Articles by Technology Review from November 2020

The news: The Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine will be tested in a new global trial, AstraZenecas CEO Pascal Soriot has told Bloomberg. Previously it had been expected to just add an arm to its e...

Julia Borges was at her cousins 12th birthday party when she was shot. The 17-year-old had been standing on a third-floor balcony when a stray bullet hit her in the back, lodging in the muscle between...

Astronaut Scott Kelly famously lived and worked on the International Space Station for 340 daysthe longest time an American has spent in space. His mission gave scientists some vital insight into what...

In the last few days, a cascade of election results from battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan have been certifieddelivering key defeats to President Trump and his continued failed att...

Lisa Long is immunosuppressed and suffers from chronic pain. That means that since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the US in March, she and her family, which includes her two daughters, 11 an...

Turbulent times can expose weaknesses in distribution chains, putting stress on chokepoints and reducing access to critical components, suppliers, and capital. The ability to respond to changes rapidl...

President-elect Joe Biden named John Kerry to the newly created role of climate czar, a move that underscores the incoming administrations commitment to an international-focused approach to the issue ...

China launched its Change 5 mission to the moon early Tuesday morning local time from the countrys launch site on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. The country is seeking to bring soil and rock sa...

Many countries launched contact tracing and exposure notification apps early in the pandemic to help slow the spread of covid-19. Now some of the most prominent are beginning to change their approach ...

The news: Oxford University and AstraZeneca have reported that their covid-19 vaccine is up to 90% effective, according to interim data from the Phase III trial. The trial found that the vaccine was 7...

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, who was one of the governments most senior cybersecurity officials. Trump fired himby tweetbecause Krebs had thoroughly debunked election di...

An AI that completes quests in a text-based adventure game by talking to the characters has learned not only how to do things, but how to get others to do things. The system is a step toward machines ...

Pfizer will apply for emergency permission to distribute its covid-19 vaccine in the US and is ready to start shipping the shots within hours of getting a government green light, the firm said today. ...

New Zealand company Rocket Lab has hit a key milestone with the successful launch and recovery of its flagship Electron rocket. The mission, the firm’s 16th so far, included a soft parachute lan...

In the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, several competing projects launched around a deceptively simple concept: your phone could alert you if youd crossed paths with someone who later tested posi...

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article. If the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, as Galileo once declared, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought...

New technologies can optimize the way people work. When implemented thoughtfully, such innovations can improve overall business processes. Those changes are accepted as part of progress. But when a te...

The good news: US greenhouse-gas emissions are on track to fall 9% this year, marking the lowest levels of climate pollution in at least three decades, according to the research group BloombergNEF. Th...

The US National Science Foundation has just announced it is going to begin decommissioning the famous Arecibo Observatory, the 1,000-meter-long, 900-ton radio telescope located in Puerto Rico. Its a h...

President-elect Joe Biden won the US election in part by running on an ambitious climate platform promising to invest heavily to avert climate catastrophe while creating millions of well-paying jobs. ...

On May 20, Super Cyclone Amphan was expected to make landfall in the Indian state of West Bengal. That morning, as the wind picked up, Mitali Mondol and her husband, Animesh, fled their house, leaving...

A solar-powered autonomous drone scans for forest fires. A surgeon first operates on a digital heart before she picks up a scalpel. A global community bands together to print personal protection equip...

In the second of two exclusive interviews, Technology Reviews Editor-in-Chief Gideon Lichfield sat down with Parag Agrawal, Twitters Chief Technology officer to discuss the rise of misinformation on t...

Misinformation and social media have become inseparable from one another; as platforms like Twitter and Facebook have grown to globe-spanning size, so too has the threat posed by the spread of false c...

Defining what is, or isnt artificial intelligence can be tricky (or tough). So much so, even the experts get it wrong sometimes. Thats why MIT Technology Reviews Senior AI Reporter Karen Hao created a...

The news: A new AI model for summarizing scientific literature can now assist researchers in wading through and identifying the latest cutting-edge papers they want to read. On November 16, the Allen ...

Moves have been made to restrict the use of facial recognition across the globe. In part one of this series on Face ID, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review explore the unexpected way...

Its no secret that machine-learning models tuned and tweaked to near-perfect performance in the lab often fail in real settings. This is typically put down to a mismatch between the data the AI was tr...

Even though the winner of an American election usually gets announced soon after the vote happens, the result is never actually official on Election Day. Its not even official once the media makes the...

More good news: US drug company Moderna announced today that early trials of its covid-19 vaccine show that it is 94.5% effective. The news comes hot on the heels of a similar announcement last week f...

