Articles by Technology Review from October 2020

Things usually move pretty slowly for the US Supreme Court, with cases sometimes taking years to make their way through to a ruling. But these days its moving so quickly that the newest justice didnt ...

Four years ago, Bin Xie was happy to sing the praises of WeChat. The IT manager from Houston had seen his pro-Trump blog, Chinese Voice of America, go viral on the app.  Today, Xie stands firmly ...

Unless youre a physicist or an engineer, there really isnt much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying mechani...

American hospitals are being targeted in a wave of ransomware attacks as covid-19 infections in the US break records and push the countrys health infrastructure to the limit. As reports emerge of atta...

With days still to go before the US presidential election, early voting has already topped half of all votes cast in the 2016 election, andevery indication is that the electorate is energized. It make...

Welcome home welcome home oh oh oh the world is beautiful the world. Theyre not the most catchy lyrics. But after Ive listened to Beautiful the World half a dozen times, the chorus is stuck in my head...

Early voting data shows that voter participation in the 2020 US presidential election is already at an all-time high in many states. With only days remaining before voting ends on November 3, more tha...

The US presidential election next Tuesday will shape the world for years, if not decades, to come. Not only because Joe Biden and Donald Trump have radically different ideas about immigration, health ...

What happened: Less than a week before the US presidential elections, the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Twitter appeared before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.The four-h...

The fake news: A new weekly satire show from the creators of South Park is using deepfakes, or AI-synthesized media, to poke fun at some of the most important topics of our time. Called Sassy Justice,...

Some people might not associate the word trust with artificial intelligence (AI). Stefan Jockusch is not one of them. Vice president of strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, Jockusch says t...

Its a cruel irony that the things that make a restaurant appealing are precisely what currently make it dangerousthe intimacy, the coziness, the groups of people deep in conversation, whiling away the...

Its a cruel irony that the things that make a restaurant appealing are precisely what currently make it dangerousthe intimacy, the coziness, the groups of people deep in conversation, whiling away the...

Last week, the Oklahoma State Election Board issued a warning about a fraudulent text message that claimed there had been changes to polling places. The phone number that the text came from was for a ...

If elections are a technology, then the machine consists of an enormous sprawl of moving parts that goes well beyond what most people realize. The system usually has lots of problems, but things have ...

Just over one week before Election Day, over 60 million Americans have already cast early votes. That dwarfs 2016s entire early voting total of 47.2 million, and the number is going to keep growing si...

Just over one week before Election Day, over 60 million Americans have already cast early votes. That dwarfs 2016s entire early voting total of 47.2 million, and the number is going to keep growing si...

If you dont already know: Yes, there is water on the moon. NASA suggests theres as much as 600 million metric tons of water ice there, which could someday help lunar colonists survive. It could even b...

The US space program has been a footnote to every presidential administration since Richard Nixon. Nothing, not even the space shuttle or the International Space Station, could define a presidency or ...

The 2020 election may be among the most consequential in modern memory, but its not just candidates that are on the ballot. Voters in 34 states are deciding on 129 measures, including several that tou...

In the past month, US President Donald Trump and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie were diagnosed with covid-19 and spent time in the hospital, just like tens of thousands of other Americans n...

NASA confirmed that the OSIRIS-REx mission picked up enough material from asteroid Bennu during its sample collection attempt on Tuesday. In fact, the spacecrafts collection chamber is now too full to...

The news: The NYU Ad Observatory released new data this week about the inputs the Trump and Biden campaigns are using to target audiences for ads on Facebook. Its a jumble of broad and specific charac...

Hey, GPT-3: Why are rabbits cute? How are rabbits cute? Is it their big ears, or maybe theyre fluffy? Or is it the way they hop around? No, actually its their large reproductive organs that makes them...

Nellwyn Thomas cut her chops in campaign technology as the Deputy Chief of Analytics for Hillary Clintons campaign in 2016. Outside politics, shes had her foot in Big Tech, working on business intelli...

A pandemic is raging with devastating consequences, and long-standing problems with racial bias and political polarization are coming to a head. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help ...

Just before 9 p.m. on October 20, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Twitch to play the hottest game in America: Among Us. Hi, everyone! This is crazy! she began, urging viewers to make a plan for how t...

At 6:12 p.m. US Eastern Time on Tuesday, NASAs OSIRIS-REx spacecraft finished a four-and-a-half hour descent to the surface of asteroid Bennu, 200 million miles from Earth. Once there, it briefly made...

As long as humans have built machines, weve feared the day they could destroy us. Stephen Hawking famously warned that AI could spell an end to civilization. But to many AI researchers, these conversa...

There have been many conspiracy theories about the 2020 US election, from lies about vote-by-mail fraud to the discredited idea that millions of non-citizens get to vote. But just two weeks from Elect...

