Articles by Technology Review from July 2020

The European Union imposed its first-ever sanctions for cyberattacks on Thursday, targeting Russian, Chinese, and North Korean groups connected to several major hacking incidents. The action, which in...

In the past few weeks, a new vocabulary has emerged in parenting groups on social media: pandemic pods, copods, microschools, homeschool pods. All describe cobbled-together groups of students who plan...

Rising tides and storm surges will devastate economies and communities around the globe, if we dont dramatically cut greenhouse-gas emissions and bolster shoreline protection. By the end of the centur...

Computer programming has never been easy. The first coders wrote programs out by hand, scrawling symbols onto graph paper before converting them into large stacks of punched cards that could be proces...

Computer programming has never been easy. The first coders wrote programs out by hand, scrawling symbols onto graph paper before converting them into large stacks of punched cards that could be proces...

Deep down, our drive to explore Mars has always been about figuring out the story of life in our solar system. Are we alone? Were we always? Or is life on Earth descended from Martian progenitors? NAS...

If you need a reason to feel good about the direction technology is going, look up Dell Technologies CTO John Roese on Twitter. The handle he composed back in 2006 is @theICToptimist. ICT stands for i...

Toronto and the corridor that stretches west to Kitchener and Waterloo is already Canadas capital of finance and technologyand naturally, the regions leaders want to set an example for the rest of the...

Toronto and the corridor that stretches west to Kitchener and Waterloo is already Canadas capital of finance and technologyand naturally, the regions leaders want to set an example for the rest of the...

Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US governments covid-19 vaccine fundin...

The ongoing battle between social media companies and covid-19 misinformation pushersincluding US president Donald Trumpstepped up again this week thanks to a new viral video. And it has exposed, once...

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The news: In a new white paper about its plans for AI, translated by China scholars Jeffrey Ding and Caroline Meinhardt, Tencent, the owner of WeChat and one of Chinas three largest tech giants, empha...

In the depths of a downturn that has wiped out millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth, a wide range of voices in the US are calling for a green stimulus to kick-start growth and lay the f...

In the depths of a downturn that has wiped out millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth, a wide range of voices in the US are calling for a green stimulus to kick-start growth and lay the f...

Biotech company Moderna has been making some pretty promising strides in developing and testing its covid-19 vaccine. The company just announced it was working with the US National Institutes of Healt...

Twitter recently announced it would take action against accounts posting information related to the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents follow the breadcrumbs left by a mysterious figure known as...

The European Unions economic recovery plan is notable for its focus on climate action, sustainable investments, and a just transition fund. As part of this deal, the EU is also proposing a carbon bord...

Twitter is perfect as a megaphone for the far right: its trending topics are easy to game, journalists spend way too much time on the site, andif youre luckythe President of the United States might re...

Since the onset of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have turned to AI to assist with their hiring. The most common involve using face-scanning algorithms, games, questions, or other evaluat...

Since the onset of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have turned to AI to assist with their hiring. The most common involve using face-scanning algorithms, games, questions, or other evaluat...

Since the onset of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have turned to AI to assist with their hiring. The most common systems involve using face-scanning algorithms, games, questions, or other...

Since the onset of the pandemic, a growing number of companies have turned to AI to assist with their hiring. The most common systems involve using face-scanning algorithms, games, questions, or other...

When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed.  Now a n...

The US Space Command has announcedits found evidence that Russia recently conducted a test of anti-satellite weapons , albeit one that did not destroy or harm any objects. SpaceCom claims that on July...

The news: Chinas Tianwen-1 mission to Mars successfully lifted off shortly before 1pm local time on Thursday July 23, Chinese media reported. The mission, which includes a lander, rover, and orbiter, ...

The first time the US went to the moon, it put down an estimated $283 billionto do it alone. Thats not the case with Artemis, the new NASA program to send humans back. Although its a US-led initiative...

Its impossible to contain covid-19 without knowing whos infected: until a safe and effective vaccine is widely available, stopping transmission is the name of the game. While testing capacity has incr...

