Articles by Technology Review from August 2020

Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a fe...

The news: IBM has built a new chemistry lab called RoboRXN in the cloud. It combines AI models, a cloud computing platform, and robots to help scientists design and synthesize new molecules while work...

Nobody knows what will happen in the future, but some guesses are a lot better than others. A kicked football will not reverse in midair and return to the kickers foot. A half-eaten cheeseburger will ...

Grace Windheim had heard of deepfakes before. But she had never considered how to make one. It was a viral meme using the technology that led her to research the possibilityand discover that it was su...

Hacking isnt all 1s and 0smore often than youd think, its about people. A Tesla employee was offered a $1 million bribe in early August to install ransomware on the car companys networks in Nevada, a ...

On Sunday evening, Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. By Tuesday, a 16-year-old Texan, Kel, had built a one-page website, Justice for Jacob Blake, that offered context, ...

What weird bugs did you pick up last time you rode a subway train? Just as the covid-19 pandemic was taking off, a global network of scientists began mapping the DNA of urban microbes and using AI to ...

What weird bugs did you pick up last time you rode a subway train? Just as the covid-19 pandemic was taking off, a global network of scientists began mapping the DNA of urban microbes and using AI to ...

Quantum computing has the potential to handle complex problems at hyper-fast speeds. What makes this possible is the way it exploits qubitstypically subatomic particles such as electronsthat use ...

The first family to quit Pastor Clark Fraileys church during the pandemic did it by text message. It felt to Frailey like a heartbreaking and incomplete way to end a years-long relationship. When a se...

Human rights advocates filed a new court petition against the Israeli phone hacking company Cellebrite, urging Israels Ministry of Defense to halt the firms exports to Hong Kong where security forces ...

NASA has released new photos of Comet Neowise taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, revealing a close-up view of the brightest comet observed in decades after it passed around the sun this summer. ...

The AI community is finally waking up to the fact that machine learning can cause disproportionate harm to already oppressed and disadvantaged groups. We have activists and organizers to thank for tha...

The 33-year-old-man arrived by plane in Hong Kong on August 15. After disembarking, he headed to one of the airports covid-19 testing stations. Someone swabbed his throat, and then he waited for the r...

The US has approved wide emergency use of blood plasma from covid-19 survivors as a treatment for coronavirus infection, despite limited evidence it helps. Blood drug: The therapy, which the White Hou...

Since OpenAI first described its new AI language-generating system called GPT-3 in May, hundreds of media outlets (including MIT Technology Review) have written about the system and its capabilities. ...

In June 2019, Facebooks AI lab, FAIR, released AI Habitat, a new simulation platform for training AI agents. It allowed agents to explore various realistic virtual environments, like a furnished apart...

At the MIT community vigil held in June 2020 in the wake of George Floyds death, Corban Swain, a PhD student in biological engineering, read two of his poems on racism. Listen here....

Check out the virtual MIT campus on this guided tour by Amanda Shayna Ahteck 23....

Companies of all sizes and maturity levels, from startups to multinational corporations, have at least this in common: they know that using data effectively is a key driver of innovation, competitive ...

When the UK first set out to find an alternative to college entrance exams, the premise seemed perfectly reasonable. Covid-19 had derailed any opportunity for students to take the exams in person, but...

Thousands of lightning strikes have sparked hundreds of fires across California in recent days, producing several major clusters burning around the San Francisco Bay Area. The blazes quickly ripped th...

Countries that responded wisely to the pandemic run the gamut in terms of wealth, size, population, and style of government. What they shared was a swift, coordinated government response. Where that h...

Whats new: Dozens of countries have rolled out automated contact tracing apps, but a new study confirms what experts already knew: they cant beat the pandemic on their own. According to a new systemat...

The narrative in the US that the Chinese dont care about data privacy is simply misguided. Its true that the Chinese government has built a sophisticated surveillance apparatus (with the help of Weste...

The news: Pages spreading health misinformation got an estimated 3.8 billion views on Facebook in the year up to May 2020, according to analysis by human rights group Avaaz. Views peaked at nearly hal...

Shalev Hulio wants to explain himself. Normally, silence and secrecy are inherent in the spy business. For nine full years, Hulio never talked publicly about his billion-dollar hacking companyeven whe...

Until the beginning of August, Vietnam, population 97 million, was the worlds largest country with zero coronavirus deaths. A small number of people have died since then. The one- party state implemen...

Swedens controversial, less-stringent lockdown has made an unlikely star of its state epidemiologist. He told us why he still believes in the national strategy and why he thinks a classic second wave ...

