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This article first appeared in The Debrief, MIT Technology Review’s weekly newsletter from our editor in chief Mat Honan. To receive it in your inbox every Friday,  sign up here. On Tuesday last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a blog post and video titled “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes.”  Zuckerberg—whose previous self-acknowledged mistakes include the Cambridge Analytica…

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 strange limbo facing millions of IVF embryos Millions of embryos created through IVF sit frozen in time, stored in cryopreservation tanks around the world. The number is only growing thanks to…

Lisa Holligan already had two children when she decided to try for another baby. Her first two pregnancies had come easily. But for some unknown reason, the third didn’t. Holligan and her husband experienced miscarriage after miscarriage after miscarriage. Like many other people struggling to conceive, Holligan turned to in vitro fertilization, or IVF. The…

Agents are the hottest thing in tech right now. Top firms from Google DeepMind to OpenAI to Anthropic are racing to augment large language models with the ability to carry out tasks by themselves. Known as agentic AI in industry jargon, such systems have fast become the new target of Silicon Valley buzz. Everyone from…

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 US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic This week marks a strange anniversary—it’s five years since most of us first heard about a virus causing a mysterious “pneumonia.” A…

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. This week marks a strange anniversary—it’s five years since most of us first heard about a virus causing a mysterious “pneumonia.” A virus that we later learned could…

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. The world’s first industrial-scale plant for green steel promises a cleaner future As of 2023, nearly 2 billion metric tons of steel were being produced annually, enough to cover Manhattan in a layer…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I love the fresh start that comes with a new year. And one thing adding a boost to my January is our newest list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. In case you haven’t…

The first Democrat in New York history with a computer science background wants to revive some of the ideas behind the failed California AI safety bill, SB 1047, with a new version in his state that would regulate the most advanced AI models. It’s called the RAISE Act, an acronym for “Responsible AI Safety and…

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. What’s next for AI in 2025 For the last couple of years we’ve had a go at predicting what’s coming next in AI. A fool’s game given how fast this industry moves. But…

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. For the last couple of years we’ve had a go at predicting what’s coming next in AI. A fool’s game given how fast this industry moves. But…

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 means the end of internet search as we’ve known it We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few words in a search box and in return…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The start of a new year, and maybe especially this one, feels like a good time for a gut check: How optimistic are you feeling about the future of technology?  Our…

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Every day, we are tracked hundreds or even thousands of times across the digital world. Cookies and web trackers capture every website link that we click,…

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: MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025 Each year, we spend months researching and discussing which technologies will make the cut for our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list. We try to highlight…

We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few relevant words in a search box and in return get a list of blue links to the most relevant results. Maybe some quick explanations up top. Maybe some maps or sports scores or a video. But fundamentally, it’s just fetching information…

Welcome to our annual breakthroughs issue. If you’re an MIT Technology Review superfan, you may already know that putting together our 10 Breakthrough Technologies (TR10) list is one of my favorite things we do as a publication. We spend months researching and discussing which technologies will make the list. We try to highlight a mix…

Recorded on January 3, 2025 Unveiling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025 Speakers: Amy Nordrum, executive editor, and Charlotte Jee, news editor. Each year, MIT Technology Review publishes an annual list of the top ten breakthrough technologies that will have the greatest impact on how we live and work in the future. This year, the…

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 poop could help feed the planet A new industrial facility in suburban Seattle is giving off a whiff of futuristic technology. It can safely treat fecal waste from people and livestock while…

WHO Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity WHEN Now Google’s introduction of AI Overviews, powered by its Gemini language model, will alter how billions of people search the internet. And generative search may be the first step toward an AI agent that handles any question you have or task you need done. Rather than returning…

WHO Gilead Sciences, GSK, ViiV Healthcare WHEN 1 to 3 years In June 2024, results from a trial of a new medicine to prevent HIV were announced—and they were jaw-dropping. Lenacapavir, a treatment injected once every six months, protected over 5,000 girls and women in Uganda and South Africa from getting HIV. And it was…

WHO US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, US National Science Foundation WHEN 6 months The next time you glance up at the night sky, consider: The particles inside everything you can see make up only about 5% of what’s out there in the universe. Dark energy and dark matter constitute the rest, astronomers…

WHO Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI WHEN Now Make no mistake: Size matters in the AI world. When OpenAI launched GPT-3 back in 2020, it was the largest language model ever built. The firm showed that supersizing this type of model was enough to send performance through the roof. That…

WHO Blue Ocean Barns, DSM-Firmenich, Rumin8, Symbrosia WHEN Now Companies are finally making real progress on one of the trickiest problems for climate change: cow burps.  The world’s herds of cattle belch out methane as a by-product of digestion, as do sheep and goats. That powerful greenhouse gas makes up the single biggest source of…