It has been five years since Katrina Spade composted her first human body. With her pushing and lobbying, Washington state is now the first in the US to legally offer an alternative to burial or crema...

Catastrophic risks are events that threaten human livelihood on a, well, catastrophic scale. Most are interconnected, meaning that one eventsuch as a nuclear detonationis likely to trigger others, lik...

In 2009, two farmers checked in to the Heartland hospital in Missouri within days of each other with fever, nausea, diarrhea, and rapidly declining white blood cell counts. Doctors sent their blood sa...

Its dark. Vegetal decay hangs thick in the air, trapped beneath the rotting innards of a felled beech tree. You wedge the hard shell of your exoskeleton through softening pulp, legs clicking in rhythm...

Karma Ura is a bespectacled, self-effacing man of many achievementsa scholar, writer, painter, and bureaucrat. He is also the president of the Centre for Bhutan & Gross National Happiness Studies,...

Within a few days of the covid-19 lockdown in Oxford, UK, the street where philosopher Roman Krznaric lives had transformed. An email chain quickly morphed into a WhatsApp group with over 100 neighbor...

On a crisp, sunny morning in August, software engineer Rodrigo Espinosa de los Monteros rode up 22 floors to a strangers rooftop in the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattans Lower East Side. Willem B...

On a seasonably warm day in August along a rugged stretch of the Southern California coast, work crews put on their reflective vests and hard hats. They directed a fleet of heavy vehicles known as cas...

Cardinal and Gray Society members who would like to sign up for the Alumni Helping Alumni program, please click here. Class of 1999 members who want to sign up, click here. Those from other classes wh...

The 2020 Support Black Lives at MIT petition by the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and Black Students Union (BSU):http://bgsa.mit.edu/sbl2020 The Techs article on student evaluation of the ...

The Department of Justice and attorney generals from 11 Republican-led states filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google on Tuesday, alleging that the company maintains an illegal monopoly on online se...

Maria Zuber got the word on a Friday: Harvard had shut down its research labs. As vice president for research, Zuber consulted with lead researchers across campus over whether MIT should follow suit. ...

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Frederick Goff, SM 01, and his teammates from a machine-learning-based hedge fund decided to apply their technology to job search engines, for which there was...

Pandemic worries have kept many of us awake this year. But David Rapoport 70 has long known a thing or two about not getting a good nights sleep. Rapoport is a leading expert in sleep medicine and the...

Today, one in every six people on Earth lives in an informal urban or squatter settlement. United Nations analysts estimate that number will rise to one in three by 2050. Traditionally, policymakers s...

How is it possible the housing market is as strong as it is, given that the overall economy is as weak as it is? Confronting questions like these, Daryl Fairweather 10, chief economist of the real est...

In 2004, Gloria Ro Kolb 94 was leading her first startup, Fossa Medical, which developed therapies for kidney stones, when she learned a startling statistic: one in three women over 30 deals with urin...

Sally Yu became an MIT volunteer almost immediately after graduating. Its like I never left! she says. For the little volunteering I do, I gain so much in knowledge, friendships, and personal growth. ...

In 1892, Hannah Knox Luscomb took her five-year-old daughter, Florence, to hear Susan B. Anthony speak. The speech made such an impression on Florence that she always began her life story with this mo...

In 1996, Life magazine published a shocking expos of child labor practices in South Asia. The lead photograph showed a 12-year-old boy in northern Pakistan, stitching soccer balls stamped with the Nik...

Before coming to the States for college, I had never gone beyond the borders of Kenya. While I had expected some level of culture shock, I wasnt prepared for the jarring reality of being Black in Amer...

My first week at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was rife with revelations. I learned that five days sufficed to build a photosensitive robot from wires, circuit boards, and Legos; that burr...

Sally Yu became an MIT volunteer almost immediately after graduating. Its like I never left! she says. For the little volunteering I do, I gain so much in knowledge, friendships, and personal growth. ...

In August, about 12,000 cell phones with Detroit area code 313 got recorded messages from Tamika Taylor. She claimed to be a member of a civil rights organization called Project 1599, and said she was...

Impossible Foods has continued to expand throughout the pandemic, bringing its bleeding, sizzling plant-based burgers and sausages to more than 10,000 additional US stores this year. Now the company, ...

In June of 2019, Vice uncovered the existence of a disturbing app that used AI to undress women. Called DeepNude, it allowed users to upload a photo of a clothed woman for $50 and get back a photo of ...

Impossible Foods has continued to expand throughout the pandemic, bringing its bleeding, sizzling plant-based burgers and sausages to more than 10,000 additional US stores this year. Now the company, ...

The news: Young, healthy people will be deliberately infected with covid-19 in the first ever human challenge trial, set to begin at a London hospital in January. The study, announced today, will recr...

More than 29million voters have already cast their ballots in the 2020 US elections, and were still more than two weeks from Election Day itself. At the same point in 2016, the number of early votes w...

