Articles by Technology Review from May 2020

Two NASA astronauts launched into space aboard SpaceXs brand new Crew Dragon vehicle, en route to the International Space Station. Its the first time the company is sending humans into space, and the ...

Two NASA astronauts have just launched into space aboard SpaceXs brand-new Crew Dragon vehicle, en route to the International Space Station. It is the first time the company has sent humans into space...

The news: The United Nations is endorsing a computer simulation tool that it believes will help governments tackle the worlds biggest problems, from gender inequality to climate change. Global challen...

The news: Twitter placed a warning label on a tweet from US President Donald Trump early on May 29, saying that it violated the platforms rules against glorifying violence. In the tweet, sent at 12:53...

An experimental tool helps researchers wade through the overwhelming amount of coronavirus literature to check whether emerging studies follow scientific consensus. Why it matters: Since the start of ...

Four years ago, a Breitbart writer famed for championing a harassment campaign targeting women in video games used his air time during a White House press briefing to blast Twitter. He was angry that ...

The news: Two days after Twitter added fact-checking labels to US President Donald Trump’s misleading tweets about mail-in voting, the president has signed an executive order aimed at weakening ...

The news: Two days after Twitter added fact-checking labels to US President Donald Trump’s misleading tweets about mail-in voting, the president has signed an executive order aimed at weakening ...

Perhaps the single biggest implication of reopening national economies is that responsibility and thus liability for dealing with the covid-19 pandemic will shift from the public to the private sector...

About a month after shelter-in-place orders began in her area, Shaylee Mansfieldan 11-year-old deaf actress in Austin, Texasposted a video on Twitter. I dont understand my favorite people on Instagram...

About a month after shelter-in-place orders began in her area, Shaylee Mansfieldan 11-year-old deaf actress in Austin, Texasposted a video on Twitter. I dont understand my favorite people on Instagram...

The news: Twitter added a fact checking label to two tweets from US President Donald Trumps Twitter account on Tuesday. The tweets from @realDonaldTrump (the presidents popular personal account that a...

The news: Twitter added a fact-checking label to two tweets from US President Donald Trumps Twitter account on Tuesday. The tweets from @realDonaldTrump (the presidents popular personal account that a...

While older people share fake news more than other age groups, a new analysis says incorrect assumptions about why is causing problems....

This week on Radio Corona, join us for a discussion about digital contract tracing initiatives with Gideon Lichfield, our editor-in-chief, Danny Weitzner of MITs CSAIL, and Bobbie Johnson, a Tech Revi...

The news: Virgin Orbit failed in its first test of its LauncherOne rocket yesterday, after seven years of development and testing. The rocket was transported by a Boeing 747 then released over the Pac...

The moonshot program to come up with a vaccine against covid-19 is advancing faster than anyone could have hoped. At least four experimental vaccines have been shown to protect monkeys, and three of t...

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...

In a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey, a handful of people stand around the base of a white box as big as a house. Every few seconds a plastic bin emerges from an opening in its sleek walls. Someone ...

In a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey, a handful of people stand around the base of a white box as big as a house. Every few seconds a plastic bin emerges from an opening in its sleek walls. Someone ...

On Wednesday, May 27, at 4:33 p.m. US Eastern Time, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are scheduled to launch into orbit for a rendezvous with the International Space Station. This is standa...

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two of the most hyped drugs being studied as treatments for covid-19, thanks in large part to President Donald Trumps repeated promotion during his public appear...

Brandon Moak felt as if a freight train had hit him. It was mid-March, and the cofounder and CTO of the autonomous- trucking startup Embark Trucks had been keeping tabs on the emergence of covid-19. A...

Brandon Moak felt as if a freight train had hit him.  It was mid-March, and the cofounder and CTO of the autonomous- trucking startup Embark Trucks had been keeping tabs on the emergence of covid...

A day in the life of Salesforce workers will look very different when they return to the software companys offices. The San Franciscobased business says all of its 49,000 employees can continue workin...

Kathleen M. Carley and her team at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Center for Informed Democracy & Social Cybersecurity have been tracking bots and influence campaigns for a long time. Across US and f...

