Articles by Technology Review from April 2020

The good news started trickling out early this morning, first in a vague company press release and then, by midday, from the White House. A drug called remdesivir appears to actually work against the ...

For all the progress that chatbots and virtual assistants have made, theyre still terrible conversationalists. Most are highly task-oriented: you make a demand and they comply. Some are highly frustra...

Economies are in turmoil. Get the answers to the questions on everyone’s mind: What will it take to stabilize and boost regional, national, and global economies? What can business leaders do to ...

Technology is changing the nature of work on every level of business, from workforce talent to digital implementation and automation. What technologies are having the most significant impact? How do w...

A continuous stream of emerging technologies is radically transforming business, disrupting the technological status quo, and reinventing the way people work. On day two of EmTech Next, well delve int...

Times of crisis require leadership and strategy to navigate the path forward. Day one of EmTech Next digs into topics including: Innovation and Leadership in a Time of Crisis. If innovation is the fue...

We are living in a changed world. Technology and what it means to be digitally resilient are driving the nature of work on every level of the organization as never before. Your key to success as a lea...

AI is rapidly transforming the way that companies interact with their customers. MIT Technology Review Insights survey of 1,004 business leaders, The global AI agenda, found that customer service is t...

Without federal leadership, the hard work of contact tracing is being left to a coalition of states, medics and technology companies like Google and Apple. They can make it happen, but it won't be eas...

There is widespread agreement that the only way to safely reopen the economy is through a massive increase in testing. The US needs to test millions of people per day to effectively track and then con...

Starting in the fall of 2016 and continuing into 2018, researchers at Columbia University in Manhattan began collecting nasal swabs from 191 children, teachers, and emergency workers, asking them to r...

The covid-19 pandemic is stretching hospital resources to the breaking point in nearly every country in the world. It is no surprise that many people hope  AI could speed up patient screening and...

As the coronavirus spread from China across the world earlier this year, two friends in Sydney watched in horror. Milton Zhou is a co-founder of a renewable energy company called the Maoneng Group, wh...

The pandemic is turning medics into social media stars, but even the most successful say being a positive influence is difficult....

The pandemic is turning medics into social-media stars, but even the most successful say being a positive influence is difficult....

The frustration in Marc Andreessens post on our failure to prepare and respond competently to the coronavirus pandemic is palpable, and his diagnosis is adamant: a failure of action, and spe...

One of Israelslargest health maintenance organizations is using artificial intelligence to help identify which of the 2.4 million people it covers are most at risk of severe covid-19 complications. Ma...

Coronavirus testing in the US is nowhere near where it should be. A recent road map suggested we need to test upwards of 20 million people every day in order to safely reopen the economy (we...

Rizwan Malik had always had an interest in AI. As the lead radiologist at the Royal Bolton Hospital, run by the UKs National Health Service (NHS), he saw its potential to make his job easier. In his h...

This report is part of The global AI agenda, a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Fea...

This report is part of The global AI agenda, a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Fea...

California plans to significantly ramp up its coronavirus testing and tracing efforts, as the state strives to reach a point where it could relax stay-at-home rules implemented to contain the outbreak...

In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, will discuss volunteer initiatives that might accelerate the development of a coronavirus vaccine. JoshMorr...

In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, will discuss volunteer initiatives that might accelerate the development of a coronavirus vaccine. Joining ...

Update: This episode has ended. You can watch it below. In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, discussed volunteer initiatives that might accelera...

You might know Bluetooth best for helping you pair your headphones and smartphone, but the 21-year-old wireless technology is getting a new wave of attention now that its at the heart of contact-traci...

Deep Tech is a new subscriber-only podcast that brings alive the people and ideas our editors and reporters are thinking about. Episodes are released every two weeks. Were making this episodelike the ...

Theres a phrase to describe what were experiencing: collective trauma. We are all grievingwhether its for the deaths of loved ones, the loss of our way of life, or the knowledge that things will never...

Whats new: Facebook has released a map showing the proportion of people who say they have experienced coronavirus symptoms in each state in the US. The data was gathered from more than one million Fac...

Eight years ago, Suleika Jaouad was alone in a hospital room, undergoing aggressive treatment for leukemia and awaiting a bone marrow transplant. Just out of college and harboring dreams of becoming a...