The news: Facebook says it is setting up new internal teams to look for racial bias in the algorithms that drive its main social network and Instagram, according to the Wall Street Journal. In particu...

An international group of researchers have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that were recently active and are likely still active today. The results, published Monday in Nature Geoscience, u...

The news: A covid-19 vaccine candidate being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca proved safe and provoked a strong immune response in its first clinical trials. Participants systems produce...

Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future, Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco-based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days...

The UAE launched its Emirates Mars Mission on Monday, from Japans Tanegashima Space Center at 6:58 am local time (Sunday evening US Eastern Time). If the mission successfully reaches Mars, the UAE wil...

The concept: When we look at a chair, regardless of its shape and color, we know that we can sit on it. When a fish is in water, regardless of its location, it knows that it can swim. This is known as...

Earlier this week as a pandemic raged across the United States, residents were cut off from the only publicly available source of aggregated data on the nations intensive care and hospital bed capacit...

Yeshimabeit Milner was in high school the first time she saw kids she knew getting handcuffed and stuffed into police cars. It was February 29, 2008, and the principal of a nearby school in Miami, wit...

Morgan Eckroth became famous on TikTok as morgandrinkscoffee. A 21-year-old barista and social-media manager for Tried & True Coffee in Corvallis, Oregon, she shares latte art, dramatic reenactmen...

The news: Russian hackers targeted UK, US, and Canadian researchers developing coronavirus vaccines, according to a report from the United Kingdom, American, and Canadian intelligence services. The ha...

In February of last year, the San Francisco-based research lab OpenAI announced that its AI system could now write convincing passages of English. Feed the beginning of a sentence or paragraph into GP...

Its been a banner year for solar observations so far. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii presented some of the best images ever taken of the sun, showing us a caramel-like surface where in...

What do Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have in common? Dozens of high-profile verified Twitter accounts were hacked on Wednesday, seemingly to push a cryptocurrency scam that may h...

We may think of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care in terms of scientific advances, such as a cure for cancer or a science-fiction tricorder-like device. But in the real world, AI is making i...

On May 4, a slick, 26-minute video was released, alleging that the coronavirus was actually a laboratory-manipulated virus deployed to wreak havoc so that a resulting vaccine could be used for profit....

The numbers tell the story. US venture capital firms have $444 billion under management, including $121 billion in dry powder waiting in reserveall in pursuit of the next unicorn startup that will gro...

Joe Biden has raised the ambitions of his climate plan, in a clear sign his campaign is responding to demands for greater action among the progressive flank of his party. In a speech on Tuesday, the p...

This story is part of our ongoing list of answers to the biggest questions our readers have about the coronavirus. That list is constantly updated, and you can check it out here. Since early in the pa...

The news: We should prepare now for a potential new wave of coronavirus cases this winter, according to the UKs Academy of Medical Sciences. Healthcare systems tend to struggle in winter anyway due to...

For decades, US policymakers have bet that the worlds best and brightest will endure a dysfunctional immigration process for a chance at the opportunities the country offers. And for decades, they hav...

Astronomers have found one of the largest structures in the known universean intergalactic wall of galaxies thats at least 1.4 million light-years long. And given how close it is to us, its remarkable...

Astronomers have found one of the largest structures in the known universea wall of galaxies thats at least 1.4 billion light-years long. And given how close it is to us, its remarkable that we havent...

We are at the very beginning of a medical revolution, fueled by our ability to analyze hitherto unheard-of amounts of data using artificial intelligence (AI). AI is enabling the development of smart m...

The lowdown: Immunity to covid-19 may be short-lived, according to a new longitudinal study of people who have caught the disease and recovered. The study: Researchers at Kings College London repeated...

This was the week airborne transmission became a big deal in the public discussion about covid-19. Over 200 scientists from around the world cosigned a letter to the World Health Organi...

The context: One of the greatest unsolved flaws of deep learning is its vulnerability to so-called adversarial attacks. When added to the input of an AI system, these perturbations, seemingly random o...

