Articles by Technology Review from June 2020

On Monday, India banned TikTok and dozens of other apps made in China, escalating tension between the countries two weeks after a long-simmering border dispute in the Himalayas turned deadly. The news...

On Monday, India banned TikTok and dozens of other apps made in China, escalating tension between the countries two weeks after a long-simmering border dispute in the Himalayas turned deadly. The news...

The coronavirus pandemic has led to enhanced health-care collaboration, innovation, and increased use of digital technologies. Telehealth enables doctors to safely connect with patients virtually and ...

We have the greatest testing program anywhere in the world, US President Donald Trump told reporters on June 23. We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we h...

Astronomers from CalTech have reported that they’ve observed a collision between two black holes. Normally such an event is invisible, but this time a more massive black hole sitting nearby help...

The virus I am very wary of simplistic projections about the ongoing outbreak based solely off of its current growth patterns” Maimuna Majumder, SM 15, PhD 18, faculty, Boston Childrens Hos...

Even before president Trumps executive order on June 22, the US was already bucking global tech immigration trends. Over the past five years, as other countries have opened up their borders to highly ...

The news: US lawmakers have introduced a bill which would ban the use of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement agencies. Specifically, it would make it illegal for any federal agenc...

When it comes to supporting DevOps initiatives, mainframe technologyintroduced in the early 1950sisnt likely to be the first to come to mind. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content ...

In 2015, alarmed by an escalating civil war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia led an air campaign against the country to defeat what it deemed a threatening rise of Shia power. The intervention, launched with ei...

Its an old story by nowcloud is the computing of the future. What has become evident in recent years, however, is cloud has established itself as the computing of the presentand the agile IT architect...

Generals always fight the last war, runs the military aphorism. Politicians have also drawn heavily from battlefield lexicon in framing the fight against covid-19, but they too are at risk of leaning ...

Jess Whittlestone at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues published a comment piece in Nature Machine Intelligence this week arguing t...

Amazon launched a $2 billion venture fund to invest in companies developing ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, marking the latest corporate effort to allocate major resources to combating climate c...

The news: An open letter from a growing coalition of AI researchers is calling out scientific publisher Springer Nature for a conference paper it originally planned to include in its forthcoming book ...

In the space of a few months, covid-19 has upended economic and social activity worldwide, sending billions of people home for months on end and causing productivity to tumble. In Asia, the first regi...

After a poorly-attended Trump rally, older liberals are celebrating online movements that they dont really understand....

Jess Fong was feeling restless. Black Lives Matter protests stemming from the death of George Floyd were spreading, and she wanted to help. So she started scrolling through the plethora of lists that ...

Its an old story by nowcloud is the computing of the future. What has become evident in recent years, however, is cloud has established itself as the computing of the presentand the agile IT architect...

Businesses today have a wealth of information to draw upon. It comes from customer touchpoints, mobile interactions, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, e-commerce transactions, and many more sources. A...

AI is driving industrial transformation across a variety of sectors, and were just beginning to scratch the surface of AI capabilities. Some industrial innovations are barely noticed, such as forest i...

A pair of palm-tree-fringed coves form two narrow notches, about a quarter of a mile apart, along the shoreline of an undisclosed island somewhere in the Caribbean. After a site visit in early March, ...

Virgin Galactic announced it has signed a deal with NASA to develop a private orbital astronaut readiness program that trains and supports private astronauts for missions to the International Space St...

The roar inside a packed stadium is felt more than heard, a kind of whole-body buzz. As the announcer on the PA brings the crowd to a crescendo, techno music pumping and lights strafing our heads, dis...

The roar inside a packed stadium is felt more than heard, a kind of whole-body buzz. As the announcer on the PA brings the crowd to a crescendo, techno music pumping and lights strafing our heads, dis...

The roar inside a packed stadium is felt more than heard, a kind of whole-body buzz. As the announcer on the PA brings the crowd to a crescendo, techno music pumping and lights strafing our heads, dis...

