Articles by Technology Review from March 2021

Our solar system is full of comets that whizz by as we track them over centuries. But humans have so far seen only two visiting objects from outside the solar system. Theres Oumuamua, the interstellar...

Our solar system is full of comets that whizz by as we track them over centuries. But humans have so far seen only two visiting objects from outside the solar system. Theres Oumuamua, the interstellar...

Like many countries, China has a health care problem. Changing demographics and lifestyles mean demand for health care is outstripping growth in medical resources and its cost is rising faster than th...

The news: A real-world study of 3,950 people in six states found that two doses of Pfizer/BioNTech and Modernas vaccines cut the risk of infection by 90%. The findings are broadly in line with the 95%...

Here on Earth, we have more detailed maps of Mars than of our own ocean, and thats a problem. A massive force for surviving climate change, the ocean absorbs 90% of the heat caused by emissions and ge...

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In order to truly end the pandemic, it will be essential to get vaccines to all parts of the world. The first part of that challenge involves boosting the supply and securing doses for all, but even i...

In a Massachusetts home, a family gathers around the kitchen table. The parents tune in to the device that sits at the head of the table. Moments later, a cheery voice quiets the chatter as the whole ...

A wild-animal trader who caught a strange new virus from a frozen pangolin. A lab worker studying bat viruses who slipped up and sniffed the air under her biosafety hood. A man who suddenly fell ill a...

Google runs some of the most venerated cybersecurity operations on the planet: its Project Zero team, for example, finds powerful undiscovered security vulnerabilities, while its Threat Analysis Group...

Andrew Ng has worn many hats in his life. You may know him as the founder of the Google Brain team or the former chief scientist at Baidu. You may also know him as your own instructor. He has taught c...

In a congressional hearing about disinformation on Thursday, Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to respond to a claim he once made about his own company: that...

Anna Podedworna first heard about NFTs a month or so ago, when a fellow artist sent her an Instagram message trying to convince her to get on board. She found it really off-putting, like a pitch for a...

In his 1979 book of the same name, Tom Wolfe described astronauts as needing the right stuffmeaning they had to be in top physical and mental shape to withstand the rigors and dangers of space travel....

Astronomers have released a brand-new image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. Its a sharper follow-up to a historic 2019 picture, showing the polarized light that traces ...

One afternoon before the pandemic, I went to a decommissioned hospital in West London to meet the Hindi film director Anurag Kashyap on the set of his new Netflix production. The old maternity unit wh...

One afternoon before the pandemic, I went to a decommissioned hospital in West London to meet the Hindi film director Anurag Kashyap on the set of his new Netflix production. The old maternity unit wh...

The digital revolution is here, but not everyone is benefiting equitably from it. And as Silicon Valleys ethos of move fast and break things spreads around the world, now is the time to pause and cons...

The US has administered more than 118 million doses of covid-19 vaccines so far, and millions more are being injected every day. So far, demand from people who are desperate to get vaccinated has outs...

Nikolai Petrovsky was scrolling through social media after a day on the ski slopes when reports describing a mysterious cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China caught his eye. It was early January ...

Facebook says it has created a wristband that translates motor signals from your brain so you can move a digital object just by thinking about it. How does it work? The wristband, which looks like a c...

The search for life on other planets is a lot like cooking. (Bear with me for a second.) You can have all the ingredients in one placewater, a warm climate and thick atmosphere, the proper nutrients, ...

The photographs alone tell a fantastic storya mouse embryo, complete with beating heart cells, a head, and the beginning of limbs, alive and growing in a glass jar. According to a scientific group in ...

Its been a long, challenging year for government technologies. Some have failed massively, requiring endless patches by governments, business, and the informal volunteer corps who have come together t...

In 2016, Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz grew human embryos in a lab dish for longer than anyone had before. Bathing the tiny spheres in a special broth inside an incubator, her team at the University of Cam...

At the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black holea monster that keeps the neighborhood of stars and planets and gas and dust together. Over the decades since astronomers began studying them i...