When France launched its app for digital contact tracing, it looked like it might be a breakthrough for the virus-ravaged country. After going live in June, StopCovid was downloaded by 2 million peopl...

This virtual panel session from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Next conference takes an in-depth look at Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Reviews recently released research on Opportu...

This virtual panel session from MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Next conference takes an in-depth look at Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Reviews recently released research, Opportunity Ma...

Theres a certain routine to logging on to the now-ubiquitous videoconference: join a screen of Brady Bunchlike squares, ping-ponging your gaze between speakers but mostly staring self-consciously at y...

The news: A study of more than 17 million people in England has confirmed the various factors that are linked with an increase in a persons risk of dying from covid-19: their age, being male, Black or...

Two companies have teamed up on a project that could provide a key test of our ability to use synthetic fuel, made from carbon dioxide captured from the air, to cut emissions from aviation. Carbon Eng...

Every week, the readers of our space newsletter, The Airlock, send in their questions for space reporter Neel V. Patel to answer. This week: Can we go to Jupiter? Once we move past the ...

The big picture: Its only been one week since China passed a controversial national security law that gives it vast new powers over Hong Kong, but the internet has already changed dramatically for peo...

A notorious hacker who made an estimated $1.5 million by stealing information from more than 300 companies and governments in 44 countries has been identified as a 37-year-old man from Kazakhstan....

The news: 239 scientists from 32 countries have written an open letter to the World Health Organization arguing that covid-19 can be transmitted through the air. You might think we know that already b...

The news: A group of 239 scientists from 32 countries have written an open letter to the World Health Organization arguing that covid-19 can be transmitted through the air. You might think we know tha...

Theres no shortage of promises when it comes to AI. Some say it will solve all problems while others warn it will bring about the end of the world as we know it. Both positions regularly play out in H...

Are you hiding from covid-19? I am. The reason is simple: the high chance of death from the virus.  I was reminded of the risk last week by this report from the New York City health dep...

When SpaceXs Crew Dragon took NASA astronauts to the ISS near the end of May, the launch brought back a familiar sight. For the first time since the space shuttle was retired, American rockets we...

The news: An experimental covid-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech provoked immune responses in 45 healthy volunteers, according to a preprint paper on medRXiv. The levels of antibodies...

The news: An experimental covid-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer and BioNTech provoked immune responses in 45 healthy volunteers, according to a preprint paper on medRXiv. The levels of antibodies...

In today’s business environment, strategic technology initiatives are driven by the need to grow with greater agility and adapt to rapidly changing commercial, environmental, and regulatory cond...

In 1996 John Perry Barlow, co-founder of internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote A declaration of the independence of cyberspace. It begins: Governments of the Industrial World...

Ilan Gur always wanted to build things. But after finishing his PhD in material science at UC Berkeley, he says he bounced around, feeling like a misfit. He left the publish-or-perish world of academi...

The second quarter of 2020 launched many digital transformation projects that didnt necessarily happen at the behest of chief innovation officers, but because of the wrecking ball of disruption known ...

Its troubling, though not surprising, to see covid-19 cases spiking across the American South and Southwest, where public officials delayed lockdowns, rushed to reopen businesses, or refused to requir...

The covid-19 pandemic has unleashed changes that seemed unthinkable just a few months ago. In February, it seemed unthinkable the entire white-collar workforce of many countries would soon be working ...

5G cellular technology, which has been promised to provide a connective fabric that will cover the globe in a seamless digital experience, is starting to take shape. But the coronavirus pandemic of 20...

Covid-19 has been disruptive and bewildering for everyone, but especially for children. In the UK and in most US states, schools closed in March. Many of them will keep their doors shut until the fall...

The news: Early on Monday, Reddit banned r/The_Donald, a once-notorious pro-Trump forum, for repeated rule-breaking. CEO Steve Huffman announced that it was just one of 2,000 subreddits banned by the ...