The news: A group of experts has produced a plan for the US to reopen its economy safely this summer. However, its contingent on doing at least 20 million tests every day, scaling up contact tracing, ...

The news: A group of experts has produced a plan for the US to reopen its economy safely this summer. However, its contingent on doing at least 20 million tests every day, scaling up contact tracing, ...

The news: A group of experts has produced a plan for the US to reopen its economy safely this summer. However, its contingent on doing at least 20 million tests every day, scaling up contact tracing, ...

If the federal government actually treated the pandemic like a war, its response would look very, very different....

Across San Francisco, trips to workplaces, parks, transit stations, and stores have collectively fallen to about 40% of normal levels since late February, a consequence of strict social distancing mea...

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced plans to launch a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 27. If the launch takes place, it will be ...

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced plans to launch a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 27. If the launch takes place, it will be ...

Results from surveys tracking the true spread of the coronavirus are all over the mapbut one done in the heart of the technology sector says the germ is more widespread, and much less deadly, than wid...

Ron Kim was already convinced that money should be redesigned. Now that the coronavirus epidemic has hit, hes doubling down.  Before covid-19 started spreading in the United States, Kim, a New Yo...

Andrew Ngs startup Landing AI has created a new workplace monitoring tool that issues an alert when anyone is less than the desired distance from a colleague. Six feet apart: On Thursday, the startup ...

Ingredients: 2 Cups flour (300 grams) 1 Tablespoon baking powder 3 Tablespoons sugar Teaspoon salt 5 Tablespoons salted butter, very cold and cut into small chunks Cup dried fruit, such as dried che...

The news: Facebook will start directing people who have interacted with misinformation on coronavirus to a myth-busting page on the World Health Organizations website. Were going to start showing mess...

Remember Libra, Facebooks plan to create a global digital currency? Unveiled last June, it was immediately met with resistance from policymakers and central bankers around the world. So, the team went...

Its my first global pandemic. How about you? Jonathan Rothberg wanted to know. Rothberg is a high-energy biotech entrepreneur who has been trapped in quarantine on his super-yacht, the Gene Machine, s...

If youd told Areeba Imam a month ago that shed become obsessed with Nintendos Animal Crossing, she wouldnt have believed you. Ive never played video games before, says the 23-year-old college student,...

President Donald Trump has announced that he is halting US payments to the World Health Organization (WHO). Its unclear whether he in fact has legal authority to do so. Leaving that aside, though, as ...

President Donald Trump has announced that he is halting US payments to the World Health Organization (WHO). Its unclear whether he in fact has legal authority to do so. Leaving that aside, though, as ...

Facebook has developed a new method to play out the consequences of its code. The context: Like any software company, the tech giant needs to test its product any time it pushes updates. But the sorts...

In this episode of Radio Corona on April 16 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Nelson Mark, economics professor at the University of Notre Dame, about ...

In this episode of Radio Corona on April 16 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Nelson Mark, economics professor at the University of Notre Dame, about ...

The news: President Trumps decision to freeze US funding for the World Health Organization has been met with condemnation by political and scientific leaders around the world. Yesterday Trump announce...

I am writing this on April 10, 2020. Twenty-five days have passed since San Francisco became the first US city to impose a stay-at-home order on its residents. It feels like six months. As the covid-1...

I am writing this on April 10, 2020. Twenty-five days have passed since San Francisco became the first US city to impose a stay-at-home order on its residents. It feels like six months. As the covid-1...

Linda Kozlowskis neighbor wanted to know if she needed anything from Walmart. It wasnt a quick trip into town; the drive from the Oregon coast to Portland took two hours. But because of her age, Kozlo...

The US and other countries are scrambling to test hundreds of thousands of people to see if they are infected by the coronavirus. That test, which employs a technique called PCR, looks directly for th...

June 1956 From The First Great Epidemic of History: Since the beginning of recorded history the people of this world have been molested by a long series of awesome epidemics, several of which have bro...

What has the role of disasters been in shaping society throughout history? Disasters tend to make structural failures and long-running structural inequalities glaringly obvious. They force them to a c...

What steps did the US government take after the 2014 Ebola outbreak? An emergency spending bill that was passed by Congress in December 2014 included $1 billion that the administration used to address...

And they could even help with the next one....

Grassroots groups of researchers are taking matters into their own hands. But volunteering doesnt always go smoothly....

