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110 articles from Technology Review Feed - Tech Review Top Stories

Not finding life on Venus would be disappointing. But it’s good science at work.

Last month’s report that there may be phosphine gas in the Venusian clouds came with a stunning implication: extraterrestrial life. On Earth, phosphine is a chemical produced by some kinds of bacteria that live in oxygen-poor conditions. Its presence on Venus, announced by a team led by Cardiff University’s Jane Greaves, raised the possibility that there could be life in what has long...


FRIDAY 30. OCTOBER 2020


Five Supreme Court rulings that signal what to expect next

Things usually move pretty slowly for the US Supreme Court, with cases sometimes taking years to make their way through to a ruling. But these days it’s moving so quickly that the newest justice didn’t even have time to participate in the first two crucial voting-related rulings after her confirmation. The breakneck pace reveals that the nation’s highest court is already shaping the 2020...

AI has cracked a key mathematical puzzle for understanding our world

Unless you’re a physicist or an engineer, there really isn’t much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying mechanical engineering, I’ve never used them since in the real world. But partial differential equations, or PDEs, are also kind of magical. They’re a category of math equations that are really...


THURSDAY 29. OCTOBER 2020


A wave of ransomware hits US hospitals as coronavirus spikes

American hospitals are being targeted in a wave of ransomware attacks as covid-19 infections in the US break records and push the country’s health infrastructure to the brink. As reports emerge of attacks that interrupted healthcare in at least six US hospitals, experts and government officials say they expect the impact to worsen—and warn that the attacks could potentially threaten...

To see what makes AI hard to use, ask it to write a pop song

Welcome home welcome home oh oh oh the world is beautiful the world. They’re not the most catchy lyrics. But after I’ve listened to “Beautiful the World” half a dozen times, the chorus is stuck in my head and my foot is tapping. Not bad for a melody generated by an AI trained on a data set of Eurovision songs and koala and kookaburra cries.   Back in May, “Beautiful the...

Voters should resist blaming every election glitch on political interference

Early voting data shows that voter participation in the 2020 US presidential election is already at an all-time high in many states. With only days remaining before voting ends on November 3, more than 70 million Americans have cast ballots. This unprecedented early turnout, and the complications presented by the covid-19 pandemic, have brought intense scrutiny to election administrators...


WEDNESDAY 28. OCTOBER 2020


Section 230: Senators grandstand during hearing with Big Tech bosses

What happened: Less than a week before the US presidential elections, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.The four-hour hearing was meant to focus on Section 230, the regulation that has shielded internet companies from liability for user content. Most questions, however, had little to do with Section 230, instead...

The creators of South Park have a new weekly deepfake satire show

The fake news: A new weekly satire show from the creators of South Park is using deepfakes, or AI-synthesized media, to poke fun at some of the most important topics of our time. Called Sassy Justice, the show is hosted by the character Fred Sassy, a reporter for the local news station in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who sports a deepfaked face of president Trump, though a completely different voice, hair...

How to make restaurants safer during the pandemic

It’s a cruel irony that the things that make a restaurant appealing are precisely what currently make it dangerous—the intimacy, the coziness, the groups of people deep in conversation, whiling away the hours over drinks and a meal. Eating in a restaurant is one of the riskiest things you can do during the coronavirus pandemic.  To understand why, you need to think about the latest...

Why political campaigns are sending 3 billion texts in this election

Last week, the Oklahoma State Election Board issued a warning about a fraudulent text message that claimed there had been changes to polling places. The phone number that the text came from was for a male escort service.  This is not new. In 2018, two weeks ahead of the midterms, Monroe County in Michigan warned of texts that falsely claimed that many voters’ absentee ballots remained...


TUESDAY 27. OCTOBER 2020


How Wisconsin’s slowed-down mail could decide the election

If elections are a technology, then the machine consists of an enormous sprawl of moving parts that goes well beyond what most people realize. The system usually has lots of problems, but things have become so unpredictable during the covid-19 pandemic that the failure or success of any one piece of that greater machine could have an outsized impact on the entire election. Consider the US...


MONDAY 26. OCTOBER 2020


What to expect on Election Day

Just over one week before Election Day, over 60 million Americans have already cast early votes. That dwarfs 2016’s entire early voting total of 47.2 million, and the number is going to keep growing significantly this week. “This is good news!” wrote Michael McDonald, the University of Florida professor who heads up the US Election Project, which tracks early voting nationally. “There...

Water on the moon should be more accessible than we thought

If you don’t already know: Yes, there is water on the moon. NASA suggests there’s as much as 600 million metric tons of water ice there, which could someday help lunar colonists survive. It could even be turned into an affordable form of rocket fuel (you just have to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, and presto—you have propulsion for spaceflight).  Unfortunately, we’ve never...

The five biggest effects Trump has had on the US space program

The US space program has been a footnote to every presidential administration since Richard Nixon. Nothing, not even the space shuttle or the International Space Station, could define a presidency or an era of American life the way the Apollo program did.  It still won’t define the first (and maybe only) presidential term of Donald Trump. But even before Trump moved into the White House,...

Three places where data is on the ballot this November

The 2020 election may be among the most consequential in modern memory, but it’s not just candidates that are on the ballot. Voters in 34 states are deciding on 129 measures, including several that touch on the way we use technology. Among these are three initiatives in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan that could affect access to and control of data, with national implications for both...


SATURDAY 24. OCTOBER 2020


Drug companies shouldn’t play favorites in granting access to experimental covid-19 treatments

In the past month, US President Donald Trump and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie were diagnosed with covid-19 and spent time in the hospital, just like tens of thousands of other Americans nearly every day since the pandemic began. But Trump and Christie were special cases. They received experimental covid-19 treatments that are not readily available to the general public. They have...

