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Greetings from a cold winter day. As I write this letter, we are in the early stages of President Donald Trump’s second term. The inauguration was exactly one week ago, and already an image from that day has become an indelible symbol of presidential power: a photo of the tech industry’s great data barons seated…

Tourists to Odense, Denmark, come for the city’s rich history and culture: It’s where King Canute, Denmark’s last Viking king, was murdered during the 11th century, and the renowned fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen was born there some 700 years later. But today, Odense (with a population just over 210,000) is also home to…

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. The past few months have demonstrated how AI can bring us together. Meta released a model that can translate speech from more than…

The tiny beads added to some cleansers and cosmetics are one source of the long-­lasting microplastics that threaten the environment. But MIT researchers have found a way to address the problem at its source: replacing them with polymers that break down into harmless sugars and amino acids. Particles of this polymer could also be used…

A trip to Walmart. An aging German shepherd. A cheap disposable camera. These are just a few of the seemingly mundane things that have sparked the relentlessly imaginative mind of Kurt Schroder ’90, leading to some of his groundbreaking inventions. “I just can’t stop doing it,” he says, with a chuckle and a tiny trace…

Jane Muschenetz’s poems don’t look like the sonnets you remember studying in high school English. If anything, they’re more likely to call to mind your statistics class. Flip through the pages of her poetry chapbook Power Point and you’ll see charts, graphs, and citations galore. One poem visually documents maternal mortality rates and women’s unpaid…

Microbes that gobble up or break down environmental toxins can clean up oil spills, waste sites, and contaminated watersheds. But until his faculty mentor asked him for help with a project he was working on with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2009, Eric Alm had not thought much about their role in a very…

Wearable devices like smart watches and fitness trackers help us measure and learn from physical functions such as heart rates and sleep stages. Now MIT researchers have developed a tiny equivalent for individual brain cells. These soft, battery-free wireless devices, actuated with light, are designed to wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons…

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. Your boss is watching Working today—whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car—can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-­ending consequences if your productivity flags.  But what matters…

In the fall of 2024, a trucking company in Falls Township, Pennsylvania, temporarily stored a storm-damaged Tesla at its yard. A few weeks later, the car burst into flames that grew out of control within seconds, some shooting out 30 feet. A local fire company tried in vain to squelch the blaze, spraying more than…

A full day’s work for Dora Manriquez, who drives for Uber and Lyft in the San Francisco Bay Area, includes waiting in her car for a two-digit number to appear. The apps keep sending her rides that are too cheap to pay for her time—$4 or $7 for a trip across San Francisco, $16 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. The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled Ever since World War II, the US has been the global leader in science and technology—and benefited immensely from it. Research fuels American innovation and…

Maggie Barnidge, 18, has been managing cystic fibrosis her whole life. But not long after she moved out of her home state to start college, she came down with pneumonia and went into liver failure. She desperately wanted to get in touch with her doctor back home, whom she’d been seeing since she was diagnosed…

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. Yesterday marks a month since the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th US president. And what a month it has been. The Trump administration wasted no time…

Ever since World War II, the US has been the global leader in science and technology—and benefited immensely from it. Research fuels American innovation and the economy in turn. Scientists around the world want to study in the US and collaborate with American scientists to produce more of that research. These international collaborations play a…

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. A new Microsoft chip could lead to more stable quantum computers Microsoft has announced that it’s made significant progress in its 20-year quest to make topological quantum bits, or qubits—a special approach to…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Electricity demand rose by 4.3% in 2024 and will continue to grow at close to 4% annually through 2027, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.  If that sounds…

It probably hasn’t been long since you last slipped into something stretchy. From yoga pants to socks, stretch fabrics are everywhere. And they’re only getting more popular: The global spandex market, valued at almost $8 billion in December 2024, is projected to grow between 2% and 8% every year over the next decade. That might…

Microsoft announced today that it has made significant progress in its 20-year quest to make topological quantum bits, or qubits—a special approach to building quantum computers that could make them more stable and easier to scale up.  Researchers and companies have been working for years to build quantum computers, which could unlock dramatic new abilities…

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. Your most important customer may be AI Imagine you run a meal prep company that teaches people how to make simple and delicious food. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation for meal…

At about the time when personal computers charged into cubicle farms, another machine muscled its way into human resources departments and became a staple of routine employment screenings. By the early 1980s, some 2 million Americans annually found themselves strapped to a polygraph—a metal box that, in many people’s minds, detected deception. Most of those…

Imagine you run a meal prep company that teaches people how to make simple and delicious food. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation for meal prep companies, yours is described as complicated and confusing. Why? Because the AI saw that in one of your ads there were chopped chives on the top of a…

Recorded on February 18, 2025 Generative AI Search and the Changing Internet Speakers: Mat Honan, editor in chief, and Niall Firth, executive editor. Generative AI search, one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025, is ushering a new era of the internet. Despite fewer clicks, copyright fights, and sometimes iffy answers, AI could unlock new ways…

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. Nokia is putting the first cellular network on the moon Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second…