Ahead of President Trumps rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. Just passed 800,000 tickets, he wrote. Biggest data haul and rally sign...

Ahead of President Trumps rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. Just passed 800,000 tickets, he wrote. Biggest data haul and rally sign...

There are advantages to being one of the worlds largest single-payer health-care systems. For the UKs National Health Service, the NHS, big data is increasingly one of them.  Its Recovery Trial, ...

Were still not very sure how covid-19 immunity works. As we inch closer to a vaccine and pin our hopes on herd immunity to allow us to safely open up communities again, the uncertainties will only get...

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...

Potential weapons against covid-19 include manufactured antibodies, serum transfusions from survivors, antivirals, steroids, and more than 100 vaccine candidates, some now advancing toward decisive te...

The news: The UK is going to abandon its current contact tracing app in favor of one based on technology built by Apple and Google, the BBC reports. Tests of its existing app among residents on the Is...

The discovery that led Nir Shavit to start a company came about the way most discoveries do: by accident. The MIT professor was working on a project to reconstruct a map of a mouses brain and needed s...

Jacob White, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was invited by Dean of Digital Learning Krisha Rajagopal to share the details of his teaching-from-home set up with the Academic ...

We give robots some pretty scary and stressful jobs: cleaning up nuclear sites, inspecting pipelines from the inside, exploring  the frozen wastes of Mars. The arrival of the coronavirus has tran...

After students in 12.307 left campus, they were able to study atmospheric wind patterns using a virtual laboratory created from video of a real experiment using animation software. The above vide...

Watch a sample lecture: This clip from a new and improved 2.00b lecture covers goals for the students CAD milestone and provides tips for designing under constraints. Its part of a 1.5-hour lecture th...

April 1987  From How to Keep Mature Industries Innovative: Basic American ways of thinking must change. We are used to the notion that the only way to encourage innovation is to remove obstacles ...

A few years ago I used an algorithm to help me write a science fiction story. Adam Hammond, an English professor, and Julian Brooke, a computer scientist, had created a program called SciFiQ, and...

The screen read ## result null set as expected but above the crash were strings of phrases Krishna couldnt explain.  ## Dog. Drinking water in a kitchen. A woman in a house at night.  ## Cit...

Inside a Schnucks grocery store in St. Louis, Missouri, the toilet paper and baking ingredients are mostly cleared out. A rolling robot turns a corner and heads down an aisle stocked with salsa and ta...

Learn other peoples languages NABIHA SAKLAYENClass of 2018 Cofounded Cellino Biotech, which uses lasers to program stem cells. I became an entrepreneur without knowing what it meant. My collaborators ...

In early March I started getting calls from people trying to respond to what was clearly turning into a global pandemic. A government agency that funds R&D wanted help connecting its research team...

I felt bad asking Zack Gray to repeat his story. He was used to it, he said. Its the founding tale of his startup, Ophelia; hed already told part of it in his commencement speech at Wharton, and to po...

The techlash, allegedly, is over. An April op-ed in the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valleys local paper, put it most directly: Covid-19 response will end all the Big Tech bashing. An article publis...

In chaotic times it can be reassuring to see so many people working toward a better world. Thats true for medical professionals fighting a pandemic and for ordinary citizens fighting for social justic...

The news: Facebook has announced that people will soon be able to opt out of seeing political adverts on its platform. It will start giving a small group of US users the ability to hide adverts from c...

The news: Facebook has announced that people will soon be able to opt out of seeing political adverts on its platform. It will start giving a small group of US users the ability to hide adverts from c...

At the start of the spring semester, the Institute asked members of the MIT community whod just been in China to self-quarantine for 14 days to prevent the possible spread of covid-19 on cam- pus. Whe...

Contact tracingnotifying people who might have been exposed to diseasewill be key to controlling the covid-19 pandemic until a vaccine is available, but the tactic raises obvious privacy concerns. Now...

The symptoms of covid-19 often affect the respiratory and digestive systems, so it makes sense to suppose that the virus may target cells in those parts of the body. Now researchers at MIT, Harvard, a...

