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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. Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound Despite the geopolitical chaos and market collapses triggered by President Trump’s announcement of broad tariffs on international goods, some supporters still hope the strategy will…

Despite the geopolitical chaos and market collapses triggered by President Trump’s announcement of broad tariffs on international goods, some supporters still hope the strategy will produce a “golden age” of American industry. Trump himself insists, “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” While it’s possible that very targeted tariffs could help protect…

Organizations are deepening their cloud investments at an unprecedented pace, recognizing its fundamental role in driving business agility and innovation. Synergy Research Group reports that companies spent $84 billion worldwide on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of 2024, a 23% rise over the third quarter of 2023 and the fourth consecutive quarter in…

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. Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple’s carbon neutral goal “We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge…

The past few years have been an almost nonstop parade of good news for climate tech in the US. Headlines about billion-dollar grants from the government, massive private funding rounds, and labs churning out advance after advance have been routine. Now, though, things are starting to shift.   About $8 billion worth of US climate tech…

We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest.  The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a…

Recorded on April 23, 2025 Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by MIT Technology Review‘s readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist…

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 Creativity issue The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But…

A new play about OpenAI I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in…

The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago.  I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things…

Clara Brenner, MBA ’12, arrived in Cambridge on the lookout for a business partner. She wanted to start her own ­company—and never have to deal with a boss again. She would go it alone if she had to, but she hoped to find someone whose skills would complement her own. It’s a common MBA tale.…

After decades of working as a biologist at a Southern school with a Division 1 football team, coming to MIT was a bit of a culture shock—in the best possible way. I’ve heard from MIT alumni all about late-night psetting, when to catch MITHenge, and the best way to celebrate Pi Day (with pie, of course).…

Tiny flying robots could perform such useful tasks as pollinating crops inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture’s harmful impacts on the environment. The latest robo-bug from an MIT lab, inspired by the anatomy of the bee, comes closer to matching nature’s performance than ever before.  Led by Kevin Chen, an associate…

It all began with a simple origami model.  As an undergrad at Harvard, Danna Freedman went to a professor’s office hours for her general chemistry class and came across an elegant paper model that depicted the fullerene molecule. The intricately folded representation of chemical bonds and atomic arrangements sparked her interest, igniting a profound curiosity…

When the prison doors first closed behind him more than 50 years ago, Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, felt decidedly unsettled.   In his first job out of college, as a researcher for a consulting company working on a project for the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, he had been tasked with interviewing incarcerated participants in…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging in everyday use cases, thanks to advances in foundational models, more powerful chip technology, and abundant data. To become truly embedded and seamless, AI computation must now be distributed—and much of it will take place on device and at the edge.  To support this evolution, computation for running AI workloads…

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. $8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025 This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale…

“My mind is still sharp and my hands work just fine, so I have no interest in getting help from AI to draw or write stories,” says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist best known for his seminal series A Daunting Team, a 1983 manhwa about the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball players. “Still,…

Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as “paper architecture”). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted…

A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for “willfully turning a blind eye” to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will “provide humanitarian assistance to persons…

This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report. That’s far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a…

In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They’re the products of living processes—places where coral has grown toward…

At first glance, the Bathhouse spa in Brooklyn looks not so different from other high-end spas. What sets it apart is out of sight: a closet full of cryptocurrency-­mining computers that not only generate bitcoins but also heat the spa’s pools, marble hammams, and showers.  When cofounder Jason Goodman opened Bathhouse’s first location in Williamsburg…

Forests are the second-largest carbon sink on the planet, after the oceans. To understand exactly how much carbon they trap, the European Space Agency and Airbus have built a satellite called Biomass that will use a long-prohibited band of the radio spectrum to see below the treetops around the world. It will lift off from…

Americans don’t agree on much these days. Yet even at a time when consensus reality seems to be on the verge of collapse, there remains at least one quintessentially modern value we can all still get behind: creativity.  We teach it, measure it, envy it, cultivate it, and endlessly worry about its death. And why…

The quest for long, healthy life—and even immortality—is probably almost as old as humans are, but it’s never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer. A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should…

Google DeepMind’s latest update to a top Gemini AI model includes a dial to control how much the system “thinks” through a response. The new feature is ostensibly designed to save money for developers, but it also concedes a problem: Reasoning models, the tech world’s new obsession, are prone to overthinking, burning money and energy…

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. US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio,…

As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While my dad was locating capacitors and resistors, I was in the toy section. It was there, in 1984, that I discovered the best toy of my childhood: the Armatron robotic arm.  Described as…