What it is, where it comes from, how it hurts us, and how we fight it....

A new paper by researchers from Harvards school of public health modeling the spread of covid-19 in the United States says that prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022. ...

A new paper by researchers from Harvards school of public health modeling the spread of covid-19 in the United States says that prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022. ...

The petrochemical industry came of age during World War II, ushering in the era of gasoline, polymers, and plastics. But it truly expanded after the war, helped along by pioneering chemical engineers ...

I would love to see a future where looking inside the body becomes as routine as a blood pressure cuff measurement, says Charles Cadieu 04, MEng 05. As president of the medical technology startup Capt...

This May, residents chosen from a lottery  of 2,600 applicants are scheduled to begin moving into 98 affordable housing units in the new Finch Cambridge building on Concord Avenue near Fresh Pond...

Like many college students, Matthew Kallis 82 took a while to find his focus. He recalls the day it happened: I sat down in the middle of Killian Court staring out at the pillars of Building 10, and s...

I still remember the smell of the tobacco smoke. Bans on indoor smoking had recently gone into effect, but there had been no provision to fumigate, and a haze lingered throughout Professor Joseph Harr...

Back in 2008, Oregon health officials had enough money to let additional people join their state-run Medicaid system. They figured demand would exceed the number of spaces available, so the state ran ...

The Institute launched the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing (SCC) with three critical objectives: to support the rapid evolution and growth of computer science and AI, to facilitate coll...

As this issue of MIT News goes to press, MIT has joined the nation, and the world, in facing an unprecedented public health crisis. Our community has a significant role to play in the response to the ...

MIT has had more than its share of memorable commencements, from the collapse of founder William Barton Rogers during his 1882 speech, to the arrival of 17 beavers who parachuted into Killian Court wh...

When Ellen Swallow Richards became the first woman to graduate from MIT in 1873, she was convinced that her aptitude for science was not unusualthat she was not, as people claimed, an exception. Richa...

The question at the top of most Americans minds right now is: When can we go outdoors again? California took one of the first stabs at answering that question on Tuesday, as Governor Gavin Newsom laid...

The widespread perception that it was once official British policy to let the novel coronavirus spread until the population reached herd immunity is false; the government was just overly optimistic ab...

Putting contact tracing apps on billions of phones is a power move. But will people trust them enough to make it successful?...

Coronavirus was a test, and many of the worlds most advanced nations have all too visibly failed. What can we do better?...

Lori Perlow emailed her colleagues when her grandmother died last Monday, letting them know shed take the afternoon off. She sat down at her computer the next day and opened Zoom, just as she would on...

Lori Perlow emailed her colleagues when her grandmother died last Monday, letting them know shed take the afternoon off. She sat down at her computer the next day and opened Zoom, just as she would on...

The inside story of how one Indian state is flattening the curve through epic levels of contact tracing and social assistance....

In this episode of Radio Corona, Jennifer Strong, our audio and live journalism editor, will speak with economistJohnVan Reenen about how to make effective policy to salvage the global economy. Reenen...

Its becoming increasingly clear how we can get back outside and back to workalthough not exactly back to normal....

Its becoming increasingly clear how we can get back outside and back to workalthough not exactly back to normal....

I stop the car when I see him walking slowly down the empty footpath outside our now shuttered buildingI know he lives on campus and is far from home. I sent my students away more than a week ago; I t...

The global effort to halt the spread of the deadly coronavirus has stalled much the global economy, setting up an unintended experiment on the impact on carbon emissions. Chinas GDP may have plummeted...

Apple and Google are jointly building software into iPhone and Android devices to help track the spread of coronavirus by telling users if they contacted an infected person and are potentially sick th...

The blood sample arrived in Vancouver by courier on February 25. It wasnt much to look at, but to the scientists at the 117-person biotechnology company AbCellera, it was precious. The blood had been ...

On the early afternoon of December 15, the gavel fell at the UN COP25 conference in Madrid. The weeks of negotiations over crucial pieces of the Paris climate agreement reached four years earlier had ...

Imagine, a few weeks or months from now, having a covid-19 test kit sent to your home. Its small and portable, but pretty easy to figure out. You prick your finger as in a blood sugar test for diabeti...

In this episode of Radio Corona, on April 9 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at C...