Uruguay has been a rare bright spot in coronavirus-ravaged South America, thanks to a highly developed research infrastructure, a tradition of at-home medical care, and a strong public health system. ...

Covid-19 was the second pandemic of the decade for Liberia, which was devastated by Ebola just five years ago. A US-trained public health officer who served in both emergencies explains how some insti...

The government-run Robert Koch Institute for public health research in Berlin has been at the forefront of the countrys robust pandemic response, leading the search for a vaccine and racing to push ou...

For many years, Latin Americas largest democracy was a leader on data governance. In 1995, it created the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, a multi-stakeholder body to help the country set princi...

Mati Monjib speaks slowly, like a man who knows hes being listened to.  Its the day of his 58th birthday when we speak, but theres little celebration in his voice. The surveillance is hellish, Mo...

China doesnt only collect enormous amounts of data on its own citizens: it also sucks up data from around the world that might one day be useful for its national security, using both domestic and fore...

A team led by Charles Harvey, an MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Alison Hoyt, PhD 17, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, has used precise satellite el...

On childhood drives into Chicago with her parents, Amina Razvi, MA 02, MArch 02 noticed large numbers of people living on the streets and vowed to help build homes for them. That was a significant tur...

Jenny C. Xu 19 created her first video game at age 12, young enough not to realize how outnumbered she would be as a female in the game developing world. Shes glad it worked out that way.  The ge...

Guadalupe Hayes-Mota 08, MBA 16, SM 16, was diagnosed with hemophilia at birth. He had limited access to medication in the small city in Mexico where he grew up, which meant long hospital stays for bl...

As a toddler, Brian Brenner 82, SM 84, jumped with excitement when he saw the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge being built over New York Harbor. As an adult, he courted his wife, Lauren, by taking her to vis...

By early February, the health-care system in Washingtonthe first US state to have a confirmed case of covid-19was bracing for the spread of the novel coronavirus. When local hospitals began asking for...

As a schoolboy growing up in New York City in the 1870s, Herman Hollerith often managed to sneak out of the schoolroom just before spelling lessons. His teacher noticed and one day locked the door; Ho...

The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrated from the USSR. Working on large CVS poster boards, we drew...

Since Bonny Kellermann 72 and Bob Ferrara 67 first launched the Tech Challenge Games in 1992, reunion classes have competed in a range of zany contests from a three-legged race to collect pi plates to...

On June 2, one week after the killing of George Floyd, the MIT community came together for an online vigil. I would like to share with you my remarks from that gathering. But I know that mine is not t...

Californias electricity system is buckling under the strains of a blistering heat wave that may have established the highest temperature ever reliably recorded. As residents cranked up air conditionin...

Any researcher whos focused on applying machine learning to real-world problems has likely received a response like this one: The authors present a solution for an original and highly motivating probl...

Mongolia shares the worlds longest land border with China, but its early and highly centralized pandemic response has been so effective that not a single person in the landlocked country has died from...

Tom Malone refused to believe that watercooler conversations were dead just because so many people were suddenly working from home during the pandemic. He knew that random workplace chatter can help p...

Tom Malone refused to believe that watercooler conversations were dead just because so many people were suddenly working from home during the pandemic. He knew that random workplace chatter can help p...

With the launch of three missions to Mars this summer (including a new NASA rover, Perseverance, that will look for signs of life), our exploration of the Red Planet will soon leap to new heights...

When news broke that a mistaken match from a face recognition system had led Detroit police to arrest Robert Williams for a crime he didnt commit, it was late June, and the country was already in uphe...

Ryan Beard was sitting in front of his keyboard, taking song requests on a live stream on the last Friday of July, when he saw a message from a viewer pop up in the chat: tik tok is officially getting...

In early March, as the coronavirus pandemic forced America to contemplate a nationwide shutdown, Dan St. Louis started to get nervous. St. Louis runs a facility in Conover, North Carolina, called the ...

At the start of the week, Liam Porr had only heard of GPT-3. By the end, the college student had used the AI model to produce an entirely fake blog under a fake name. It was meant as a fun experiment....

The news: Englands revamped covid-19 contact tracing app has finally been launched for testing by the public, after its previous version was scrapped for technical problems. The new program went live ...

The Chinese company Sinovac Biotech developed an experimental vaccine for SARS back in 2004. That disease went away after killing just 800 people, and the project was shelved. But it meant that when t...

When Neguine Rezaii first moved to the United States a decade ago, she hesitated to tell people she was Iranian. Instead, she would use Persian. I figured that people probably wouldnt know what that w...