The 1918 influenza epidemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, hit the US in three devastating waves. But its arrival at MIT ranks as little more than a footnote in the Institutes...

In 8.13 and 8.14, the 18-credit-hour classes known as Physics Junior Lab, students are introduced to experimental physics by replicating classic early-20th-century discoveries in such things as specia...

When my friends and I heard that we were all being kicked out of East Campus for the rest of the semester, only one thing still seemed certain in a world falling apart: we were staying together, no ma...

When professor of mechanical engineering Alex Slocum Sr. 82, SM 83, PhD 85, and his son, Alexander Slocum Jr. 08, SM 10, PhD 13, started hearing the reports out of Italy in early March, they knew a cr...

Polina Anikeeva, associate professor of materials science and engineering, normally takes what she calls an old-school approach to teaching 3.024 (Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Properties of Materi...

More coverage at news.mit.edu In virtual town hall, MIT leadership updates community on Covid-19 responses Critical research continues, students and staff are receiving support, and contingency p...

Julia (Rosolovsky) Greer 97 is a scientist and a classical pianist. Her nanotechnology research breaks new ground, and her music lifts people up. Fittingly, Fast Company named her one of its...

As Purell stations were being installed across campus in early March, 2.007 lab instructors were checking in with their students about what they hoped to get out of the robotics-centered Design and Ma...

American intelligence agencies are still falling short on security, years after high-profile data leaks from Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Joshua Schulte, according to a member of the US Senate...

The news: A cheap steroid called dexamethasone significantly cuts the chances that seriously ill covid-19 patients will die, according to the worlds biggest trial of existing treatments. Specific...

As we learn more about how the coronavirus spreads between people, theres more evidence to suggest most infections are transmitted by a select few individuals we call superspreaders. Heres what a supe...

The news: Norway is halting its coronavirus contact tracing app, Smittestopp, after criticism from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, which said that the countrys low rate of infections meant th...

In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 civil rights and research organizations wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon stop providing face recognition technology to governments. As part of an inc...

Deepfakes have struck a nerve with the public and researchers alike. There is something uniquely disturbing about these AI-generated images of people appearing to say or do something they didnt. With ...

Deepfakes have struck a nerve with the public and researchers alike. There is something uniquely disturbing about these AI-generated images of people appearing to say or do something they didnt. With ...

The coronavirus pandemic and the protests sparked by the May 25 murder of George Floyd have been the defining events of 2020 so far, and in both cases one 17-year-old has played a major role online: A...

It was a surge unlike any other, even for Amazon. In the first quarter of 2020, the e-commerce giants net sales increased by 26% over the same period a year earlier. It was panic-buying on a grand sca...

The news: Twitter is testing a new feature on Android phones which prompts people to read articles before they share them. If someone goes to retweet a link on Twitter when they havent clicked through...

Demands for climate action have largely faded into the background as the covid-19 pandemic, the economic meltdown, and widespread protests over police brutality have seized the worlds attention. But f...

On board the International Space Station since May 2018 is a mini-fridge-size facility called the Cold Atom Lab (CAL), capable of chilling atoms in a vacuum down to temperatures one ten billionth of a...

After months spent battling covid-19, the US is now gripped by a different fever. As the video of George Floyd being murdered by Derek Chauvin circulated across social media, the streets around Americ...

After months spent battling covid-19, the US is now gripped by a different fever. As the video of George Floyd being murdered by Derek Chauvin circulated across social media, the streets around Americ...

Of all the videos that were released after George Floyds murder, the one recorded by 17-year-old Darnella Frazier on her phone is the most jarring. It shows Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyds ne...

Like other industries, space hasnt been immune to the effects of covid-19 pandemic. Operations across the world have been slowed or shut down thanks to lockdowns imposed by governments to stop the spr...

Inside the biosafety level 4 lab at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) in Boston, researchers wear three sets of gloves and breathe air piped into moon suits through snakin...

