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US doctors write billions of prescriptions each year. During 2024, though, one type of drug stood out—“wonder drugs” known as GLP-1 agonists. As of September, one of every 20 prescriptions written for adults was for one of these drugs, according to the health data company Truveta. The drugs, which include Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Victoza, are…

Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin most modern AI systems. That’s according to work presented at a leading machine learning conference in Vancouver last week. Neural networks, from GPT-4 to Stable Diffusion, are built by wiring together perceptrons,…

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. Later today, around 10 minutes after this email lands in your inbox, I’ll be holding my four-year-old daughter tight as she receives her booster dose of the MMR…

Business applications powered by AI are revolutionizing customer experiences, accelerating the speed of business, and driving employee productivity. In fact, according to research firm Frost & Sullivan’s 2024 Global State of AI report, 89% of organizations believe AI and machine learning will help them grow revenue, boost operational efficiency, and improve customer experience. Take for…

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. Digital twins of human organs are here. They’re set to transform medical treatment. Steven Niederer, a biomedical engineer at the Alan Turing Institute and Imperial College London, has a cardboard box filled with…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The vibes in the climate world this year have largely been … less than great. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit a new high, reaching 37.4 billion metric tons in 2024. This year is…

A healthy heart beats at a steady rate, between 60 and 100 times a minute. That’s not the case for all of us, I’m reminded, as I look inside a cardboard box containing around 20 plastic hearts—each a replica of a real human one. The hearts, which previously sat on a shelf in a lab…