While it’s rare to look at the news without finding some headline related to AI and energy, a lot of us are stuck waving our hands when it comes to what it all means. Sure, you’ve probably read that AI will drive an increase in electricity demand. But how that fits into the context of…

President Trump and his appointees have repeatedly stressed the need to establish “American energy dominance.”  But the White House’s profusion of executive orders and aggressive tariffs, along with its determined effort to roll back clean-energy policies, are moving the industry in the wrong direction, creating market chaos and economic uncertainty that are making it harder…

On Thanksgiving weekend of 2013, Jeff Bezos, then Amazon’s CEO, took to 60 Minutes to make a stunning announcement: Amazon was a few years away from deploying drones that would deliver packages to homes in less than 30 minutes.  It lent urgency to a problem that Parimal Kopardekar, director of the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute,…

The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirming reporting by MIT Technology Review. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters…

Anyone who crammed for exams in college knows that an impressive ability to regurgitate information is not synonymous with critical thinking. The large language models (LLMs) first publicly released in 2022 were impressive but limited—like talented students who excel at multiple-choice exams but stumble when asked to defend their logic. Today’s advanced reasoning models are…

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. AI is coming for music, too While large language models that generate text have exploded in the last three years, a different type of AI, based on what are called diffusion models, is…

Colossal Biosciences not only wants to bring back the woolly mammoth—it wants to patent it, too. MIT Technology Review has learned the Texas startup is seeking a patent that would give it exclusive legal rights to create and sell gene-edited elephants containing ancient mammoth DNA. Colossal, which calls itself “the de-extinction company,” hopes to use…

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. When OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy excitedly took to X back in February to post about his new hobby, he probably had no idea he was about…

The end of this story includes samples of AI-generated music. Artificial intelligence was barely a term in 1956, when top scientists from the field of computing arrived at Dartmouth College for a summer conference. The computer scientist John McCarthy had coined the phrase in the funding proposal for the event, a gathering to work through…

Bowling Green, Kentucky, is home to 75,000 residents who recently wrapped up an experiment in using AI for democracy: Can an online polling platform, powered by machine learning, capture what residents want to see happen in their city? When Doug Gorman, elected leader of the county that includes Bowling Green, took office in 2023, it…

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. How the federal government is tracking changes in the supply of street drugs In 2021, the Maryland Department of Health and the state police were confronting a crisis: Fatal drug overdoses in the…

Arnhildur Pálmadóttir was around three years old when she saw a red sky from her living room window. A volcano was erupting about 25 miles away from where she lived on the northeastern coast of Iceland. Though it posed no immediate threat, its ominous presence seeped into her subconscious, populating her dreams with streaks of…

In 2021, the Maryland Department of Health and the state police were confronting a crisis: Fatal drug overdoses in the state were at an all-time high, and authorities didn’t know why. There was a general sense that it had something to do with changes in the supply of illicit drugs—and specifically of the synthetic opioid…

The manufacturing industry is at a crossroads: Geopolitical instability is fracturing supply chains from the Suez to Shenzhen, impacting the flow of materials. Businesses are battling rising costs and inflation, coupled with a shrinking labor force, with more than half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. alone. And climate change is further intensifying…

Tech buzzwords are clanging through the halls of Washington, DC. The Trump administration has promised to “leverage blockchain technology” to reorganize the US Agency for International Development, and Elon Musk’s DOGE has already unleashed an internal chatbot to automate agency tasks—with bigger plans on the horizon to take over for laid-off employees. The executive order…

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. DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data —Steven Renderos is the executive director of Media Justice Tech buzzwords are clanging through the halls of Washington, DC. The Trump…

One day, in the near or far future, an asteroid about the length of a football stadium will find itself on a collision course with Earth. If we are lucky, it will land in the middle of the vast ocean, creating a good-size but innocuous tsunami, or in an uninhabited patch of desert. But if…

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. Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military For much of last year, US Marines conducting training exercises in the waters off South Korea, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia were also…

1. Sophie and Martin are at the 2012 Gordon Research Conference on the Biology of Aging in Ventura, California. It is a foggy February weekend. Both are disappointed about how little sun there is on the California beach. They are two graduate students—Sophie in her sixth and final year, Martin in his fourth—who have traveled…

In 2021, 20 years after the death of her older sister, Vauhini Vara was still unable to tell the story of her loss. “I wondered,” she writes in Searches, her new collection of essays on AI technology, “if Sam Altman’s machine could do it for me.” So she tried ChatGPT. But as it expanded on…