Articles by Technology Review from September 2020

Ask Stefan Jockusch about what a factory might look like in 10 or 20 years, and the answer might leave you at a crossroads between fascination and bewilderment. Jockusch is vice president for strategy...

Should Twitter censor lies tweeted by the US president? Should YouTube take down covid-19 misinformation? Should Facebook do more against hate speech? Such questions, which crop up daily in media cove...

The news: Two political ads will broadcast on social media today, featuring deepfake versions of Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Both deepfake leaders will be giv...

In the digital era, strong technology leadership correlates ever more closely with business revenue growth. Technology strategy, and the ability of chief technology officers to deliver it, is key to b...

When the New York Times published its blockbuster scoop about President Donald Trumps tax returns, a lot of cybersecurity experts had traumatic flashbacks to four years ago. Just a few weeks before th...

Campaigns and elections have always been about dataunderneath the empathetic promises to fix your problems and fight for your family, its a business of metrics. If a campaign is lucky, it will find it...

Four underground reservoirs of water may be sitting below the south pole of Mars. The new findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, suggest Mars is home to even more deposits of liquid water than...

For evidence that mainstream economists are taking the challenge of covid-19 seriously, look no further than the comments of Gabriela Ramos, chief of staff at the OECD, at a conference in April: ...

SpaceX has already launched more than 700 Starlinksatellites, with thousands more due to come online in the years ahead. Their prime mission is to provide high-speed internet virtually worldwide, incl...

SpaceX has already launched more than 700 Starlink satellites, with thousands more due to come online in the years ahead. Their prime mission is to provide high-speed internet virtually worldwide...

The covid-19 pandemic shocked the world and generated high levels of economic, political, and social uncertainty. And for many people, the virus compounded the growing sense of uncertainty they alread...

Of all the AI models in the world, OpenAIs GPT-3 has most captured the publics imagination. It can spew poems, short stories, and songs with little prompting, and has been demonstrated to fool people ...

The explosive successes of AI in the last decade or so are typically chalked up to lots of data and lots of computing power. But benchmarks also play a crucial role in driving progresstests that resea...

Researchers have spent years trying to crack the mystery of how we express our feelings. Pioneers in the field of emotion detection will tell you the problem is far from solved. But that hasnt stopped...

Automated driving is advancing all the time, but theres still a critical missing ingredient: trust. Host Jennifer Strong meets engineers building a new language of communication between automated vehi...

The news: Google Maps has added a new feature which lets people see the number of covid-19 cases per 100,000 people for any given area, with a label indicating if cases are trending up or down. In a b...

When Karen Leibowitz and Anthony Myint opened The Perennial, the most ambitious and expensive restaurant of their careers, it was essentially on a self-dare. The married duo had found enormous success...

When Karen Leibowitz and Anthony Myint opened The Perennial, the most ambitious and expensive restaurant of their careers, it was essentially on a self-dare. The married duo had found enormous success...

Daniel Schrag has spent most of his life working on climate change. He studied the planets ancient warming periods early in his career, served as a climate advisor to President Barack Obama, and is no...

California Governor Gavin Newsom made a bold attempt today to eliminate sales of new gas-guzzling cars and trucks, marking a critical step in the states quest to become carbon neutral by 2045. But the...

California governor Gavin Newsom made a bold attempt today to eliminate sales of new gas-guzzling cars and trucks, marking a critical step in the states quest to become carbon neutral by 2045. But the...

Chinas president Xi Jinping has announced plans for the nation to become carbon neutral by 2060, setting a bold goal for the worlds biggest climate polluter. But it’s hard to reconcile Xi’...

If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, He would have given man a moon. The famed rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke uttered those words in 1984. He wanted to highlight how we could use the mo...

Regina Barzilay, a professor at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is the first winner of the Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humani...

In March, Adobes leadership team decidedfor the sake of employee well-beingto institute worldwide work-from-home policies to protect against the spread of covid-19. And it was a large undertaking. Thi...

Over a year ago, scientists unleashed something incredible on the world: the first photo of a black hole ever taken. By putting together radio astronomy observations made with dishes across four conti...

The news: On September 22, Microsoft announced that it would begin exclusively licensing GPT-3, the worlds largest language model built by San Francisco-based OpenAI. The model acts like a powerful au...

What happens when a major city allows the coronavirus to rage unchecked? If the Brazilian city of Manaus is any answer, it means about two-thirds of the population could get infected and one person in...

A dozen or so steep-roofed buildings cling to the edges of an open-pit mine. High above them, on top of an enormous rock arch, sits an inaccessible house. Elsewhere, a railway on stilts circles a grou...