The news: North Dakota was one of the first American states to launch a coronavirus contact tracing app, in April. Now, several weeks into the process of reopening the state, the government in Bismarc...

Studies on macaques suggest that infection with the coronavirus grants some immunity to catching it againand that vaccines also seem to offer some protection. The questions:Does getting infected by th...

Apple and Google are releasing their much-anticipated exposure notification technology to help global health authorities track the coronavirus pandemic. Governments around the world can now use the te...

Apple and Google are releasing their much-anticipated exposure notification technology to help global health authorities track the coronavirus pandemic. Governments around the world can now use the te...

Apple and Google are releasing their much-anticipated exposure notification technology to help global health authorities track the coronavirus pandemic. Governments around the world can now use the te...

The news: Astronomers have made what are possibly the first ever observations of a planet in the process of being born. The newly released images are of a very young star system called AB Aurigae, abo...

You are feeling feverish and have a cough. Is it just a cold, or is it covid-19? Thats a question thats going to be hanging over all of us, possibly for several years. Right now, getting tested for th...

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 much...

Take a deep breath. Now, tell me how are you feeling? There are no wrong answers, and no one else needs to know. Give your day a score out of 10 if you cant think of the right words. Even better, wri...

We are witnessing a new wave of technological progress with enormous potential to profoundly transform our societies. Together with globalization, climate change, demographic transformations, and the ...

With the latest technology and smartest talent, the possibilities are endless. Explore the ways technology and people are bridging gaps and creating new opportunities and resiliencies now through adva...

On Friday, May 15, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the worlds largest contract chipmaker, announced that it will build a $12 billion plant in Arizona, to open by 2024. It expects th...

The moon is a treasure trove of valuable resources. Gold, platinum, and many rare Earth metals await extraction to be used in the production of next-generation electronics. Non-radioactive helium-3 co...

Drug maker Moderna has just announced encouraging interim results from the ongoing phase 1 trial for its experimental coronavirus vaccine. The early results suggest the vaccine has the potential to co...

Countries around the world have responded to the Covid-19 coronavirus with lockdowns, restrictions, and technology solutions that use artificial intelligence to combat the virus. As the worl...

For years we’ve been using the phrase gone viral to describe something that becomes wildly popular on the internet. But it strikes a different note in the middle of a global pandemic, especially...

Dozens of states across the US are pinning their hopes on contact tracing to control the spread of the coronavirus and enable regions to reopen without sparking major resurgences of the outbreak. Alas...

Technology Review is running a project to monitor and observe the development and deployment of automated contact tracing apps aimed at curbing the spread of covid-19. Each weekday we review submissio...

Brian Pokorny had heard of AI systems for call centers before. But as the IT director of Otsego County, New York, he assumed he couldnt afford them. Then the pandemic hit, and the state governor order...

Covid-19 is primarily a respiratory infection that attacks the lungs, making it harder for patients to breathe and get enough oxygen to the rest of the body. Pneumonia and other respiratory conditions...

The story of blockchain market adoption closely resembles the path taken by other disruptive technologies: an initial industry explores what is possible, others give form and substance to what is plau...

The news: Thousands of droplets from the mouths of people who are talking loudly can stay in the air for between eight and 14 minutes before disappearing, according to a new study. The research, condu...

Like most children in the US, Juana* hasnt been to school in two months. Her mother, Dilma, left school after first grade and doesnt speak English. Until recently, the family in Oakland, California, o...

Some people die from covid-19, and others who are infected dont even show symptoms. But scientists still dont know why. Now consumer genomics company 23andMe is going to offer free genetic tests to 10...

In this week’s episode of Radio Corona, we explore why the US has no idea how to manage all the testing data its collecting.  Last week, reporter Neel Patel wrote&#...

The news: In its latest Community Standards Enforcement Report, released today, Facebook detailed the updates it has made to its AI systems for detecting hate speech and disinformation. The tech giant...

The amount of data generated by businesses today has reached unprecedented levels following successive waves of digitalization across products, services, operations, and supply chains, and as a result...

The news: Wuhans entire population of 11 million people will be tested for coronavirus after the city, where the pandemic started, discovered new infections for the first time since its lockdown was l...

