The first time Mary Ann Price logged into her employer’s system to schedule a vaccine, she found an appointment three days later at a nearby Walgreens pharmacy. She woke up the next day to an email saying it had been canceled. So she logged in again and found an opening that afternoon at the local…

Language-generation algorithms are known to embed racist and sexist ideas. They’re trained on the language of the internet, including the dark corners of Reddit and Twitter that may include hate speech and disinformation. Whatever harmful ideas are present in those forums get normalized as part of their learning. Researchers have now demonstrated that the same can be true for image-generation...

The news: Two new sets of vaccine results announced today suggest the South African variant of the virus is proving harder to vaccinate against. Novavax and Johnson & Johnson both announced that final-stage clinical trials showed their vaccines are effective at preventing illness—but that this efficacy dropped when dealing with the variant sequenced in South Africa, known as B.1.351. ...

As the Biden administration ramps up, it inherits soaring cases and a muddled vaccine rollout— so it’s reasonable to wonder what else can possibly slow the spread of covid-19. Some strategies in the administration’s covid plan are basics, like calling on people to wear masks, doing more testing, and communicating more clearly. But digital technology gets a nod, too: tucked into a list of...

In late October 1959, a Mexican spy named Eduardo Diaz Silveti slipped into the US Embassy in Mexico City. Tall and well-spoken with slicked-back hair, Silveti, 30, descended from a family of bullfighters. He had learned spycraft at the Federal Security Directorate, or DFS, Mexico’s secret police. During the Cold War, the capital had become…

President Joe Biden continues to make good on his campaign pledge to accelerate progress on climate change, rapidly working down the list of what he can accomplish on his own in his early days in office. On Wednesday, January 27, he will sign a second set of executive orders and memorandums on climate change that direct federal agencies to purchase US-made, zero-emissions vehicles and...

After just a week in office, the Biden administration is already under immense public pressure to fix America’s mangled vaccine rollout. Operation Warp Speed injected enormous sums into developing vaccines but left most of the planning—and cost—of administering them to states, which are now having to cope with the fallout. The reliance on chronically underfunded…

The current covid-19 pandemic has shined the spotlight on longstanding health inequities for people of color. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to the general United States population, African Americans are 1.4 times more likely to contract the coronavirus, and 2.8 times more likely to die from covid-19. Similarly, Native Americans and Hispanics/Latinos are...

The pharmaceutical and chemicals industries are no strangers to digital technology, with decades of experimentation using data and statistical techniques to improve productivity and innovation. But the results were historically disappointing relative to the promise. Over the past two or three years, the pace of digital transformation is increasing thanks to the improved performance,...

The global vaccine rollout is full of glitches, shortages, and problems, but not every country faces the same challenges. Evening out those inequalities to make sure poorer countries are included in the vaccination race isn’t just the ethical thing to do: it’s good for rich countries, too. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that the entire global economy depends on...

Every morning, as Nandita Mohan sifts through her emails, her college pals are in her ear — recounting their day, reminiscing, reflecting on what it’s like to have graduated in the throes of a pandemic. Mohan isn’t on the phone, nor is she listening to an especially personal podcast; she’s using Cappuccino, an app that…

Online misinformation and political polarization have hampered the efforts of public health officials to stop the spread of covid-19. Are there better ways to counter the falsehoods and get more reliable information out there? The MIT Media Lab’s HealthPulse project recently tried to answer that question. It ran a trial in Atlanta, a city with a large population of African-Americans, who for...

On January 10, Charlie O’Donnell, a startup investor who runs Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, published a blog post that he hoped would inspire self-reflection among his peers in the industry. Provocatively titled Seed Investments in Insurrection, his argument was that venture capitalists needed to wrestle with their impact on democracy.  “It’s kind of hard to make…

Salim Abdool Karim was at a cricket match on December 26, Boxing Day, when he made the mistake of looking at his email. He had received a new report and the news wasn’t good. A heavily mutated coronavirus spotted in South Africa appeared to allow the virus to bind more tightly, and more easily, to human cells. Karim, an epidemiologist and lead covid-19 adviser to the South African government,...

On Wednesday, the US waited with bated breath as president Trump handed the government reins over to president Biden. The transition of power ended up peaceful, and Biden promptly ushered in his new vision for America with a flurry of executive orders. At the moment, the most pressing issues on his table are fighting the coronavirus pandemic, providing financial relief for Americans, and...

A virtual robot arm has learned to solve a wide range of different puzzles—stacking blocks, setting the table, arranging chess pieces—without having to be retrained for each task. It did this by playing against a second robot arm that was trained to give it harder and harder challenges. Self play: Developed by researchers at OpenAI, the identical robot arms—Alice and Bob—learn by...

The news: President Biden has said it will take a “wartime effort” to tackle the covid-19 pandemic as he unveiled a seven-point plan on his first full day in the job. He pledged to be guided by science, and to make transparency and accountability core values for his administration’s response. The plan is a distillation of a 200-page strategy document which sets out his...

Hadas Ziv, head of policy and ethics at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel Israel was originally praised for its approach to covid-19 vaccine distribution, and was hailed as a model for how to get things done. But the picture that has emerged since is a lot more complicated. Covid-19 infections have reached record highs, and a new lockdown has been extended until the end of January. Meanwhile,...

In the last few years, research has shown that deep learning can match expert-level performance in medical imaging tasks like early cancer detection and eye disease diagnosis. But there’s also cause for caution. Other research has shown that deep learning has a tendency to perpetuate discrimination. With a healthcare system already riddled with disparities, sloppy applications of deep learning...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, now the world’s richest person with a net worth north of $180 billion, announced on Twitter that he plans to give away $100 million of it as a prize for the “best carbon capture technology.” Am donating $100M towards a prize for best carbon capture technology— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2021 He added in a subsequent tweet that he’ll...

For oil and gas companies, digital transformation is a priority—not only as a way to modernize the enterprise, but also to secure the entire energy ecosystem. With that lens, the urgency of applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities for optimization and cybersecurity becomes clear, especially as threat actors increasingly target connected devices and operating...

China’s space program might have been slowed by the pandemic in 2020, but it certainly didn’t stop. The year’s highlights included sending a rover to Mars, bringing moon rocks back to Earth, and testing out the next-generation crewed vehicle that should take taikonauts into orbit—and possibly to the moon—one day.  But there were a few achievements the rest of the world might not...