Articles by Technology Review from May 2021

Trying to describe dark matter is like trying to describe a ghost that lives in your house. You cant see it at all, but what you can see is all the stuff its moving around. And the only explanation is...

Demand for 5G smartphones is reaching an all-time high In 2021, consumers and institutions alike are fast-tracking a digital revolution in an unprecedented era of social distancing and remote worka tr...

Spring 2021 in India has been horrific and frightening: ambulances wail constantly, funeral pyres are alight 24 hours a day, seemingly endless body bags stack up, and grief hangs heavy in the air. A y...

Earlier this spring, a paper studying covid forecasting appeared on the medRxiv preprint server with an authors list running 256 names long. At the end of the list was Nicholas Reich, a biostatisticia...

Medical technology and pharmaceutical companies are transitioning beyond biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, and equipment to provide comprehensive patient care. The key is to support proactive, pred...

Chinese-speaking hackers are masquerading as the United Nations in ongoing cyber-attacks against Uyghurs, according to the cybersecurity firms Check Point and Kaspersky. Researchers identified an atta...

A little stick figure with a wedge-shaped head shuffles across the screen. It moves in a half crouch, dragging one knee along the ground. Its walking! Er, sort of.  Yet Rui Wang is delighted...

During the past few months, Microsoft Exchange servers have been like chum in a shark-feeding frenzy. Threat actors have attacked critical zero-day flaws in the email software: an unrelenting cyber ca...

A new startup is relying on minerals to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, in one of the first commercial efforts to deploy whats known as enhanced weathering to slow climate change. Heirloom Carbon ...

Over the past two decades, the data economy has permeated every aspect of our social and economic lives. Now, a growing community of voices is seeking a new social contract between the tech industry a...

Like many vaccine tourists, Alex doesnt want you to know his real name.  The British expat arrived on a red-eye flight from his home in Nairobi, Kenya, at New Yorks John F. Kennedy International ...

Jim Cantrell calls himself one of the intellectual fathers of the small-launch business. Its hard to disagree. When Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, Cantrell became its first vice president of busine...

Jim Cantrell calls himself one of the intellectual fathers of the small-launch business. Its hard to disagree. When Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, Cantrell became its first vice president of busine...

Every person engaged with the networked world constantly creates rivers of data. We do this in ways we are aware of, and ways that we arent. Corporations are eager to take advantage. Take, for instanc...

When Joanie Schaffer heard about Dr. B, a free covid-19 vaccine standby service, she was running out of options. It was early February, and vaccine appointments were scarce, so Schaffer, who was alrea...

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The 58-year-old man was blind, barely able to perceive whether it was day or night. After receiving gene therapy to add light-sensing molecules to one of his retinas, he could locate a notebook set on...

On January 11, antivirus company Bitdefender said it was happy to announce a startling breakthrough. It had found a flaw in the ransomware that a gang known as DarkSide was using to freeze computer ne...

On May 22, Virgin Galactic took two people to the very edge of suborbital space for the first time in more than two years, and its third time overall. Its the first of four planned crewed missions sla...

More than 1.5 billion covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered in over 180 countries. That works out to roughly 21 doses for every 100 people. However, as you can see from the animated chart belo...

On May 10, 40 advocacy groups sent an open letter demanding a permanent ban of the use of Amazons facial recognition software, Rekognition, by US police. The letter was addressed to Jeff Bezos and And...

What touches the American psyche more deeply than a gas shortage? If the Colonial Pipeline attack is any measure, nothing. Ransomware has been a growing problem for years, with hundreds of brazen crim...

On May 18, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced an impressive new tool: an AI system called LaMDA that can chat to users about any subject. To start, Google plans to integrate LaMDA into its main search...

Water levels are running dangerously low in rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers across much of the American West, raising serious dangers of shortages, fallowed agricultural fields, and extreme wildfires...

Water levels are running dangerously low in rivers, reservoirs, and aquifers across much of the American West, raising serious dangers of shortages, fallowed agricultural fields, and extreme wildfires...

Is NASA really going to return humans to the moon in 2024? That was the increasingly unlikely mandate issued to the agency by the Trump administration. President Biden hasnt changed that goal yet...

In a recent survey, 2021 Thriving in an AI World, KPMG found that across every industrymanufacturing to technology to retailthe adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasing year over year. P...

Almost exactly a year ago, software developers rushed to build technologies that could help stop the pandemic. Back then, the focus was on apps that could track whether youd been near someone with cov...

The pandemic that has raged across the globe over the past year has shone a cold, hard light on many thingsthe varied levels of preparedness to respond; collective attitudes toward health, technology,...