Americas most famous spy agency has a major competitor it cant quite seem to beat: Silicon Valley. The CIA has long been a place cutting-edge technology is researched, developed, and realizedand it wa...

Corporations have never been able to cleanly separate their activities from geopolitics. Now, technology firms are finding it increasingly difficult to work across the US-China divide. Try as they mig...

Will the US government ban TikTok and WeChat, or wont itand why? With the Trump administration issuing vaguely phrased executive orders and policies about the apps, even as legal challenges against po...

What’s going on? The US Commerce Department issued an order banning Americans from downloading Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat at the end of last week. A lot has changed since then. First, ...

What’s happening? The US Commerce Department has issued an order banning Americans from downloading Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat; its due to come into effect on Sunday, September 20. Exi...

For the first time ever, a patients death has been linked directly to a cyberattack. Police have launched a murder investigation after ransomware disrupted emergency care at Dsseldorf University Hospi...

For the past couple of years, Courtney Cochran hosted a Nashville-based meetup group called the Snail Mail Social Club. Before the pandemic, it involved people gathering, pen and paper in hand, to wri...

When it comes to imagining the future, customer service often gets painted in a dystopian light. Take the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report. Tom Cruises John Anderton walks into the Gap, an identity re...

Algorithms can change the course of childrens lives. Kids are interacting with Alexas that can record their voice data and influence their speech and social development. Theyre binging videos on TikTo...

US President Donald Trump has successfully moved the nation backwards on climate change, even as the world grapples with increasingly devastating fires, heat waves and droughts. His rollbacks of major...

Five of California’s 10 largest fires in modern history are all burning at once. Together, this year’s wildfires have already destroyed 4,200 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands of peo...

Leading discussions about the global rules to regulate digital privacy and surveillance is a somewhat unusual role for a developing country to play. But Brazil had been doing just that for over a deca...

Venus has long played second fiddle to its redder, smaller, and more distant sibling. Given how inhospitable weve learned Venus to be, weve spent the majority of the last century pinning some of our b...

In the 1950s, Albert Sabin was searching for an improved polio vaccine. To that end, his lab infected the brains of mice, chimpanzees, and monkeys with the virus that causes the disease. They wanted t...

America has successfully launched national innovation missions time and again. These missions have delivered life-saving drugs, sparked the computer and internet revolutions, and put humans on the moo...

If you ever found yourself on Venus, youd be destroyed in moments. The pressure at the surface is thought to be up to 100 times greater than what is found on Earth, temperatures are around 464 C, and ...

International organizations and corporations are racing to develop global guidelines for the ethical use of artificial intelligence. Declarations, manifestos, and recommendations are flooding the inte...

The news: An international consortium of medical experts has introduced the first official standards for clinical trials that involve artificial intelligence. The move comes at a time when hype around...

NASA announced today that it was seeking proposals from private companies interested in collecting samples from the moon and making them available for purchase by the agency.  The news: As part o...

Facebook unveiled a new product today called Facebook Campus: a college-only space designed to help students connect with fellow classmates over shared interests. Sound familiar? Campus appears to be ...

Facebook unveiled a new product today called Facebook Campus: a college-only space designed to help students connect with fellow classmates over shared interests. Sound familiar? Campus appears to be ...

Russian military hackers responsible for cyberattacks against Democratic targets during the 2016 American election are now targeting over 200 organizations in the United States including political par...

For years, North Koreas Kim dynasty has made money through criminal schemes like drug trafficking and counterfeiting cash. In the last decade, Pyongyang has increasingly turned to cybercrimeusing armi...

Brazil is grappling with a crisis of misinformation. To solve it, the country should be investing in education and holding the financiers of fake-news networks accountable. Instead, Brazils National C...

Earlier this year, before the pandemic and lockdowns, audio engineer Stphane Pigeon received an unusual request: would he consider making sounds that replicated the office? I said, No, no, no, I will ...

Earlier this year, before the pandemic and lockdowns, audio engineer Stphane Pigeon received an unusual request: would he consider making sounds that replicated the office? I said, No, no, no, I will ...

Every week, the readers of our space newsletter, The Airlock, send in their questions for space reporter Neel V. Patel to answer. This week: How the average person can go to space. What...

US president Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, agree on at least one issue: the arcane federal law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. On September 8, Trump twee...

The news: AstraZeneca has paused its global Phase 3 covid-19 vaccine trial after a UK participant fell seriously ill. Its unclear if the suspected serious adverse reaction was a result of receiving th...

Over the past six months, central banks and governments have unlocked financial floodgates to deal with the economic fallout of covid-19. As early as April, 106 countries had introduced or adapted soc...

On September 6, China successfully landed a reusable spacecraft the country had launched into orbit just two days before, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. The successful flight marked th...