How many people have really been infected by the coronavirus? In one German town a preliminary answer is in: about 15%. The municipality of Gangelt, near the border with the Netherlands, was hard hit ...

How many people have really been infected by the coronavirus? In one German town a preliminary answer is in: about 14%. The municipality of Gangelt, near the border with the Netherlands, was hard hit ...

In this episode of Radio Corona, on April 10 at 4 pm ET, Karen Hao, senior AI reporter of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Shion Lim, a postdoc research fellow at the Wells Lab of UCSF. They will be...

When it comes to predicting the spread of an infectious disease, its crucial to understand what Ryan Tibshirani, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, calls the the pyramid of severity...

The US isn't ready to hold a vote during a pandemic. It needs to get there, quickly....

Ten years ago I ran away to sea after a family crisis. But life on a container ship was a very different kind of loneliness from the self-isolation caused by coronavirus....

In this episode of Radio Corona, on April 9 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columb...

In the first employment report after social distancing measures had taken hold in many US states, the Department of Labor announced that 3.3 million people had filed jobless claims. A week later, in t...

In one of the first such efforts in the country, San Francisco is assembling a task force to interview and trace the interactions of all people who test positive for covid-19. The goal is to find who ...

Ten years ago I ran away to sea after a family crisis. But life on a container ship was a very different kind of loneliness from the self-isolation caused by coronavirus....

In this episode of Radio Corona, on April 9 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Craig Spencer, director of global health in emergency medicine at Columb...

The news: Facebook has launched a new app called Tuned, which lets couples message each other, swap music, share their mood, keep a daily shared diary, and send photos and voice memos. It can be used ...

Transfusions of blood serum from people whove recovered from covid-19 could help severe cases recover, according to a new study from China. Plasma donation: The concept of using blood from surviv...

In one of the first such efforts in the country, San Francisco is assembling a task force to interview and trace the interactions of every person who tests positive for covid-19. The goal is to find w...

Transfusions of blood serum from people whove recovered from covid-19 could help severe cases recover, according to a new study from China. Plasma donation: The concept of using blood from surviv...

Transfusions of blood serum from people whove recovered from covid-19 could help severe cases recover, according to a new study from China. Plasma donation: The concept of using blood from surviv...

The novel coronavirus sweeping the globe has exposed how vulnerable international supply chains are to disruption. The World Economic Forum has a pitch for how to make them more resilient: blockchains...

The novel coronavirus sweeping the globe has exposed how vulnerable international supply chains are to disruption. The World Economic Forum has a pitch for how to make them more resilient: blockchains...

Just like that, our internet connection has become an umbilical to the outside world. We now depend on it to do our jobs, to go to school, and to see other people. It is our primary source of entertai...

Just like that, our internet connection has become an umbilical to the outside world. We now depend on it to do our jobs, to go to school, and to see other people. It is our primary source of entertai...

Deep Tech is a new subscriber-only podcast that brings alive the people and ideas in our print magazine. Episodes are released every two weeks. Were making the first four installments, built around ou...

We all know by now that flattening the curve is one of the most important things we can do to mitigate the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic. China and Italy provided a grim picture of what happ...

In this episode of Radio Corona on April 7 at 4 pm ET, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, speaks with Nelson Mark, economics professor at the University of Notre Dame, about t...

The news: WhatsApp has said it will implement new limits on message forwarding amid growing concerns that it is being used to spread misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. From today, mes...

The news: With many of us now relying on video calls for face-to-face interaction, choppy connections are more frustrating than ever. An artificial intelligence that mimics an individual speakers way ...

Jason Bae, an urgent-care physician in Northern California, has been seeing covid-19 patients for almost a month. When he first started ordering coronavirus tests, around the week of March 9, his heal...

Google researchers are using imitation learning to teach autonomous robots how to pace, spin, and move in more agile ways. What they did: Using a data set of motion capture data recorded from var...

Update: this episode has ended. You can watch here.  To register, click this link just before 4 p.m. ET. We also recommend you download or enable the Zoom application. You wil...

Every few days, tens of thousands of people on Instagram join a virtual dance party hosted by DJ D-Nice. The blowout live-stream events, branded under the name Club Quarantine, have attracted celebrit...

This was supposed to be the moment for introvertsthe disaster preppers of our new, covid-ravaged social lives. Those who cherished their time alone at home were already experts at voluntary self-isola...