Like clockwork, at the end of every year, people around the world sit down and make resolutions for the new one: lose weight, meditate, save money.  Maybe this year it’s time to take stock of your tech life. Perhaps you’ve been getting a persistent note that your storage is full, or you simply want to feel less stressed by the onslaught of breaking news.  ...

Four months after the Afghan government fell to the Taliban, 22-year-old Asad Asadullah had settled into a new routine.  In his hometown in Afghanistan’s northern Samangan province, the former computer science student started and ended each day glued to his laptop screen.  Since late October, Asadullah had been participating in a virtual coding bootcamp organized…

We’ve never relied more on technology to solve our problems than we do now. Sometimes it works. Vaccines against covid-19 have cut the death toll. We’ve got virus tests and drugs, too. But this isn’t the story about what worked in 2021. This is MIT Technology Review’s annual list of cases where innovation went wrong. From the metaverse to Alzheimer’s drugs, the technologies on this...

A shock has reverberated inside Israel in the last few months. NSO Group, the billion-dollar Israeli company that has sold hacking tools to governments around the world for more than a decade, has drawn intense scrutiny after a series of public scandals. The company is in crisis. Its future is in doubt. But while NSO Group’s future is uncertain, governments are more likely than ever to buy...

When Hongzhi Gao was young, he lived with his family in Gansu, a province located in the center of northern China by the Tengger Desert. Thinking back to his childhood, he recalls the constant, steady wind of dirt outside their house, and that during most months of the year it didn’t take more than a minute after stepping outside before sand would fill any empty space and creep into his pockets,...

New data shows that the polarization of political discourse online has remained largely unchanged since the end of 2020. That’s probably not surprising if you’ve looked at the internet at all in the past year. But the data also shows an underlying pattern in which individual topics—like abortion and immigration—took turns driving divisiveness. While people were consistently mad online...

The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year. We asked our writers and editors to look back over all the stories we published in 2021 and tell us which…

Less than three hours after a jury in Boston began deliberating the fate of Harvard chemistry professor Charlies Lieber, the verdict was in: he was found guilty on Tuesday of six felony counts, including false statements and tax fraud, that stemmed from his failure to disclose affiliations and funding from a Chinese university and talent recruitment program.  Lieber’s trial was closely...

It might sound strange to think of storytelling as a climate solution, but after spending five years documenting 1,001 voices on climate change in 20 countries, I believe one of the most powerful forms of climate action is to listen deeply to people already affected by the crisis. To ensure that solutions actually help communities most at risk, we must first hear their stories.  Climate...

When Ahsan Rehman graduated from one of Pakistan’s top engineering universities in 2016, he knew he wanted a job that would help people. He did not have to look far for ideas. At his home in Karachi, his family often went days without getting any water from the city’s pipes. Initially, they had dug a…

The comings and goings of water define Mexico City, a mile-high metropolis sprawled across three dry lake beds. The city floods in the wet season and thirsts during regular droughts. CDMX, as the city of 21 million styles itself, pumps more water from the aquifer below it than it replenishes: the city sank some 12 meters in the last century and may sink another 30 meters before hitting rock...

In the waning weeks of 2017, many residents of Cape Town, South Africa, lined up day and night to fill old jugs with water from the city’s few natural springs. Palpable angst hung in the air. After months of warnings through an anomalously long drought, Cape Town was on the verge of becoming the world’s first major city to run out of water. Freshwater dams had dipped below 25% of capacity, and...

From: Boreal, Emily <Emily.Boreal@samphire.house> To: Picual, Jim <Jim.Picual@samphire.house>,Joss, Lillian <Lillian.Joss@samphire.house>,Gupta, Mohan <Mohan.Gupta@samphire.house> Cc: Executive Committee <Ex.Com@samphire.house> You sent me to find the god of a dying world, and I found her, but it didn’t turn out the way you expected. I’m not sorry for...

November 1960 From “Climate Control and the Oceans”: Without a clear picture of how the ocean overturns and with no accurate time scale for interaction with the atmosphere, oceanographers and meteorologists alike are at a loss to explain adequately the general mechanism of the earth’s climate. Now man, with his carbon-dioxide-producing industry, has become yet another unknown modifying...

As we were closing this issue, I came across a video on Twitter of a highway just outside Vancouver, submerged in water. It wasn’t the only one. The densely populated urban heart of British Columbia was cut off from the rest of Canada by flooding and mudslides after an atmospheric river barreled through. The country’s busiest port lost access to rail service, stranding containers. Hundreds of...

In the world of water, 2021 was yet another year for the record books. Parts of Western Europe reeled from deadly floods that sent rivers surging to levels not seen in 500 to 1,000 years. Destructive floods hit central China as well, displacing more than a quarter of a million people from their homes. Meanwhile, a large swath of the southwestern United States remained locked in a megadrought—the...

Every day, the Linggiu Reservoir does quiet battle with the ocean, feeding rainwater into the Johor River in southern Malaysia to keep its salt levels low enough to treat. Singapore, which built the reservoir in 1995, had been entitled to extract some 250 million gallons per day from the 123-kilometer-­long river, meeting more than half…

The Sulphur Springs Valley is a windswept desert in southeastern Arizona, bounded on three sides by forest-­topped mountain ranges known as the sky islands. It can take an hour or more to drive between inhabited places in the valley, but the community there is tight-knit—many of the farmers went to the same high school (as did their grandparents), and today they graze their cattle on the plains...

The deadly consequences of climate change only grew clearer this year, as record-shattering heat waves, floods, and wildfires killed thousands and strained the limits of our disaster responders. In the closing days of 2021, scientists warned that the eastern ledge of a Florida-size glacier is about to snap off of Antarctica and US legislators found…

In 2021 we saw images capturing the speed of climate change, the visionaries working on today’s pressing issues, a glimpse into a transhuman future, and more.

The Congo River is the world’s second-largest river system after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and animals that live in the swamps and peatlands it supports. The massive tropical rainforest sprawled across its middle helps regulate the entire Earth’s climate system. The amount of water in the system, however, is...

It’s been a year of supersized AI models.  When OpenAI released GPT-3, in June 2020, the neural network’s apparent grasp of language was uncanny. It could generate convincing sentences, converse with humans, and even autocomplete code. GPT-3 was also monstrous in scale—larger than any other neural network ever built. It kicked off a whole new trend in AI, one in which bigger is...

For years, Beijing landscape architect Yu Kongjian was ridiculed by his fellow citizens as a backward thinker. Some even called him an American spy—a nod to his doctorate from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and his opposition to dams, those symbols of power and progress in modern China. Yu’s transgression: he advised working with water,…

While the covid-19 pandemic upended workplaces and ushered in rapid digital transformation, the turmoil around cybercrime has remained constant: attackers are always changing tactics to evade detection. Flexible, customer-first solutions have emerged to meet ever-changing circumstances to keep organizations secure and confident against cyber threats. In the new year and beyond, as technology...