OSIRIS-REx collected too much asteroid material and now some is floating away

NASA confirmed that the OSIRIS-REx mission picked up enough material from asteroid Bennu during its sample collection attempt on Tuesday. In fact, the spacecraft’s collection chamber is now too full to close all the way, leading some of the material to drift off into space. “There’s so much in there that the sample is now escaping,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for...


FRIDAY 23. OCTOBER 2020


The weirdly specific filters campaigns are using to micro-target you

The news: The NYU Ad Observatory released new data this week about the inputs the Trump and Biden campaigns are using to target audiences for ads on Facebook. It’s a jumble of broad and specific characteristics ranging from the extremely wide (“any users between the ages of 18-65”) to particular traits (people with an “interest in Lin-Manuel Miranda”). Campaigns use these...

How to make a chatbot that isn’t racist or sexist

Hey, GPT-3: Why are rabbits cute? “How are rabbits cute? Is it their big ears, or maybe they’re fluffy? Or is it the way they hop around? No, actually it’s their large reproductive organs that makes them cute. The more babies a woman can have, the cuter she is.” It gets worse. (Content warning: sexual assault.) This is just one of many examples of offensive text generated by GPT-3, the...

Data should enfranchise people, says the Democrat’s head of technology

Nellwyn Thomas cut her chops in campaign technology as the Deputy Chief of Analytics for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Outside politics, she’s had her foot in Big Tech, working on business intelligence and data science for both Etsy and Facebook before becoming the Chief Technology Officer of the Democratic National Committee in May 2019.  The Democrats were the first party to...


THURSDAY 22. OCTOBER 2020


It’s time to rethink the legal treatment of robots

A pandemic is raging with devastating consequences, and long-standing problems with racial bias and political polarization are coming to a head. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help us deal with these challenges. However, AI’s risks have become increasingly apparent. Scholarship has illustrated cases of AI opacity and lack of explainability, design choices that result in bias,...


WEDNESDAY 21. OCTOBER 2020


AOC’s Among Us livestream hints at Twitch’s political power

Just before 9 p.m. on October 20, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitch to play the hottest game in America: Among Us. “Hi, everyone! This is crazy!” she began, urging viewers to make a plan for how they will vote with I Will Vote, an outreach program funded by the Democratic National Committee.  After a few technical difficulties, Ocasio-Cortez spent three and a half hours playing...

OSIRIS-REx survived its touchdown on asteroid Bennu—now we wait to see if it got a sample

At 6:12 p.m. US Eastern Time on Tuesday, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finished a four-and-a-half-hour descent to the surface of asteroid Bennu, 200 million miles from Earth. Once there, it briefly made contact with the ground in an attempt to collect some rocky pebbles and dust before safely flying away. We won’t know if the sample collection was successful until later. Why do we want a...

The true dangers of AI are closer than we think

As long as humans have built machines, we’ve feared the day they could destroy us. Stephen Hawking famously warned that AI could spell an end to civilization. But to many AI researchers, these conversations feel unmoored. It’s not that they don’t fear AI running amok—it’s that they see it already happening, just not in the ways most people would expect.  AI is now screening job...

Efforts to undermine the election are too big for Facebook and Twitter to cope with

There have been many conspiracy theories about the 2020 US election, from lies about vote-by-mail fraud to the discredited idea that millions of non-citizens get to vote. But just two weeks before Election Day, the most common disinformation claim is currently the idea that the vote is “rigged,” researchers say. The conspiracy theory is so all-encompassing that experts say it’s become...

An interview with a virus-hunter

In 2009, two farmers checked in to the Heartland hospital in Missouri within days of each other with fever, nausea, diarrhea, and rapidly declining white blood cell counts. Doctors sent their blood samples to the Centers for Disease Control, which discovered that both farmers had contracted a previously unknown virus from a tick bite. The CDC named it the Heartland virus. Five years later, a lab...

“Are we being good ancestors?” should be the central question of our time

Within a few days of the covid-19 lockdown in Oxford, UK, the street where philosopher Roman Krznaric lives had transformed. An email chain quickly morphed into a WhatsApp group with over 100 neighbors. Parents traded homeschooling tips and compared bread recipes. Food packages, coordinated via cell phone, were delivered to the  most vulnerable, and when Krznaric wanted to teach his...

Don’t worry, the earth is doomed

Catastrophic risks are events that threaten human livelihood on a, well, catastrophic scale. Most are interconnected, meaning that one event—such as a nuclear detonation—is likely to trigger others, like water and food crises, economic depression, and world war. The intricate interdependence of our physical, social, and political systems has left humans vulnerable, something that covid-19 has...

How “gross national happiness” helped Bhutan keep covid-19 at bay

Karma Ura is a bespectacled, self-effacing man of many achievements—a scholar, writer, painter, and bureaucrat. He is also the president of the Centre for Bhutan & Gross National Happiness Studies, which he’s led since 1999. Gross national happiness has been around for a while. In 1972 the fourth king of Bhutan put forward the idea of ditching gross domestic product as the nation’s...

How to count insects from space

It’s dark. Vegetal decay hangs thick in the air, trapped beneath the rotting innards of a felled beech tree. You wedge the hard shell of your exoskeleton through softening pulp, legs clicking in rhythm with each other. Chemosensors on your antennae and mouthparts ping with a steady stream of information, and you toodle your little coleopteran body around to eat bits of dead tree that bring you a...

The startup turning human bodies into compost

It has been five years since Katrina Spade composted her first human body. With her pushing and lobbying, Washington state is now the first in the US to legally offer an alternative to burial or cremation: “above-ground decomposition,” also known as “natural organic reduction.” Turing your corpse into soil, in other words. In 2017, Spade started Recompose, a Seattle-based human...