On November 13, Michael Giusto turned 18 years old. Becoming an adult is always a big moment in any teenagers life. But Giustos landmark birthday comes with added responsibility. Thanks to a quirk in ...

Whats your plan for Thanksgiving? Americans caught between the dire reality of an out-of-control pandemic and a desire to celebrate the national holiday with family may be tempted to believe that mayb...

On Thursday, President Donald Trump sent an all-caps tweet claiming that voting machines from a company called Dominion Voting Systems deleted millions of votes for him around the country. The claim i...

On Thursday, President Donald Trump sent an all-caps tweet claiming that voting machines from a company called Dominion Voting Systems had deleted millions of votes for him around the country. The cla...

Think of all the subconscious processes you perform while youre driving. As you take in information about the surrounding vehicles, youre anticipating how they might move and thinking on the fly about...

I really want a covid-19 vaccine. Like many Americans, I have family members and neighbors who have been sickened and killed by the new coronavirus. My sister is a nurse on a covid-19 ward, and I want...

The news: While the US has been hooked on its election, China has been shopping. From November 1 to 11, the country’s top e-commerce giants, Alibaba and JD, generated $115 billion in sales as pa...

The news: Digital contact tracing apps have faced a wide range of difficulties, but that doesnt mean we should abandon the idea, according to the authors of a new essay in the journal Science. Instead...

In recent months, researchers at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and the University of Cambridge performed a simple experiment that could have huge implications for cooling and refrigeration. ...

Axiom Space has signed three private astronauts to join former NASA astronaut Michael Lpez-Alegra on Ax-1, the first private mission into orbit and to the International Space Station. The mission: In ...

The news: When a German hospital patient died in September while ransomware disrupted emergency care at the facility, police launched a negligent-homicide investigation and said they might hold the ha...

Last month Nature published a damning response written by 31 scientists to a study from Google Health that had appeared in the journal earlier this year. Google was describing successful trials of an ...

The news: There have been increasing numbers of anecdotal reports of a link between surviving covid-19 and developing mental health problems in recent months. Now we have some numbers to back those re...

The news: There have been increasing numbers of anecdotal reports of a link between surviving covid-19 and developing mental health problems in recent months. Now we have some numbers to back those re...

Artificial intelligence has become such a big part of our lives, youd be forgiven for losing count of the algorithms you interact with. But the AI powering your weather forecast, Instagram filter, or ...

Artificial intelligence has become such a big part of our lives, youd be forgiven for losing count of the algorithms you interact with. But the AI powering your weather forecast, Instagram filter, or ...

On March 19, 2019, Norsk Hydro, one of the worlds largest producers of aluminum, faced a systemic, worldwide network ransomware attack. Its response strategy was built upon two principles: p...

How do organizations best ensure a resilient cyber ecosystemfrom assessing risk to implementing and managing controls to ensuring compliance internally and with external ...

From espionage to elections, from blackouts to data breaches, from million-dollar ransoms to staged supply-chain disruption; cyber warfare is transforming statecraft and national security policy. ...

Every internet-connected laptop, server, and device offers an opportunity for a hacker to infiltrate and compromise your organization. Having a robust cyber-resilience plan for your organization is as...

A species of bacteria can successfully pull out rare Earth elements from rocks, even in microgravity environments, a study on the International Space Station has found. The new findings, published in ...

During this pandemic, every activity in an indoor public place involves some level of risk, but some venues are far riskier than othersespecially if theyre small and crowded. We already knew that rest...

During this pandemic, every activity in an indoor public place involves some level of risk, but some venues are far riskier than othersespecially if theyre small and crowded. We already knew that rest...

During this pandemic, every activity in an indoor public place involves some level of risk, but some venues are far riskier than othersespecially if theyre small and crowded. We already knew that rest...

Our 35 Innovators Under 35 competition for 2021 is now open for nominations. You can nominate great candidates from now until 10 p.m. EST on February 3, 2021. Weve been publishing a list of young inno...

Throughout his campaign to win the White House, president-elect Joe Biden has been relatively quiet about the technology industry.  In a revealing January 2020 interview with The New York Times e...

On midnight of October 26, Facebook stopped accepting all new advertisements about social issues, elections or politics in the US. The intention was to prevent Facebook from being overwhelmed by a bli...

President-elect Joe Biden wasted little time setting a new tone on climate change. On Sunday, one day after major outlets called the presidential election for the former vice president, the Biden-Harr...

