Articles by Technology Review from April 2021

Developing the capacity to annotate massive volumes of data while maintaining quality is a function of the model development lifecycle that enterprises often underestimate. Its resource intensive and ...

By any measure, 2021 corporate planning isnt business as usual. As the coronavirus pandemic grinds on, financial services institutions are coming out of crisis mode addressing immediate cash managemen...

Tens of millions of people in the United States have now been fully vaccinated against covid-19. These people are seeing friends, eating out, andin rare casesgetting infected. But we shouldnt pan...

Last week US regulators recommended resuming use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, after deciding that a side effect involving blood clots was too rare to justify continuing the brief suspension t...

Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, we...

Todays voice assistants are still a far cry from the hyper-intelligent thinking machines weve been musing about for decades. And its because that technology is actually the combination of three differ...

In 2050, 2.5 billion more people will live in cities than do today. As the world grows more urbanized, many cities are becoming more populous while also trying to reduce carbon emissions and blunt the...

Urban technology projects have long sought to manage the cityto organize its ambiguities, mitigate its uncertainties, and predict or direct its growth and decline. The latest, smart city projects, hav...

They drilled a hole in my skull on the 43rd floor of an empty skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. One of those towers where they told people to go and work from home and they never came back. Floor-to-ceil...

Science fiction is full of cities imagined from the ground up, but an author who writes about a real place has to engage with real cultures and real histories. It takes a special kind of world-buildin...

Construction workers in New Yorks Lower Manhattan neighborhood were breaking ground for a new federal building back in 1991 when they unearthed hundreds of coffins. The more they dug, the more they fo...

Power outages are a way of life in Africas most industrialized country. Over the last decade, South Africas electricity grid has come apart at the seams and failed to deliver dependable power. As rene...

Fourteen-year-old Neha Dashrath was ecstatic when the pizza arrived. It was the first time shed ever ordered from a food delivery app. I always felt shy when my friends talked about ordering food from...

Finding your way through Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro is not easy. The buildings are densely and turbulently arranged in a manner that defies traditional identification systems like street names and numb...

Teresa Mosqueda used to spend her days asking people to run for office. A union leader and third-generation Mexican-American from Seattle, she figured the most effective way to address working familie...

The coronavirus pandemic presents a cruel irony for urban dwellers. What good are cities if the very quality that makes them so dynamicthe ease of connecting with people and gathering in large groups ...

Sohini Chattopadhyay had almost given up her medical quest before deciding to try one last bizarre idea. Chattopadhyay, 30, and her friends were looking for a plasma donor for a childhood pal who was ...

When she started her junior year after a corporate internship that left her feeling unfulfilled, Jodie Wu 09 was questioning her path as an engineer. Participating in a D-Lab class project in Tanzania...

Growing up in Chile, where her family owned a minimarket, Rocio Fonseca, SM 14, was taught to expect a life limited by her familys social class. In her early professional years, as the first in her fa...

Emerson Yearwood, who has spent most of his career as an attorney in the communications sector, is dedicated to supporting students of color at MIT through his giving and volunteerism. His current foc...

Most amputations sever the muscle pairs that control joints such as the elbow or ankle, disrupting the sensory feedback about the limbs position in space that would help patients control a prosthesis....

New Vassar, MITs new undergrad dorm, opened in January across the street from the Henry Steinbrenner Stadium and Track with the goal of promoting a healthy, well-balanced lifestyle. The 450-bed reside...

One morning at the start of the spring semester, I was surprised by a most welcome sound outside: the voices of students! I could not resist going to the window. Even bundled up against the cold, the ...

Like meat production, logging and agriculture can exact a heavy environmental toll. Now an MIT team has proposed a way to circumvent that by growing certain plant tissues in the laban idea somewhat ak...

Christopher Rose 79, SM 81, PhD 85, earned three MIT degrees in electrical engineering but has always been drawn to many disciplines. As a professor of engineering at Brown University, hes working at ...

As soon as he could walk, Tom Goreau 70 was swimming in the warm waters off Jamaica, where he grew up. He recalls water so consistently clear and blue he could see all the way down to the corals and m...