Our upcoming magazine issue is devoted to long-term problems. Few problems are longer-term or more intractable than Americas systemic racial inequality. And a particularly entrenched form of it is hou...

After being released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 5, US President Donald Trump praised the doctors who treated him for covid-19 and promised that the public would soon ...

The news: Facebook is open-sourcing a new AI language model called M2M-100 that can translate between any pair among 100 languages. Of the 4,450 possible language combinations, it translates 1,100 of ...

The news: When Twitter banned, and then unbanned, links to a questionably sourced New York Post article about Joe Bidens son Hunter, its stated intention was to prevent people from spreading harmful f...

Construction sites are vast jigsaws of people and parts that must be pieced together just so at just the right times. As projects get larger, mistakes and delays get more expensive. The consultancy Mc...

Machine learning typically requires tons of examples. To get an AI model to recognize a horse, you need to show it thousands of images of horses. This is what makes the technology computationally expe...

After months ofexperts expecting another hack-and-leak operation in the lead up to Election Day, a strange story appeared in the New York Post on Wednesday morning. It claimed tomaybecontain emails be...

The news: In a 90-minute virtual US Congressional hearing hosted by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, representatives took stock of the state of misinformation in America and sought advice...

Hackers played a significant role in the 2016 election, when the Russian government hacked the Democratic campaign and ran an information operation that dominated national headlines. American law enfo...

Technology companies provide much of the critical infrastructure of the modern state and develop products that affect fundamental rights. Search and social media companies, for example, have set de fa...

MIT Technology Review is about the biggest discoveries and ideas in emerging technology. Were keen to hear from people with interesting, provocative, and well-argued opinions on technology and where i...

2020 has created more than a brave new world. Its a world of opportunity rapidly pressuring organizations of all sizes to rapidly adopt technology to not just survive, but to thrive. And Andrew Dugan,...

BepiColombo, a Mercury-bound mission jointly run by the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is snapping up a wealth of new images and collecting some new data that...

The idea of artificial general intelligence as we know it today starts with a dot-com blowout on Broadway.  Twenty years agobefore Shane Legg clicked with neuroscience postgrad Demis Hassabis ove...

AI can read your emotional response to advertising and your facial expressions in a job interview. But if it can already do all this, what happens next? In part two of a series on emotion AI, Jennifer...

Since December 2018, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been orbiting the asteroid Bennu and trying to find out more about its chemistry and geology. And for good reason: Bennu is a time capsule, says Thom...

Room-temperature superconductorsmaterials that conduct electricity with zero resistance without needing special coolingare the sort of technological miracle that would upend daily life. They could rev...

Even before the covid-19 pandemic and the resulting collapse of much the worlds economy, a crisis in capitalism was plainly evident. Unfettered free markets had pushed inequality of income and wealth ...

The news: Global internet freedom has declined for the 10th year in a row as governments use the coronavirus pandemic as cover to restrict peoples rights, according to a report by think tank Freedom H...

Climate scientists have found that any scenario that prevents the planet from shooting past 1.5 C of warming requires effectively eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by around midcentury. But can tha...

When the pandemic hit, parents scrambled to get enough devices to get their kids for online schooling. But even when they did, not everything went smoothly. Getting multiple people online for hours at...

The news: A man in the US caught covid-19 for a second time in the space of just two months, according to a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. That makes him the fifth person to have o...

From the outside, VertiVegies looked like a handful of grubby shipping containers put side by side and drilled together. A couple of meters in height, they were propped up on a patch of concrete in on...

In a clean room in Building 23 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, a spacecraft called DART was splayed open like a fractured, cubic egg. An instrumen...

Rolando Chang Barrero lives in Palm Beach County, Florida in what he calls a bi-partisan Hispanic neighborhood. Hes an artist and gallery owner who is well-known in his community, and also the Preside...

Rolando Chang Barrero lives in Palm Beach County, Florida, in what he calls a bipartisan Hispanic neighborhood. Hes an artist and gallery owner who is well known in his community, and he is president ...

With an unprecedented number of Americans voting by mail this year, it may take longer than normal for results to come in this Election Dayincluding even unofficial results. Yet President Donald Trump...

With an unprecedented number of Americans voting by mail this year, it may take longer than normal for results to come in this Election Dayincluding even unofficial results. Yet President Donald Trump...

The long-awaited tech antitrust report that the US Congress released on October 6 presents a remarkably flimsy case for action against the nations most innovative and competitive companies. The report...

In a national database in Argentina, tens of thousands of entries detail the names, birthdays, and national IDs of people suspected of crimes. The database, known as the Consulta Nacional de Rebeldas ...

In 2019, two multimedia artists, Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund, set about to pursue a provocative idea. Deepfake video and audio had been advancing in parallel but had yet to be integrated into...