In January, 1989, my 26-year-old father uprooted his life to move to the other side of the world. He had never been on a plane, let alone outside of China. But an American professor had offered him a ...

In the first of a four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong explores the false arrest of Robert Williams by police in Detroit. The odd thing about Willliamss ordeal wasnt that police used face ...

The use of facial recognition by police has come under a lot of scrutiny. In part three of our four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong takes you to Sin City, which actually has one of America...

Clearview AI has built one of the most comprehensive databases of peoples faces in the world. Your picture is probably in there (our host Jennifer Strongs was). In part two of this four-part series on...

Police have a history of using FaceID to arrest protestorssomething not forgotten by activists since the death of George Floyd. In the last of a four-part series on facial recognition, host Jennifer S...

Gina Assaf was running in Washington, DC, on March 19 when she suddenly couldnt take another step. I was so out of breath I had to stop, she says. Five days earlier, shed hung out with a friend; withi...

The European Union has long been a trendsetter in privacy regulation. Its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and stringent antitrust laws have inspired new legislation around the world. For dec...

The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in hard-hit states. Millions of US residents have been infected by t...

Russia has cleared a vaccine against covid-19 for emergency use on health-care workers this fall. Fast advance:  Russian president Vladimir Putin said during a meeting on Tuesday that the newly r...

Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, seems to have liquid water seeping onto its surface, according to a new paper in Nature Astronomy. Data from NASA’s Dawn orbiter, the study sugge...

If contact tracing apps are following Gartners famous hype cycle, its hard to avoid the conclusion they are now firmly in the trough of disillusionment. Initial excitement that they could be a crucial...

Mars today is a cold, dry wastelandbut things were likely much different billions of years ago. Since we started launching robotic missions to Mars in the 1970s, scientists have collected evidence tha...

The coronavirus pandemic has been a boon for the test proctoring industry. About half a dozen companies in the US claim their software can accurately detect and prevent cheating in online tests. Exami...

Jennys story is not linear, the way that we like stories to be. She was born in Baltimore in 1975 and had a happy, healthy childhoodher younger brother Danny fondly recalls the treasure hunts she woul...

The world is increasingly banking on green hydrogen fuel to fill some of the critical missing pieces in the clean-energy puzzle. US presidential candidate Joe Bidens climate plan calls for a research ...

When economies across the world shut down earlier this year, it wasnt only business owners and consumers who had to adapt. Criminals suddenly had a problem on their hands. How to move their money? Pro...

Last week, Alessandro Bogliari wouldnt have imagined that anyone posed a serious threat to TikTok. Yes, there were imitators and competitors out there, but Bogliari, who runs a social media agency cal...

Space junk isnt going away anytime soonand neither are the problems it causes. Were poised to see more satellite launches with every passing year, which means more pieces of rocketry and spacecra...

SpaceX successfully flew a prototype of its next-generation Starship vehicle for the first time ever on Tuesday, a major step forward in the companys quest to eventually send people to Mars. What happ...

The news: The UK Home Office has said it will stop using an algorithm to process visa applications that critics claim is racially biased. Opponents to it argue that the algorithms use of nationality t...

Researchers demonstrated on Wednesday that they can fool a modern face recognition system into seeing someone who isnt there. A team from the cybersecurity firm McAfee set up the attack against a faci...

The news: Maryland biotechnology company Novavax has announced encouraging results from a preliminary study of its experimental coronavirus vaccine. The trial enrolled 131 healthy volunteers in Austra...

The context: Studies show that when people and AI systems work together, they can outperform either one acting alone. Medical diagnostic systems are often checked over by human doctors, and content mo...

Blistering heatwaves are breaking temperature records around the globe this year, from Iraq to the American Southwest. And its only going to get worse, as climate change accelerates. By the end of thi...

Nurses and patients in some US assisted living facilities will receive an antibody drug to prevent covid-19 infection, according to drug company Eli Lilly. The drug: Early in the coronavirus pandemic,...

Quantum computers could make encryption a thing of the past, but 15 contenders are trying to prove they have what it takes to safeguard your data....

At a typical annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the program is a parade of titles like A Structured Variational Autoencoder for Contextual Morphological Inflection....

In March of 2015, protests broke out at the University of Cape Town in South Africa over the campus statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, a mining magnate who had gifted the land on whic...

Last week, European Union leaders approved the most aggressive climate-change plan in history. The eye-catching part was the $600 billion dedicated to green measures, spread across a massive economic ...