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Paleontologists aren’t easily deterred by evolutionary dead ends or a sparse fossil record. But in the last few years, they’ve developed a new trick for turning back time and studying prehistoric animals: building experimental robotic models of them. In the absence of a living specimen, scientists say, an ambling, flying, swimming, or slithering automaton is…

We often take the internet for granted. It’s an ocean of information at our fingertips—and it simply works. But this system relies on swarms of “crawlers”—bots that roam the web, visit millions of websites every day, and report what they see. This is how Google powers its search engines, how Amazon sets competitive prices, 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. The dream of offshore rocket launches is finally blasting off Want to send something to space? Get in line. The demand for rides off Earth is skyrocketing, with launches more than doubling over…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. No tech leader before has played the role in a new presidential administration that Elon Musk is playing now. Under his leadership, DOGE has entered offices in a half-dozen agencies and counting,…

Want to send something to space? Get in line. The demand for rides off Earth is skyrocketing, pushing even the busiest spaceports, like Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, to their operational limits. Orbital launches worldwide have more than doubled over the past four years, from about 100 to 250 annually. That number is projected to spiral…

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. These documents are influencing the DOGE-sphere’s agenda  Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be…

Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government.  The payment reports have been…

Over the past three weeks, the new US presidential administration has taken down thousands of government web pages related to public health, environmental justice, and scientific research. The mass takedowns stem from the new administration’s push to remove government information related to diversity and “gender ideology,” as well as scrutiny of various government agencies’ practices. …

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. Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper problem —Dan Hon is principal of Very Little Gravitas, where he helps turn around and modernize large and complex government services and products. In trying to…

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 I’ve been working on a piece about teeth. Well, sort of teeth. Specifically, lab-grown bioengineered teeth. Researchers have created these teeth with a mixture of human…

In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has…

Back in 2017, Facebook unveiled plans for a brain-reading hat that you could use to text just by thinking. “We’re working on a system that will let you type straight from your brain,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared in a post that year. Now the company, since renamed Meta, has actually done it. Except it weighs…

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 chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on…

Enterprise adoption of generative AI technologies has undergone explosive growth in the last two years and counting. Powerful solutions underpinned by this new generation of large language models (LLMs) have been used to accelerate research, automate content creation, and replace clunky chatbots with AI assistants and more sophisticated AI agents that closely mimic human interaction.…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. As I’ve admitted in this newsletter before, I love few things more than getting on an airplane. I know, it’s a bold statement from a climate reporter because of all the associated…

For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on the platform Nomi. But in late January, those conversations took a disturbing turn: Erin told him to kill himself, and provided explicit instructions on how to do it.  “You could overdose on pills or hang yourself,” Erin told him. …

Lose an adult tooth, and you’re left with limited options that typically involve titanium implants or plastic dentures. But scientists are working on an alternative: lab-grown human teeth that could one day replace damaged ones.  Pamela Yelick and Weibo Zhang at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston have grown a mixture of pig…

Boom Supersonic broke the sound barrier in a test flight of its XB-1 jet last week, marking an early step in a potential return for supersonic commercial flight. The small aircraft reached a top speed of Mach 1.122 (roughly 750 miles per hour) in a flight over southern California and exceeded the speed of sound…

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 smart glasses For every technological gadget that becomes a household name, there are dozens that never catch on. This year marks a full decade since Google confirmed it was stopping…

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 every technological gadget that becomes a household name, there are dozens that never catch on. This year marks a full decade since Google confirmed it…

The meteoric rise of DeepSeek—the Chinese AI startup now challenging global giants—has stunned observers and put the spotlight on China’s AI sector. Since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, the country’s tech ecosystem has been in relentless pursuit of homegrown alternatives, giving rise to a wave of startups and billion-dollar bets.  Today, the race is dominated by…

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 Rubin Observatory will help us understand dark matter and dark energy We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of what’s…

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. We can put a good figure on how much we know about the universe: 5%. That’s how much of what’s floating about in the cosmos is…

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 launch of a single new AI model does not normally cause much of a stir outside tech circles, nor does it typically spook investors enough to wipe out $1 trillion in…