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Churchill's Warning

In a 1949 address published in Technology Review and excerpted here, Winston Churchill said new technologies create problems even as they solve others.The outstanding feature of the Twentieth Century has been the enormous expansion in the numbers who are given the opportunity to share in the larger and more varied life which in previous periods was reserved for the few and for the very few. This...

Curing Congestion

We can now tackle traffic as a complex network problemOver half the world's population and 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, where land for new transport infrastructure is relatively scarce. Most roads have no tolls, and most vehicles carry a single occupant. Not surprisingly, road congestion has become a daily experience for many. 

Down to Earth

How an internship in India rekindled my passion for spaceHorns blare, motors whine, and black diesel exhaust spews into the air as my driver swerves his three-wheeled open-air auto rickshaw around a pothole, simultaneously cutting off a white two-door coupe and a woman wrapped in crimson on a rusty bicycle. To my left, women with baskets on their heads crouch to stack neat rows of oranges, apples,...

Eric Fitch '95, SM '96

Renewable-energy startup turns brewing waste into natural gasEric Fitch had an epiphany as he described the collaborative, trial-and-error process that led to the creation of his company's product, an anaerobic methane digester: "It was just like Tony Patera's fluids and thermal lab," he says. "The whole thing—it was an industrial application of that class."

Glen Urban

Carlisle, MassachusettsGlen Urban is dean emeritus and David Austin Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. An MIT professor of marketing for his entire career, he recently retired from teaching but will continue his groundbreaking market research. He serves as chairman of the MIT Center for Digital Business and has cofounded five marketing companies. For 35 years, he has...

How Authors Write

The technologies of composition, not new media, inspire ­innovations in literary styles and forms.Early in Nicholson Baker's slim first novel, The Mezzanine (1988), whose entire action takes place during an escalator ride at lunchtime, the narrator describes buying milk and a cookie, and then pauses to consider, in a page-long footnote, the "uncomfortable era of the floating drinking...

How Solar-Based Microgrids Could Bring Power to Millions

Millions of the world's poorest lack power. Microgrids could be a clean-energy solution.The village of Tanjung Batu Laut seems to grow out of a mangrove swamp on an island off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. The houses, propped up over the water on stilts, are cobbled together from old plywood, corrugated steel, and rusted chicken wire. But walk inland and you reach a clearing covered with an array...

Improving Community Feedback on Our Stories

Some comment threads on our site have gotten nasty. Here's what we're doing about it.We greatly value the insights our readers can offer. The exceptional intelligence, perspective, and wit of our audience are part of what makes MIT Technology Review different from publications that cover technology breathlessly and without context. Judging by what we hear from many of our readers, high-quality...

Joseph Aoun, PhD '81

Northeastern president oversees university's unprecedented growthAs president of Northeastern University since 2006, Joseph Aoun has been a busy man. During his first four years, undergraduate applications increased 25 percent, and graduate enrollment increased 47 percent. And from 2010 to 2012, Northeastern had more applications than any other private American university. The success reflects...

Letters

Online vs. on campus In "Is MIT Giving Away the Farm?" (September/October 2012), Bethany LaPenta said of her online MITx class: "You didn't have to deal with the technicalities of 'Oh, is the wire in this resistor not working?'—technicalities that really slow down your learning. And you don't have to worry about anything catching on fire." For me, having trouble with the equipment did not slow...

MIT's Fundamental Physicist

Alan Guth wins $3 million physics prizeIn July physics professor Alan Guth '68, SM '69, PhD '72, was pleased to learn that an extra $3 million had been deposited in his bank account. Guth was one of nine physicists worldwide to find their coffers so enhanced as the inaugural winners of the Milner Foundation's Fundamental Physics Prize.

Old Media, Digitized, Make New Forms

Computers are changing art in unexpected ways.On July 6, 1507, Michelangelo wrote from Bologna to his brother, Buonarroto. He was engaged in casting a colossal bronze sculpture, of Pope Julius II, and because he was not an expert in bronze casting, he had sent to Florence for someone who was: Bernardino d'Antonio del Ponte di Milano, Master of Ordnance to the Republic of Florence. -Michelangelo...

Picture This

New programming language for image-processing algorithms yields shorter, clearer, faster codeImage-processing software is a hot commodity. But digital-photo files are getting so big that without some clever engineering, processing them would take a painfully long time. The tricks that engineers use to speed up their image-processing algorithms, however, make their code almost unreadable and,...

Rachel Peterson '09

Engineer brings "accomplish anything" mind-set to NFL cheerleadingOne might not think that an MIT education could help someone prepare for a career as an NFL cheerleader. But don't tell that to Rachel Peterson. Thanks in part to the indomitable attitude she nourished at MIT, Peterson is entering her second season as a member of the San Francisco 49ers Gold Rush—and that's not even her day...

Repeating History

We have fully eradicated only one disease. Let's do it again.In human history, few things happen only once. Over millennia, even statistically rare events repeat. Yet despite huge efforts to replicate the feat, just once have we eradicated a human disease: smallpox, responsible for over 500 million deaths in the 20th century alone.

Robert Y.C. Hsiung, March '62

Accomplished architect returns to watercolor paintingRobert Y.C. Hsiung studied visual arts throughout his childhood in China—learning Chinese calligraphy from his father and then watercolor painting from an artist in Hong Kong, where he attended a Jesuit school. In 1952 he won a scholarship to Wisconsin's St. Norbert College, where he continued watercolor as a hobby. After a family friend...

Rock-Solid Science

After doing fieldwork that brought her to the ocean floor, geologist Ro Kinzler '84, SM '85, PhD '91, takes earth science to the public.When Rosamond ("Ro") Kinzler was six months pregnant, she drove 13 hours to reach an abandoned iron mine in Canada, trekking for hours in search of a single rock. When she finally found what she was after—a nearly three-billion-year-old sample of banded iron...