Billions of years ago, Mars was a warm home to lakes and oceans. That is, until these enormous liquid bodies on its surface vanished around 3 billion years ago. For years, scientists have assumed...

Europes difficult rollout of covid-19 shots took another blow over the weekend, as several countries halted deployment of the AstraZeneca vaccine amid worries it could cause blood clots. On Monday Ger...

In late January, tech impresario Peter Diamandis hosted an exclusive, indoor conference for a group of ultra-wealthy patrons in Los Angeles. As MIT Technology Review reported last month, the get-toget...

Its time to wake up and do a better job, says publisher Tim OReillyfrom getting serious about climate change to building a better data economy. And the way a better data economy is built is through da...

A persona is an imaginary figure representing a segment of real people, and it is a communicative design technique aimed at enhanced user understanding. Through several decades of use, personas were d...

Joaquin Quionero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience. It was March 23, 2018, just days after the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy that worked on Do...

At first the Chinese hackers ran a careful campaign. For two months, they exploited weaknesses in Microsoft Exchange email servers, picked their targets carefully, and stealthily stole entire mailboxe...

On Sunday, NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had gone into safe mode once again, due to an onboard software error. The telescopes science systems were not affected at all, but all science...

The world watched in wonder in February as NASAs robotic rover Perseverance successfully landed on the surface of Mars with the goal of searching for evidence of past life on the red planet. The techn...

Fully vaccinated Americans can now gather indoors, maskless and without distancingas long as its with others whove gotten their shots, according to new guidance from the Centers for Disease Control an...

A Chinese government-linked hacking campaign revealed by Microsoft this week has ramped up rapidly. At least four other distinct hacking groups are now attacking critical flaws in Microsofts email sof...

On Valentines Day, a rare burst of Arctic air spread across the central US and into Texas, dropping temperatures there into the single digits and nearly causing the states power grid to collapse. A st...

Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up thei...

Across the country, schools are wrestling with the difficult choice of whether to reopen, and how to do it with reduced risk. In Kalamazoo, Michigannot far from one the main sites where Pfizer is fran...

I first came across Qoves Studio through its popular YouTube channel, which offers polished videos like Does the hairstyle make a pretty face?, What makes Timothe Chalamet attractive?, and How jaw ali...

I first came across Qoves Studio through its popular YouTube channel, which offers polished videos like Does the hairstyle make a pretty face?, What makes Timothe Chalamet attractive?, and How jaw ali...

On March 3, SpaceXs Starship pulled off a successful high-altitude flightits third in a row. Unlike in the first two missions, the spacecraft stuck the landing.Then, as in the last two, the spacecraft...

On March 3, SpaceXs Starship pulled off a successful high-altitude flightits third in a row. Unlike in the first two missions, the spacecraft stuck the landing. Then, as in the last two, the spac...

On March 3, SpaceXs Starship pulled off a successful high-altitude flightits third in a row. Unlike in the first two missions, the spacecraft stuck the landing. Then, as in the last two, the spac...

The search for AI has always been about trying to build machines that thinkat least in some sense. But the question of how alike artificial and biological intelligence should be has divided opinion fo...

In the private space industry, it can seem that theres SpaceX and then theres everyone else. Only Blue Origin, backed by its own billionaire founder in the person of Jeff Bezos, seems able to command ...

Its one of the most beautiful places on Earth, but its people are among the most vulnerable. Afghanistans snowy mountains and fertile foothills give way to arid plateaus, offering a contrast often des...

The vaccine rollout in the United States has been sluggish, hampered by manufacturing delays, logistical challenges, and freak snowstorms. Demand far outstrips supply.  Meanwhile, the more transm...

Fully recovering from the SolarWinds hack will take the US government from a year to as long as 18 months, according to the head of the agency that is leading Washingtons recovery. Brandon Wales, the ...

The commercial opens with a tempting vision and soaring instrumentals. A door swings wide to reveal a sunlit patio and a relaxed, smiling couple awaiting a meal. How much have we missed going out with...

Youve heard of Apples famous walled garden, the tightly controlled tech ecosystem that gives the company unique control of features and security. All apps go through a strict Apple approval process, t...