students to take the exams in person, but the government still wanted a way to assess them for admission decisions. Chief among its concerns was an issue of fairness. Teachers had already made predictions of their students’ exam scores,...

Thousands of lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires across California in recent days, producing several major clusters burning around the San Francisco Bay Area. The blazes quickly ripped through hundreds of thousands of acres, forcing thousands to evacuate, filling the skies with smoke, and raining down ash across much of the region. The fires follow a bone-dry winter in Northern...

Countries that responded wisely to the pandemic run the gamut in terms of wealth, size, population, and style of government. What they shared was a swift, coordinated government response. Where that has been lacking, no amount of scientific expertise, technical knowhow, or wealth can prevent disaster, as the United States all too grimly shows. Krithika Varagur spoke to public health officials...