Articles by Technology Review from January 2021

The first time Mary Ann Price logged into her employers system to schedule a vaccine, she found an appointment three days later at a nearby Walgreens pharmacy. She woke up the next day to an email say...

Language-generation algorithms are known to embed racist and sexist ideas. Theyre trained on the language of the internet, including the dark corners of Reddit and Twitter that may include hate speech...

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The news: Two new sets of vaccine results announced today suggest the South African variant of the virus is proving harder to vaccinate against. US company Novavax today announced that its covid-19 va...

As the Biden administration ramps up, it inherits soaring cases and a muddled vaccine rollout so its reasonable to wonder what else can possibly slow the spread of covid-19. Some strategies in the adm...

In late October 1959, a Mexican spy named Eduardo Diaz Silveti slipped into the US Embassy in Mexico City. Tall and well-spoken with slicked-back hair, Silveti, 30, descended from a family of bullfigh...

President Joe Biden continues to make good on his campaign pledge to accelerate progress on climate change, rapidly working down the list of what he can accomplish on his own in his early days in offi...

President Joe Biden continues to make good on his campaign pledge to accelerate progress on climate change, rapidly working down the list of what he can accomplish on his own in his early days in offi...

After just a week in office, the Biden administration is already under immense public pressure to fix Americas mangled vaccine rollout. Operation Warp Speed injected enormous sums into developing vacc...

The current covid-19 pandemic has shined the spotlight on longstanding health inequities for people of color. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to the general Unite...

The pharmaceutical and chemicals industries are no strangers to digital technology, with decades of experimentation using data and statistical techniques to improve productivity and innovation. But th...

The global vaccine rollout is full of glitches, shortages, and problems, but not every country faces the same challenges. Evening out those inequalities to make sure poorer countries are included in t...

Every morning, as Nandita Mohan sifts through her emails, her college pals are in her ear recounting their day, reminiscing, reflecting on what its like to have graduated in the throes of a pandemic....

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Online misinformation and political polarization have hampered the efforts of public health officials to stop the spread of covid-19. Are there better ways to counter the falsehoods and get more relia...

On January 10, Charlie ODonnell, a startup investor who runs Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, published a blog post that he hoped would inspire self-reflection among his peers in the industry. Provocatively ...

Salim Abdool Karim was at a cricket match on December 26, Boxing Day, when he made the mistake of looking at his email. He had received a new report and the news wasnt good. A heavily mutated coronavi...

On Wednesday, the US waited with bated breath as president Trump handed the government reins over to president Biden. The transition of power ended up peaceful, and Biden promptly ushered in his new v...

A virtual robot arm has learned to solve a wide range of different puzzlesstacking blocks, setting the table, arranging chess pieceswithout having to be retrained for each task. It did this by playing...

The news: President Biden has said it will take a “wartime effort” to tackle the covid-19 pandemic as he unveiled a seven-point plan on his first full day in the job. He pledged to be guid...

Israel was originally praised for its approach to covid-19 vaccine distribution, and was hailed as a model for how to get things done. But the picture that has emerged since is a lot more complicated....

Israel was originally praised for its approach to covid-19 vaccine distribution, and was hailed as a model for how to get things done. But the picture that has emerged since is a lot more complicated....

In the last few years, research has shown that deep learning can match expert-level performance in medical imaging tasks like early cancer detection and eye disease diagnosis. But theres also cause fo...

In the last few years, research has shown that deep learning can match expert-level performance in medical imaging tasks like early cancer detection and eye disease diagnosis. But theres also cause fo...

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, now the world’s richest person with a net worth north of $180 billion, announced on Twitter that he plans to give away $100 million of it as a prize for the “best carb...

For oil and gas companies, digital transformation is a prioritynot only as a way to modernize the enterprise, but also to secure the entire energy ecosystem. With that lens, the urgency of applying ar...

Chinas space program might have been slowed by the pandemic in 2020, but it certainly didnt stop. The years highlights included sending a rover to Mars, bringing moon rocks back to Earth, and testing ...

A flurry of executive orders is expected to take place over the next few days from the new US president as he takes residence in the White House. Here are the highlights of those he has signed so far....

The news: Hours before leaving the presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order which requires American cloud computing companies to do more to verify the identities of their foreign customers. ...

For two years now, NASAs InSight probe has sat on the surface of Mars, attempting to dig 5 meters (16 feet) deep in order to install the landers heat probe. The instrument was going to effectively tak...

At the height of Californias worst wildfire season on record, Geoff Marshall looked down at his computer and realized that an enormous blaze was about to take firefighters by surprise. Marshall runs t...

As the world watched rioters take over the US Capitol on January 6, the lack of security was chilling. Some active police officers stood their ground but were outnumbered and defenseless. Other video ...

As the coronavirus vaccines have rolled out across the US, the process has been confusing and disastrous. States, left by the federal government to fend for themselves, have struggled to get a handle ...

As the coronavirus vaccines have rolled out across the US, the process has been confusing and disastrous. States, left by the federal government to fend for themselves, have struggled to get a handle ...

Every financial institution is looking to digital transformation to meet rising customer expectations for speed and convenience, lower its operating cost, and fend off competition, including from tech...

Rumman Chowdhurys job used to involve a lot of translation. As the responsible AI lead at the consulting firm Accenture, she would work with clients struggling to understand their AI models. How did t...