If the world hopes to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions by midcentury, nearly half the cuts will have to come from technologies that are only in early stages today. That finding, in a report from the...

On March 14, Chinas space program took a huge leap forward when it landed a rover on Mars for the first time, according to state media. China is now only the second country to land successfully on Mar...

In 1998 a couple of Stanford graduate students published a paper describing a new kind of search engine: In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy ...

A man with a brain implant that allows him to control computers via mental signals says he is ready to challenge Elon Musks neuroscience company Neuralink in a head-to-head game of Pongwith a monkey. ...

A man with a brain implant that allows him to control computers via mental signals says he is ready to challenge Elon Musks neuroscience company Neuralink in a head-to-head game of Pongwith a monkey. ...

A year ago, the idea that the covid-19 pandemic could have been caused by a laboratory accident was denounced as a conspiracy theory by the worlds leading journals, scientists, and news organizations....

Ayanna Howard has always sought to use robots and AI to help people. Over her nearly 30-year career, she has built countless robots: for exploring Mars, for cleaning hazardous waste, and for assisting...

The covid-19 pandemic is a catastrophe that could have been averted, say a panel of 13 independent experts tasked with assessing the global response to the crisis. Their report, released May 12 and co...

On May 10, the World Health Organization added a new virus to its list of covid-19 variants of global concern. The variant, B.1.617, is being blamed for the runaway infections in India. It is the four...

Credit scores have been used for decades to assess consumer creditworthiness, but their scope is far greater now that they are powered by algorithms. Not only do they consider vastly more data, in bot...

Emoji are now part of our language. If youre like most people, you pepper your texts, Instagram posts, and TikTok videos with various little images to augment your wordsmaybe the syringe with a bit of...

Engineers are under unprecedented pressure to build products that are used by thousands, if not millions, of consumers every day. Just ask Bernd Zapf. Head of development, new business, and technologi...

The Massachusetts Audubon Society has long managed its land in western Massachusetts as crucial wildlife habitat. Nature lovers flock to these forests to enjoy bird-watching and quiet hikes, with the ...

Last week,China successfully launched Tianhe-1, the first part of its new space station, to be completed before the end of 2022. A week later, the mission is still making huge wavesand not in a good w...

Update 5/9, 12:25 a.m. ET: The US Space Force confirmed the booster landed in the Indian Ocean just north of Maldives late Saturday evening. Last week, China successfully launched Tianhe-1, the f...

Several years ago, when Elizabeth Softky first heard of the concept of universal basic income, she had her doubts. She was a public school teacher at the time, and she knew how hard it was to convince...

Several years ago, when Elizabeth Softky first heard of the concept of universal basic income, she had her doubts. She was a public school teacher at the time, and she knew how hard it was to convince...

The news: A new type of attack could increase the energy consumption of AI systems. In the same way a denial-of-service attack on the internet seeks to clog up a network and make it unusable, the new ...

A dozen covid-19 vaccines are now being used around the world. Most require two doses, and health officials have warned against mixing and matching: the vaccines, they argue, should be administered th...

In March 2017, a group of hackers from China arrived in Vancouver with one goal: Find hidden weak spots inside the worlds most popular technologies.  Googles Chrome browser, Microsofts Windows op...

Uploading personal photos to the internet can feel like letting go. Who else will have access to them, what will they do with themand which machine-learning algorithms will they help train? The compan...

The night before the Facebook Oversight Board decided to stand by the companys decision to ban him from its platforms, former president Donald Trump announcedvia an exclusive on Fox Newsthat hed creat...

Over-the-counter home tests for covid-19 are finally here. MIT Technology Review obtained kits sold by three companies and tried them out. After buying tests from CVS and online, I tested myself sever...

Jennifer Xiong spent her summer helping Hmong people in California register to vote in the US presidential election. The Hmong are an ethnic group that come from the mountains of China, Vietnam, Laos,...

Theres nothing new about conspiracy theories, disinformation, and untruths in politics. What is new is how quickly malicious actors can spread disinformation when the world is tightly connected across...

In a cruel irony, India, the worlds vaccine manufacturing powerhouse, is now crippled by a virus for which multiple safe and effective vaccines have been developed in record time. Official reports of ...

At 11:23 a.m. local time Thursday at Wenchang, Hainan Island, China launched Tianhe-1, the first module of a new orbital space station. Its scheduled to be operational by the end of 2022. The launch, ...

Kian Kelley-Chung was wearing a black T-shirt with the logo of his documentary and art collective on the day last summer when he found himself filming the Washington, DC, police during a protest. It w...