The country has the highest penetration of any automated contact tracing app in the world, but one senior figure says it wasnt a game changer....

Anyone looking for an illustration of how rapidly shopping habits changed when covid-19 hit needed only to glance at the top 10 search terms on Amazon in the week of April 12 to 18. In place of former...

In the week of April 12-18, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N9...

America is hiring an army of people to track down coronavirus cases. Whats the job like? How do people respond? And how stressful is it?...

This weekend Im going to break my isolation for the first time in two months. Aside from occasional socially distanced bike rides and walks in the park with a handful of trusted friends, I havent spen...

The news: A 25-minute clip of an upcoming documentary featuring a well-known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist was viewed millions of times this week on social media, before Facebook and YouTube pledge...

Millions of Indian citizens are being forced to download the countrys tracking appa line no other democracy has yet crossed in the fight against the coronavirus....

There's a deluge of apps that detect your covid-19 exposure, often with little transparency. Our Covid Tracing Tracker project will document them....

For our Covid Tracing Tracker project, we are sifting files, documents, and interviewing sources to monitor the status of automated contact tracing apps all around the world. But were also asking for ...

When the notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was kicked off YouTube and Facebook in 2018, the lesson was supposed to be that deplatforming works. Without access to his millions of followers on ma...

Imagine youre an epidemiologist or public health expert in the US during the current crisis. Senior elected officials have just contacted you to ask your advice on whether its safe to ease some lockdo...

Imagine youre an epidemiologist or public health expert in the US during the current crisis. Senior elected officials have just contacted you to ask your advice on whether its safe to ease some lockdo...

On Friday, March 13, the management of the large hospital in Sacramento, California, where Kate works as a nurse anesthetist announced the cancellation of all elective surgeries. Kate and her husband ...

Information firehose: The standard practice for teaching a machine-learning algorithm is to give it all the details at once. Say youre building an image classification system to recognize different sp...

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 much...

On Saturday, after three hours of flirting and playing games, Katia Ameri got engaged to Ronak Ro Trivediand the whole thing was live-streamed on Zoom. I thought that he was very sincere! she told me ...

On Saturday, after three hours of flirting and playing games, Katia Ameri got engaged to Ronak Ro Trivediand the whole thing was live-streamed on Zoom. I thought that he was very sincere! she told me ...

A few years after Li Jinxing graduated from college, he returned to his rural hometown to become a flower farmer. The days were long but the routine familiar: rise early and tend to the blossoms in th...

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...

Income inequality is one of the overarching problems of economics. One of the most effective tools policymakers have to address it is taxation: governments collect money from people according to what ...

The news: The UK government has announced it will start inviting residents of the Isle of Wight to download its official covid-19 contact tracing app this week. The app launch will start with National...

In some ways, California is a US leader in grappling with the covid-19 pandemic. It enacted early and aggressive social distancing policies that slowed the spread the disease and kept the death rate l...

The news: Apple and Google have announced that their coronavirus tracing technology will ban the use of location tracking. The announcement could create potential complications for some apps that plan...

The two technology giants have laid out new rules for those using their upcoming exposure notification system....

In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, will discuss the future of our connected world with Vint Cerf, one of the people known as a “father o...

In Portland, Oregon, earlier this spring, a programmer named Ian Hilgart-Martiszus pulled out a needle and inserted it into the arm of social worker Alicia Rowe as she squinted and looked away. He was...

The news: In a fresh spin on manufactured pop, OpenAI has released a neural network called Jukebox that can generate catchy songs in a variety of different styles, from teenybop and country to hip-hop...

In less than two months, covid-19 created arguably the worlds largest collective shift in social activity and working practices. Research firm Global Workplace Analytics estimated in a 2018 report tha...

The covid-19 pandemic has shown us how much health care is in need of not just tweaking but radical change. The pressure on global health systems, providers, and staff has already been increasing to u...

Pandemic conspiracy theorists are using the Wayback Machine to promote "zombie content" that avoids content moderators and fact-checkers....

Pandemic conspiracy theorists are using the Wayback Machine to promote "zombie content" that avoids content moderators and fact-checkers....