China’s president, Xi Jinping, has announced plans for the nation to become carbon neutral by 2060, setting a bold goal for the world’s biggest climate polluter. But it’s hard to reconcile Xi’s pledge, made before the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, with the nation’s recent actions. Most notably, China is in the midst of a coal building boom. As of late last year, the country had...

“If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, He would have given man a moon.” The famed rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke uttered those words in 1984. He wanted to highlight how we could use the moon as a springboard to expand human civilization into the rest of the solar system. This was more than a decade on from the last Apollo mission to the moon, and Ehricke was watching NASA and the...

Regina Barzilay, a professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is the first winner of the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity, a new prize recognizing outstanding research in AI. Barzilay started her career working on natural-language processing. After surviving breast cancer in 2014, she switched her focus to...

In March, Adobe’s leadership team decided—for the sake of employee well-being—to institute worldwide work-from-home policies to protect against the spread of covid-19. And it was a large undertaking. This content was produced by Adobe. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. Anil Chakravarthy is Executive Vice President and General Manager of Adobe’s...

Over a year ago, scientists unleashed something incredible on the world: the first photo of a black hole ever taken. By putting together radio astronomy observations made with dishes across four continents, the collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope managed to peer 53 million light-years away and look at a supermassive black hole, which is 6.5 million times the mass of the sun and sits...