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Here’s the defense tech at the center of US aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.
After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President Joe Biden signed a $95.3 billion aid package into law on Wednesday.
The bill will send...
The Download: how to tell when a chatbot is lying, and RIP my biotech plants
Chatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust. The news: Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth…
My biotech plants are dead
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.
Six weeks ago, I pre-ordered the “Firefly Petunia,” a houseplant engineered with genes from bioluminescent fungi so that it glows in the dark.
After years of writing about anti-GMO sentiment in...
THURSDAY 25. APRIL 2024
Chatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust.
Large language models are famous for their ability to make things up—in fact, it’s what they’re best at. But their inability to tell fact from fiction has left many businesses wondering if using them is worth the risk.
A new tool created by Cleanlab, an AI startup spun out of a quantum computing lab at MIT, is designed to give high-stakes users a clearer sense of how trustworthy these...
The Download: hyperrealistic deepfakes, and clean energy’s implications for mining
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make…
Want less mining? Switch to clean energy.
Political fights over mining and minerals are heating up, and there are growing environmental and sociological concerns about how to source the materials the world needs to build new energy technologies.
But low-emissions energy sources, including wind, solar, and nuclear power, have a smaller mining footprint than coal and natural gas, according to a new report from the Breakthrough...
Hydrogen could be used for nearly everything. It probably shouldn’t be.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. From toaster ovens that work as air fryers to hair dryers that can also curl your hair, single tools that do multiple jobs have an undeniable appeal. In the climate world, hydrogen…
An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary
I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity? This makes it sound like I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today…
WEDNESDAY 24. APRIL 2024
A new kind of gene-edited pig kidney was just transplanted into a person
A month ago, Richard Slayman became the first living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Now, a team of researchers from NYU Langone Health reports that Lisa Pisano, a 54-year-old woman from New Jersey, has become the second. Her new kidney has just a single genetic modification—an approach that researchers hope could make scaling up the production of pig organs...
Almost every Chinese keyboard app has a security flaw that reveals what users type
Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing.
The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen...
The Download: introducing the Build issue
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: the Build issue Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by…
Three takeaways about the state of Chinese tech in the US
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
I’ve wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was invented in the US, today about 80% of the...
What tech learned from Daedalus
Today’s climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity—which has discharged greenhouse-gas emissions into Earth’s atmosphere for centuries—but reversing course and taming nature’s growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. Yet the dream of human-powered flight—of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of...
Building momentum
One of the formative memories of my youth took place on a camping trip at an Alabama state park. My dad’s friend brought an at-the-time gee-whiz gadget, a portable television, and we used it to watch the very first space shuttle launch from under the loblolly pines. It was thrilling. And it was hard not to believe, watching that shuttle go up (and, a few days later, land), that we were entering...
How we transform to a fully decarbonized world
In 1856, Napoleon III commissioned a baby rattle for his newborn son, to be made from one of the most precious metals known at the time: light, silvery, and corrosion-resistant aluminum. Despite its abundance—it’s the third most common element in Earth’s crust—the metal wasn’t isolated until 1824, and the complexity and cost of the process made the rattle a gift fit for a prince. It...
Job titles of the future: AI prompt engineer
The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. Companies define it in different ways, but its principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations.
Danai Myrtzani of Sleed, a digital marketing agency in Greece, describes herself as more prompter than engineer. She joined the company in March 2023 as one of...
Quartz, cobalt, and the waste we leave behind
Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard’s hat near the northwestern corner of…
This creamy vegan cheese was made with AI
As Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn serves up a plate of vegan brie, feta, and blue cheese in his offices in Emeryville, California, I’m keeping my expectations modest. Most vegan cheese falls into an edible uncanny valley full of discomforting not-quite-right versions of the real thing. But the brie I taste today is smooth, rich, and velvety—and delicious. I could easily believe it was made from...
TUESDAY 23. APRIL 2024
A linguistic warning sign for dementia
Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early—when any available treatments are likely to be most...
A walking antidote to political cynicism
Burhan Azeem ’19 had never been to a city council meeting before he showed up to give a public comment on an affordable-housing bill his senior year. Walking around Cambridge, he saw a “young, dynamic, racially diverse city,” but when he stepped inside City Hall, most of the others who had arrived to present comments were retirees reflecting a much narrower—and older—demographic....
An invisibility cloak for would-be cancers
One of the immune system’s roles is to detect and kill cells that have acquired cancerous mutations. However, some early-stage cancer cells manage to survive. A new study on colon cancer from MIT and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified one reason why: they turn on a gene called SOX17, which renders them essentially invisible to immune surveillance.
The researchers focused on...
“I wanted to work on something that didn’t exist”
In 2017 Polina Anikeeva, PhD ’09, was invited to a conference in the Netherlands to give a talk about magnetic technologies that she and her team had developed at MIT and how they might be used for deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s disease. After sitting through a long day of lectures, she was struck…
I went to COP28. Now the real work begins.
As an international student at MIT, I find that the privileges I’ve experienced in the States have made me even more conscious of my nation’s struggles. Brief visits home remind me that in Jamaica, I can’t always count on what I often take for granted in Massachusetts: water flowing through the faucet, timely public transportation, a safe neighborhood to live in. And after working hard in...
Raman to go
For a harried wastewater manager, a commercial farmer, a factory owner, or anyone who might want to analyze dozens of water samples, and fast, it sounds almost miraculous. Light beamed from a central laser zips along fiber-optic cables and hits one of dozens of probes waiting at the edge of a field, or at the mouth of a sewage outflow, or wherever it’s needed. In turn, these probes return nearly...
Taking on climate change, Rad Lab style
When I last wrote, the Institute had just announced MIT’s Climate Project. Now that it’s underway, I’d like to tell you a bit more about how we came to launch this ambitious new enterprise.
In the fall of 2022, as soon as I accepted the president’s job at MIT, several of my oldest friends spontaneously called to say, in effect, “Can you please fix the climate?”
And once I...