The news: IBM has said the company will stop developing or selling facial recognition software due to concerns the technology is used to promote racism. In a letter to Congress, IBMs CEO Arvind Krishn...

The news: Lockdowns in Europe helped to stop 3.1 million deaths up to the start of May, researchers have estimated. Strictly limiting peoples movements and enforcing social distancing cut the average ...

In the business world, the opportunities for applying quantum technology relate to optimization: solving difficult business problems, reconfiguring complex processes, and understanding correlations be...

Imagine if Facebook stopped moderating its site right now. Anyone could post anything they wanted. Experience seems to suggest that it would quite quickly become a hellish environment overrun with spa...

This week on Radio Corona, join us for a discussion between reporter Neel Patel and NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, who returned back to Earth in late April after a nearly seven-month mission aboard the ...

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 the week after George Floyds murder, hundreds of thousands of people joined protests across the US and around the globe, demanding education, attention, and justice. But one of the key tools for or...

Three thousand light-years from Earth sits Kepler 160, a sun-like star thats already thought to have three planets in its system. Now researchers think theyve found a fourth. Planet KOI-456.04, as its...

When the Dallas police called for the public to send them videos of illegal activity during protests a week ago, they didnt get the evidence of law-breaking demonstrators they expected. Instead, fans ...

With dozens of digital contact tracing apps already rolled out worldwide, and many more on the way, how many people need to use them for the system to work? One number has come up over and over again:...

Hamid Khan has been a community organizer in Los Angeles for over 35 years, with a consistent focus on police violence and human rights. He talked to us on April 3, 2020, for a forthcoming podcast epi...

In the last few months, millions of people around the world stopped going into offices and started doing their jobs from home. These workers may be out of sight of managers, but they are not out of mi...

The news: Holing up with groups of friends or neighbors or other families during lockdown has given many people, especially those stuck home alone, a way to relieve isolation without spreading covid-1...

In an advance towards conquering covid-19, doctors in Michigan say an antibody drug may sharply cut the chance patients on a ventilator will die. The problem: The pandemic viral disease is infecting m...

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers was captured on video, not once but half a dozen times. As we try to understand why a police officer continued compressing a mans neck and spi...

People of all persuasions are angry at the inconsistent politics of social media platforms. For that, blame their founders ruling style....

People of all persuasions are angry at the inconsistent politics of social media platforms. For that, blame their founders ruling style....

Black Americans have seen technology used to target them again and again. Stopping it means looking at the problem differently....

Ask Zhu Kaiyu about his factory, and he can rattle off a series of statistics meant to impress: 15,000 square meters, 800 employees, 300 machines, 5 million articles of clothing sold per year. Zhu ope...

SpaceX achieved something historic this past weekend with its Demo-2 launch. The companys Crew Dragon vehicle became the first private spacecraft to take humans into orbita milestone for NASA, the Ame...

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...

Corporations, politicians, and environmentalists have all embraced carbon farming as the feel-good climate solution of the moment. Several leading Democratic presidential contenders highlighted the po...

Blackout Tuesday has overtaken Instagram, but there are more effective ways to show support. Whats Blackout Tuesday? If youve been on Instagram today, you may notice black posts. The movement was star...

American legislators have outlined a plan to regulate digital contact tracing apps to protect peoples privacy. But the bill, unveiled on June 1 with bipartisan support, largely recommends measures alr...

There wasnt a communications blackout in Washington, DC, on Sunday, but #dcblackout trended on Twitter anyway, thanks to some extremely distressing tweets telling people that, mysteriously, no message...

The news: Keeping people two meters apart from each other is far more effective than just one at reducing the risk of spreading coronavirus, according to a new analysis in The Lancet. The researchers ...

The news: Patients have started to receive the first antibody drug developed specifically to treat covid-19. Its being tested in 32 patients at various doses in hospitals in the US. If it’s show...

The news: Patients have started to receive the first antibody drug developed specifically to treat covid-19. Its being tested in 32 patients at various doses in hospitals in the US. If its shown to be...