As rioters stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, Theolike many Americanswatched, dumbfounded and in horror. Then he had an idea. What if we went on social and started pulling these screenshots together a...

As covid-19 began spreading around the world, an avalanche of new digital services and data-driven approaches has emerged to aid pandemic response. From smartphone exposure notifications to vaccine al...

Galileo once observed that nature is written in math. Biology might be written in words. Natural-language processing (NLP) algorithms are now able to generate protein sequences and predict virus mutat...

Galileo once observed that nature is written in math. Biology might be written in words. Natural-language processing (NLP) algorithms are now able to generate protein sequences and predict virus mutat...

The year 2020 was profoundly challenging for citizens, companies, and governments around the world. As covid-19 spread, requiring far-reaching health and safety restrictions, artificial intelligence (...

Covid vaccines reprogrammed to aim at new emerging strains of the virus could reach the market quickly, without going through large clinical trials, according to officials at Moderna and the US govern...

The US may face a rapidly closing window to bring a suspected extra-contagious variant of covid-19 under control. If the variant strain, first spotted in the United Kingdom, is as infectious as some s...

Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks dont notice when the words in a sentence are jumbled up, which shows that they dont...

Many AIs that appear to understand language and that score better than humans on a common set of comprehension tasks dont notice when the words in a sentence are jumbled up, which shows that they dont...

When the pandemic threw the world into disarray in spring 2020, most organizations responded by holding onbarely, at times. Executives assessed the impact on operations and dealt with the immediate em...

For Singaporeans, the covid-19 pandemic has been closely intertwined with technology: two technologies, to be specific. The first is the QR code, whose little black-and-white squares have been ubiquit...

What’s happening: Parler, a site that bills itself as a free speech social network and that was widely used to coordinate the storming of the Capitol last week, has gone offline after Amazon sto...

This week a violent mob mounted the biggest attack on the Capitol, the seat of American democracy, in more than 200 years, driven by the false belief that the presidential election had been stolen. Th...

On January 7, following the violent white supremacist riots that breached the US Capitol, Twitter and Facebook both suspended President Donald Trump from their platforms. The next day, Twitter made it...

Less than 24 hours after President Trump was allowed back on Twitter, the social media platform announced it was permanently suspending his @realdonaltrump account on Friday afternoon due to the risk ...

Less than 24 hours after President Trump was allowed back on Twitter, the social media platform announced on Friday afternoon, January 8, that it was permanently suspending his @realdonaltrump account...

As a violent mob incited by President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol on January 6, halting the procedure in Congress to formally certify Joe Biden as president-elect, a Redditor with the username...

A year ago, none the wiser about what 2020 would bring, I reflected on the pivotal moment that the AI community was in. The previous year, 2018, had seen a series of high-profile automated failures, l...

Maybe you saw this coming nearly a decade ago, when #YourSlipIsShowing laid bare how racist Twitter users were impersonating Black women on the internet. Maybe, for you, it was during Gamergate, the o...

Just as well-known, easily identifiable far-right figures livestreamed themselves invading the Capitol in Washington, DC, a lie started spreading around the Trump-supporting internet: What if the mob ...

The outcomes in Georgias runoff Senate elections hand the Democratic Party control of both chambers of Congress, easing the path for President-elect Joe Biden to achieve progress on his ambitious clim...

As a mob of right-wing extremists occupied the US Capitol building on Tuesday, President Trump posted a short video message to his loyal supporters on social media: We had an election that was stolen ...

Covid-19 patients who recovered from the disease still have a robust immunity from the coronavirus eight months after infection, according to a new study. The result is an encouraging sign that the au...

To say the first few weeks of vaccine delivery have been turbulent would be an understatement. States across the US have found themselves struggling with underdeveloped logistics that have caused prob...

The explosive growth of artificial intelligence has fostered hope that it will help us solve many of the worlds most intractable problems. However, theres also much concern about the power of AI, and ...

Weve all been there by now: surfing the web and bumping into ads with an uncanny flavor. How did they know I was thinking about joining a gym? Or changing careers? Or that I need a loan? You might won...

Weve all been there by now: surfing the web and bumping into ads with an uncanny flavor. How did they know I was thinking about joining a gym? Or changing careers? Or that I need a loan? You might won...

With GPT-3, OpenAI showed that a single deep-learning model could be trained to use language in a variety of ways simply by throwing it vast amounts of text. It then showed that by swapping text for p...

The news: Police will be able to access data collected by Singapores covid-19 contact tracing system for use in criminal investigations, a senior official said on Monday. The announcement contradicts ...

Spaceflight in 2020 did not go as planned. Like nearly everything else in the world, space activity was hit hard by the pandemic. Last year we listed the seven space missions that we were most ex...

Theres a case to be made that 2020, for all the sacrifices it demanded and tragedies it inflicted, could at least mark a turning point on climate change. It’s now possible that global oil demand...

Theres a case to be made that 2020, for all the sacrifices it demanded and tragedies it inflicted, could at least mark a turning point on climate change. It’s now possible that global oil demand...

Even amidst stay-at-home orders and restricted mobility, the photographers commissioned for stories this year were able to connect us with events around the world....

From the MIT Technology Review art team, here are some of our very favorite illustrations of the year:...

This was a year we needed technology to save us. A pandemic raced over the land, there were wildfires, uneasy political divisions, and we gasped in the miasma of social media. In 2020, the ways in whi...