The Building 7 dome, designed by William Welles Bosworth to give MIT a suitably grand entrance on Mass Ave, was completed in 1939. In 2019, an 80-year checkup seemed warranted, and a study initiated b...

Third-party cookies are like Cretaceous dinosaurs. Theyre munching away on consumers data while asteroids lobbed by Google, Mozilla, Apple, and others are on the brink of obliterating the current mark...

The news: Oxygen and other vital medical supplies have started arriving in India as it battles one of the most acute covid-19 crises of any country yet. The country set a global record for new cases f...

The data scientist Youyang Gu thinks of himself as a realisthe declares it in his Twitter profile: Presenter of unbiased takes. Realist. When he noticed the scattershot covid-19 projections last sprin...

Bill Gates made headlines earlier this year for saying that all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef in an interview with MIT Technology Review about the release of his new book, How to A...

These days we are all striving for connections. In families, between generations, in neighborhoods, and even among co-workers. We rely on it for learning, for trading, for economic growth, for innovat...

On paper, the task was gargantuan. To slow the rapid spread of the coronavirus, the New York City subway would start closing every night for the first time in 115 years. That meant the Metropolitan Tr...

When Aaron Ring began testing blood samples collected from covid-19 patients who had come through YaleNew Haven Hospital last March and April, he expected to see a type of immune cell known as an auto...

At the turn of the 20th century, a German horse took Europe by storm. Clever Hans, as he was known, could seemingly perform all sorts of tricks previously limited to humans. He could add and subtract ...

NASAs Perseverance rover has successfully generated breathable oxygen on Mars. The demonstration, carried out by the rovers MOXIE instrument on April 20, could lay the groundwork for helping future as...

The news: The US will pledge at a summit of 40 global leaders today to halve its carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. This far exceeds an Obama-era pledge in 2014 to get emissions 26-28% below 2...

One February afternoon, a 50-year-old Asian woman was waiting in line at a bakery in Queens, New York, when a man threw a box of spoons at her and then shoved her so violently she required 10 stitches...

A new startup called Orchid is offering the chance for couples planning a pregnancy to learn their risk of passing common conditions like Alzheimers, heart disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes, schizophreni...

Its a bumper week for government pushback on the misuse of artificial intelligence. Today the EU released its long-awaited set of AI regulations, an early draft of which leaked last week. The regulati...

More than 132 million people in the US have received at least one dose of a covid-19 vaccine, and as of this week, all Americans over 16 are eligible. But while the US has vaccinated more people than ...

The news: NASA has flown an aircraft on another planet for the first time. On Monday, April 19, Ingenuity, a 1.8-kilogram drone helicopter, took off from the surface of Mars, flew up about three meter...

At a conference in New Orleans in 2007, Jon Greiner, then the chief of police in Ogden, Utah, heard a presentation by the New York City Police Department about a sophisticated new data hub called a re...

Later this decade, NASA astronauts are expected to touch down on the lunar surface for the first time in decades. When they do, according to an announcement made by the agency, theyll be riding inside...

Back in November, the computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey Hinton had a hunch. After a half-centurys worth of attemptssome wildly successfulhed arrived at another promising insight i...

The hackers at Positive Technologies are undeniably good at what they do. The Russian cybersecurity firm publishes highly regarded research, looks at cutting-edge computer security flaws, and has spot...

CxOs and boards recognize that their organizations ability to generate actionable insights from data, often in real-time, is of the highest strategic importance. If there were any doubts on this score...

The future of the single-shot Johnson & Johnson covid vaccine remains in limbo after an advisory panel recommended taking a deeper look into reports of rareand sometimes fatalside effects. The US ...

On January 9, 2020, Detroit Police drove to the suburb of Farmington Hill and arrested Robert Williams in his driveway while his wife and young daughters looked on. Williams, a Black man, was accused ...

Our entire financial system is built on trust. We can exchange otherwise worthless paper bills for fresh groceries, or swipe a piece of plastic for new clothes. But this trusttypically in a central go...

The US took the dramatic step of recommending that health-care providers stop giving people the Johnson & Johnson vaccine against covid-19 after six women who received it developed serious blood c...