President Trump is trying to recruit an army of poll watchers for Election Day. As part of his ongoing disinformation campaign about election fraud, these aggressive appeals to his supporters are rais...

When the coronavirus pandemic hit earlier this year, Alonso Yaez, CIO of Walmarts operations in Mexico and Central America, sprang into action, triggering the retailers crisis management plan and lead...

Ahead of an October 20 attempt to bring extraterrestrial rocks from an asteroid called Bennu to Earth, NASAs OSIRIS-REx mission has delivered new insights into its chemistry and geology. Bennu, curren...

Busted: A bot powered by OpenAIs powerful GPT-3 language model has been unmasked after a week of posting comments on Reddit. Under the username /u/thegentlemetre, the bot was interacting with people o...

As covid-19 began to spread earlier this year, it soon became clear that prisons and jails are particularly susceptible to outbreaks. In response, criminal justice systems around the world started loo...

As we head into the Northern Hemisphere fall with covid-19 still raging in the US and a number of other parts of the world, two data points provide cause for extra concern. One is that the seasonal fl...

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to expand to power everything from security and facial recognition software to autonomous vehicles and mobile apps. In Women leading the future of mobile AI, a v...

This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as miracles coming down from God. If thats true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tis...

This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as miracles coming down from God. If thats true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tis...

The president is running a disinformation campaign, and too many people wont call it what it is. The simplest disinformation is explicitly false or misleading information disseminated for politic...

As of Tuesday evening, 18 people whove worked at the White House had tested positive for covid-19. That count is likely to tick upward. Now the White House strategy to prevent such an outbreak is comi...

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded today to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for the development of a method for genome editing called CRISPR.  Genetic scissors: ...

5G and the enterprise opportunity: How leading operators are developing ecosystem, cloud, and AI strategies for winning in 5G is an MIT Technology Review Insights report that examines how operators ar...

In middle school and high school, Nora Tan downloaded the big three of social media. It was only natural. I grew up in the age when social media was really taking off, says Tan, a Seattle-based produc...

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead in a pandemic, and one of the infected is the President of the United States. But not even personally contracting covid-19 has stopped him from minimizing t...

The news: Facebook announced on Tuesday that it will remove any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content. QAnon, the pro-Trump conspira...

The news: Facebook announced on Tuesday that it will remove any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content. QAnon, the pro-Trump conspira...

Last week Texas governor Greg Abbott became the latest Republican to attack America’s vote-by-mail system. A proclamation he issued claimed that the threat of illegal voting justifies a dramatic...

The context: When Twitter announced it would start removing tweets expressing hope that President Trump would die of covid-19, a number of usersnotably, women and people of color in politics openly as...

The news: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidelines to acknowledge that the coronavirus can be spread by tiny particles that linger in the air. The agency said it to...

On a scorching day this August, Caleb Woodall wielded his shovel like a spear, stabbing it into the hardened crust of an asbestos-filled pit near Coalinga, California. Woodall, a graduate student at W...

US President Donald Trump tweeted today that hell leave Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at 6:30 p.m. after a three-day stay. The question now: With the campaign in full swing, will Trump ...

Space exploration is a long-term endeavor. It takes many years and boatloads of money to get a single spacecraft off the ground and out of Earth’s atmosphere. Getting it to destinations outside ...

The news: President Donald Trump has started receiving the steroid drug dexamethasone, which is usually reserved for patients with a severe case of covid-19. A study in June found that it significantl...

Day by day, the evidence is mounting that Facebook is bad for society. Last week Channel 4 News in London tracked down Black Americans in Wisconsin who were targeted by President Trumps 2016 campaign ...

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, tested positive for covid-19 and within 24 hours had received an experimental, cutting-edge antibody treatment not available to other Americans. In a ...

In November of 2018, a new deep-learning tool went online in the emergency department of the Duke University Health System. Called Sepsis Watch, it was designed to help doctors spot early signs of one...

The square-faced, three-legged alien shoves and jostles to get at the enormous plant taking over its tiny planet. But each bite just makes the forbidden fruit grow bigger. Suddenly the plants weight f...

The evidence that the coronavirus spreads through the air has been mounting for months. However, the official guidance from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control is still that ...

Elections are a technology. I dont mean just that they rely on technology, although cybersecurity, voter data, misinformation, and online advertising are all central to how todays elections are fought...

Russias biggest technology company enjoys a level of dominance that is unparalleled by any one of its Western counterparts. Think Google mixed with equal parts Amazon, Spotify and Uber and youre getti...

When the 2020 coronavirus pandemic forced workers across the United States to stop congregating in offices and work from home, Siemens USA was prepared to protect its newly remote workforce and identi...

In the middle of the night on Monday, the two cosmonauts and one astronaut on the International Space Station were woken up by a call from mission control. They were told that there was a hole in a mo...