A large geometric concrete structure sits on the busy corner of Canal and West Streets in Lower Manhattan. Passersby wondering at its function may guess its a museum, or an art gallery. Few are likely...

Many years after meeting in a freshman fencing class, Tom and Betsy (Beliveau) Davis were reacquainted and eventually married. Their shared undergraduate experience led them to establish the Tom and B...

When Mark Zuckerbergannouncedthat Facebook would stop accepting political advertisingin the week before the US presidential election,he was respondingto widespread fearthatsocial mediahas outsizepower...

On August 31, Airbnb launched Project Lighthouse, an initiative meant to uncover, measure, and overcome discrimination on the home-sharing platform. According to the company, Project Lighthouse will i...

About a year after graduating from college, I packed my possessions into a rental van Id split with a near stranger and departed my home state of Ohio. We steered onto I-70 West, bound for San Francis...

Amba Kak was in law school in India when the country rolled out the Aadhaar project in 2009. The national biometric ID system, conceived as a comprehensive identity program, sought to collect the fing...

Back in July, OpenAIs latest language model, GPT-3, dazzled with its ability to churn out paragraphs that look as if they could have been written by a human. People started showing off how GPT-3 could...

The Google Magenta team, which makes machine-learning tools for the creative process, has made models that help you compose melodies, and tools that help you sketch cats. Mostly because its fun, but a...

Long before the world had ever heard of covid-19, Kay Tye set out to answer a question that has taken on new resonance in the age of social distancing: When people feel lonely, do they crave social in...

Long before the world had ever heard of covid-19, Kay Tye set out to answer a question that has taken on new resonance in the age of social distancing: When people feel lonely, do they crave social in...

In a high-level report precipitated by the birth of CRISPR babies in China in 2018, scientists say the technologys next medical use should be narrowly restricted to prospective parents who cant otherw...

The news: Since April, the Delphi research group at Carnegie Mellon University has been compiling one of the worlds largest databases for covid-19 symptom tracking. Now its launching a new challenge w...

When Kyle Rittenhouse shot and murdered protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, it wasnt just the act of a lone vigilante; it was a direct consequence of white militia groups organizing on social media....

Sara Garner had a nagging feeling something wasnt quite right. A software engineer, she was revamping her personal site, but it just didnt feel like her. Sure, it had the requisite links to her social...

Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, intelligence services in both Beijing and Washington have vied to uncover secrets in one another’s countries, and to safe...

Since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, intelligence services in both Beijing and Washington have vied to uncover secrets in one anothers countries, and to safeguard t...

2020 has brought global disruption of societies, customer behavior, and economies. The businesses that survive and thrive will need to make fast, smart decisions about how to pivot in todays world.
...

Is AI atan impasse? The growth of AI to date has been fueled by massive amounts of data and exponential gains in processing efficiency. But are these gains sustainable and if not, what is going to tak...

For the first time ever, EmTech MIT, our flagship event on emerging technologies and trends, will be held virtually. Going virtual has given us the opportunity to offer the MIT Inside Track,which incl...

Marc Benioff is a true pioneer of cloud computing; under his leadership, Salesforce is the #1 provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software globally. Benioff has been named Innovator of ...

Marc Benioff is a true pioneer of cloud computing; under his leadership, Salesforce is the #1 provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software globally. Benioff has been named Innovator of ...

Now is the time to reset, rethink, and rebuild. Join us virtually atEmTech MIT, our annual flagship event on technology strategies for leadership in a changed world.This year’s program focuses o...

Heres a life-or-death question: Do apps that notify people of potential exposure to coronavirus help save lives or are they a waste of precious time and money? A new study from Oxford University and G...

The astronomy community is on edge. The growing number of satellites streaming through low Earth orbit is making it almost impossible to get a clear view of the sky.  The true threat these mega-c...

The worlds most populous democracy is now also the world leader in internet shutdowns. India has imposed hundreds of internet blackouts in different parts of the country over the past few years, inclu...

The news: Apple and Google have announced theyre expanding their coronavirus exposure warning system so health agencies can take part without needing to create a customized app. Its a significant upgr...

As record-breaking heat waves baked Californians last month, the collective strain of millions of air conditioners forced the states grid operators to plunge hundreds of thousands of households into d...

As record-breaking heat waves baked Californians last month, the collective strain of millions of air conditioners forced the states grid operators to plunge hundreds of thousands of households into d...

Remember all those articles you read in January with headlines like 2020 trends to watch in your industry? You tossed those predictions out long ago. But while everyone knows that the coronavirus pand...

American citizens are inundated with political messageson social networks, in their news feeds, through email, text messages, and phone calls. Its not an accident that people get bombarded: political ...