When Gary Landsman prays, he imagines he is in Israel and his sons Benny and Josh are running toward him. They are wearing yarmulkes, and the cotton fringes called tzizit fly out from their waistbands...

AI researchers often say good machine learning is really more art than science. The same could be said for effective public relations. Selecting the right words to strike a positive tone or reframe th...

Now is a tough time to be a retailer. Even before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic brought rapid changes to the market, many traditional brick-and-mortar businesses were struggling. For example, from 201...

The 2020 coronavirus pandemic upended the way companies do business. Some are coping better than othersbut largely, businesses are optimistic about 2021. Thats especially so for tech-forward organizat...

As the US government pumps billions of dollars into projects aimed at curbing the pandemic, from vaccine development to genomic sequencing, officials claim they are being transparent about how money i...

In 2023, NASA will launch VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover), which that will trek across the surface of the moon and hunt for water ice that could one day be used to make ro...

Facebook is withholding certain job ads from women because of their gender, according to the latest audit of its ad service. The audit, conducted by independent researchers at the University of Southe...

Its been a busy week for Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition company that uses 3 billion photos scraped from the web to power a search engine for faces. On April 6, Buzzfeed News publis...

As covid vaccines roll out in a handful of countries, the next question has become: How do people prove theyve been inoculated? For months, this conversationand the ethical questions any vaccine passp...

A pair of robot legs called Cassie has been taught to walk using reinforcement learning, the training technique that teaches AIs complex behavior via trial and error. Its the first time reinforcement ...

Cyberattacks continue to grow in prevalence and sophistication. With the ability to disrupt business operations, wipe out critical data, and cause reputational damage, they pose an existential threat ...

On March 20, Kyle Niemer and Mallory Raven-Ellen Backstrom had the wedding of their dreams: intimate (around 40 guests), in a spacious venue with a dance floor, great food and PCR tests on demand to ...

The news:The personal data of 533 million Facebook users in more than 106 countries was found to be freely available online last weekend. The data trove, uncovered by security researcherAlon Gal, incl...

The disruptive shifts of 2020, including covid-19 shutdowns that led to millions of workers working remotely, forced organizations to radically rethink everything from worker well-being, business mode...

Shortly after President Biden was inaugurated, the man who was being given command of his coronavirus response had a message about what America needed to do. Were 43rd in the world in genomic sequenci...

Shortly after President Biden was inaugurated, the man who was being given command of his coronavirus response had a message about what America needed to do. Were 43rd in the world in genomic sequenci...

The last votes for one of the most closely-watched unionization drives in modern history came in on Monday, March 29, and results could be announced shortly. The vote among almost 6,000 workers at an ...

Veronica started using filters to edit pictures of herself on social media when she was 14 years old. She remembers everyone in her middle school being excited by the technology when it became availab...

Even when covid-19 forced nail salons in New York to close, Araceli continued to work. A nail technician for over a decade, she now found herself making house calls to clients, entering their homes to...

Ideas about what constitutes beauty are complex, subjective, and by no means limited to physical appearances. Elusive though it is, everyone wants more of it. That means big business and increasingly,...

The 10 most cited AI data sets are riddled with label errors, according to a new study out of MIT, and its distorting our understanding of the fields progress. Data backbone: Data sets are the backbon...

This vision of an internet free from harassment, hate, and misogyny might seem far-fetched, particularly if youre a woman. But a small, growing group of activists believe the time has come to reimagin...

The Alibaba Damo Academy is a unique hybrid research and development (R&D) facility. An academically-oriented independent science organization established in 2017 in Hangzhou, China, it is also an...

In an unexpected move, the advisory committee for a Harvard University geoengineering research project is recommending that the team suspend plans for its first balloon flight in Sweden this summer. T...

In an unexpected move, the advisory committee for a Harvard University geoengineering research project is recommending that the team suspend plans for its first balloon flight in Sweden this summer. T...

The news: Ahead of a landmark vote that could lead to the formation of the first-ever labor union at a US-based Amazon warehouse, new Twitter accounts purporting to be Amazon employees started appeari...