In 1979, a federally commissioned study led by meteorology pioneer and MIT professor Jule Charney helped alert the world to the processes driving global warmingat the time, a looming but not yet immin...

Seniors arriving on campus for the fall term headed to MITs custom-designed covid testing trailer, which lets caregivers swab noses using gloves protruding through height-adjustable panels. On August ...

Jeffrey Gum remembers his early-career surgeries with wonder. We dissected a lot of muscle off the bone, says Gum, an adult and pediatric spine surgeon at the Norton Leatherman Spine Center in Louisvi...

The European Union has agreed to stricter rules on the sale and export of cyber-surveillance technologies like facial recognition and spyware. After years of negotiations, the new regulation will be a...

A promising vaccine against covid-19 has proved 90% effective, protecting most people who get it, according to the drug maker Pfizer. If the results hold up, it would mean a potential path out of the ...

The news: President-elect Joe Biden and Vice Presidentelect Kamala Harris have revealed the members of their covid-19 task force. Its 10 members are mostly former government health officials, top medi...

Though the counts aren’t finished and the legal challenges could drag on for weeks, Joe Bidens victory in the US presidential election is looking increasingly likely. If he does triumph, it will...

Nearly 4,300 exoplanets have been discovered by astronomers, and its quite obvious now our galaxy is filled with them. But the point of looking for these new worlds is more than just an exercise in st...

Back in 2016, I could count on one hand the kinds of interventions that technology companies were willing to use to rid their platforms of misinformation, hate speech, and harassment. Over the years, ...

Youve probably heard us say this countless times: GPT-3, the gargantuan AI that spews uncannily human-like language, is a marvel. Its also largely a mirage. You can tell with a simple trick: Ask it th...

The election process is working.  Along-building chaos narrativebeing pushed by President Donald Trump suggests that the election is fatally flawed, fraud is rampant, and no institutions other th...

So Election Day is over, but the election continues. The worlds attention has turned to a set of swing states still counting important mail-in votes, particularly Pennsylvania. So what exactly is happ...

As the US election process wore on from Tuesday evening into Wednesday, multiple counties across the country are broadcasting the ballot counting process. What it is: Given the closeness of the electi...

While the presidential election is still in the balance, several ballot initiatives with broad implications for how we use technology have passed. Ballot initiatives pose questions to voters and can ...

While the presidential election is still in the balance, several ballot initiatives with broad implications for how we use technology have passed. Ballot initiatives pose questions to voters and canif...

Fast radio bursts are among the strangest mysteries in space science. These pulses last less than five milliseconds but release more energy than the sun does in days or weeks. Since they were first re...

In a move that everyone knew was coming, President Trump announced in a speech at 2:21am EST this morning that he had wonlong before enough votes were in to make that call. We were getting ready to wi...

Millions of voters across the US received robocalls and texts encouraging them to stay at home on election day, in what experts believe were clear attempts at suppressing voter turnout in the closely ...

Online platforms have made bans of political advertising a core part of their plans to mitigate the spread of disinformation around the US elections. Twitter moved early, banning political ads in Octo...

The modern AI revolution began during an obscure research contest. It was 2012, the third year of the annual ImageNet competition, which challenged teams to build computer vision systems that would re...

The modern AI revolution began during an obscure research contest. It was 2012, the third year of the annual ImageNet competition, which challenged teams to build computer vision systems that would re...

The election results will start to come in as early as 7pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, when seven states begin closing the polls. The next few hours will see more polls close around the country, more vot...

There were 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents reported in the US in 2019a record-breaking year as tracked by the Anti-Defamation League, and almost double the rate reported in 2016. The resurgence of anti-S...

Election Day misinformation will have two big goals, with the emphasis shifting over the course of the day. First it will attempt to keep people away from the polls, and then it will undermine the int...

There was a time when misinformation was thought of as something that fought its way from the fringes into the mainstream, as if it lived in a darker parallel reality that was waiting to invade our ow...

Tomorrow is Election Day in the US, which means weve reached peak political saturation: Americans are being hit with constant news alerts, a torrent of punditry and campaign ads on television, and eve...

In April, Amazon announced it would contribute $10 million to a pair of projects designed to pay forest owners across the Appalachian Mountains to manage their lands in ways that capture more carbon d...

During the 2016 primary season, Trump campaign staffer Matt Braynard had an unusual political strategy. Instead of targeting Republican base votersthe ones who show up for every electionhe focused on ...

Last months report that there may be phosphine gas in the Venusian clouds came with a stunning implication: extraterrestrial life. On Earth, phosphine is a chemical produced by some kinds of bact...