Articles by Technology Review from June 2021

Many companies dont know yet how climate change will change their business, but more are taking the inquiry seriously, signaling a new realityone that calls any companies dont yet know how for guardin...

Testing perovskite solar cells in the lab used to require a decent pair of running shoes. The materials fell apart so quickly that scientists would bolt from where they made the cells to where they te...

 In 2013, the American virologist Ralph Baric approached Zhengli Shi at a meeting. Baric was a top expert in coronaviruses, with hundreds of papers to his credit, and Shi, along with her team at ...

It was never going to be easy to challenge the market power of Facebook, the worlds largest social network and 34th largest company, by revenueand on Monday, a US judge further complicated efforts by ...

It was never going to be easy to challenge the market power of Facebook, the worlds largest social network and 34th-largest company, by revenueand on Monday, a US judge further complicated efforts by ...

The record-breaking heatwave baking the Northwest US offers the latest example of how ill-prepared we are to deal with the deadly challenges of climate change. The triple-digit temperatures in many ar...

The record-breaking heat wave baking the Northwest US offers the latest example of how ill-prepared we are to deal with the deadly challenges of climate change. The triple-digit temperatures in many a...

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It has long been thought that intense pressures and temperatures on Venus made life at the surface practically impossible. So last September, when scientists announced the possible discovery of phosph...

The global effort to develop vaccines against covid-19 has been a scientific triumph. The search for new therapies, however, has had far less success.  More than a year and a half into the pandem...

In April 2018, Anming Hu, a Chinese-Canadian associate professor at the University of Tennessee, received an unexpected visit from the FBI. The agents wanted to know whether hed been involved in a Chi...

In April 2018, Anming Hu, a Chinese-Canadian associate professor at the University of Tennessee, received an unexpected visit from the FBI. The agents wanted to know whether hed been involved in a Chi...

Alina Chan started asking questions in March 2020. She was chatting with friends on Facebook about the virus then spreading out of China. She thought it was strange that people were saying it had come...

When oxygen supplies ran out in several municipalities across the Brazilian state of Amazonas in January, 61 premature babies grabbed the headlines.  The tiny infants didnt have covid-19, but the...

A pair of companies have begun designing what could become Europes largest direct-air capture plant, capable of capturing as much as a million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year and burying it dee...

For over a week now, one corner of YouTube frequented by Kazakh dissidents and close observers of human rights in Xinjiang has been only intermittently available. On June 15, the YouTube channel of At...

If you drive in the United States, chances are you cant remember the last time you bought a paper map, printed out a digital map, or even stopped to ask for directions. Thanks to Global Positioning Sy...

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For billions of years, Earth has been playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek. New research published today in Nature posits that roughly 1,700 stars are in the right position to have spotted life on E...

Mundane tasks suddenly become extremely complex in space. I spoke with former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin, who flew two missions to space, to learn about how astronauts handle the day-to-day. Here ar...

Years ago, LinkedIn discovered that the recommendation algorithms it uses to match job candidates with opportunities were producing biased results. The algorithms were ranking candidates partly on the...

It was August 2017, and pleasant and breezy in the central mountains of Madagascar. The passengers loading their bags into the minibus leaving Ankazobe, a small town in the highlands, were grateful fo...

If youve applied for a job lately, its all but guaranteed that your application was reviewed by softwarein most cases, before a human ever laid eyes on it. In this episode, the first in a four-part in...

Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the companys sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance ...

The news: Chinas intensifying crackdown has sent cryptocurrency prices tumbling. China has been upping its regulatory squeeze on cryptocurrencies for some time, but it now looks likely that over 90% o...

Venus might be hell, but dont call it a dead planet. Amid surface temperatures of up to 471 C and surface pressures 100 times greater than those on Earth, new research suggests the planet might still ...

Amid the many business disruptions caused by covid-19, heres one largely overlooked: artificial intelligence (AI) whiplash. As the pandemic began to upend the world last year, businesses reached for e...

The steady advance of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technologies has been reshaping work and jobs for the past decade. Well before covid-19, robust debates were underway about the future...

Throughout the pandemic, there has been serious tension between what the public wants to know, and what scientists have been able to say for certain. Scientists have been able to learn more about covi...

In America, at least 17 people a day die waiting for an organ transplant. But instead of waiting for a donor to die, what if we could someday grow our own organs? Last week, six years after NASA annou...

We already knew that biased data and biased algorithms skew automated decision-making in a way that disadvantages low-income and minority groups. For example, software used by banks to predict whether...

If you want to believe, now is the time: the hope that we might one day stumble upon alien life is greater than it ever was. No, its not going to be little green men speeding through space in flying d...

Smart data integration can help to increase the quality of data-based decision-making, especially in scenarios where clinical decision-makers face multiple barriers and challenges along the patient pa...

In the spring of 2020, the first versions of covid-19 exposure notification systems were released to the public. These systems promised to slow the diseases spread by providing automated warnings to p...

Mustafa Aksu had a bad track record with therapists. Growing up in China, he was bullied by his Han Chinese classmates for being Uyghur. This made him constantly anxious, and his stomach often hurt, s...

While businesses in every sector have been working toward a digital transformation for the past several years, covid-19 accelerated this shift across industries. New technologies are advancing at a pa...

The risk of being hospitalized with the Delta covid-19 variant is roughly double that associated with the original Alpha strain, according to a study published in The Lancet. The study: The researcher...

For the past several years, economists, and government leaders have regularly sounded alarms about the dangers of big tech monopolies. On her 2020 campaign website, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warr...

Timnit Gebru never thought a scientific paper would cause her so much trouble.  In 2020, as the co-lead of Googles ethical AI team, Gebru had reached out to Emily Bender, a linguistics professor ...

On the first hot weekend of the summer, Richard Knapp put up a sign outside Mothers Ruin, a bar tucked in Manhattans SoHo neighborhood. It had two arrows: one pointing vaccinated people indoors, anoth...

You can see the faint stubble coming in on his upper lip, the wrinkles on his forehead, the blemishes on his skin. He isnt a real person, but hes meant to mimic oneas are the hundreds of thousands of ...

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Clinical trials have never been more in the public eye than in the past year, as the world watched the development of vaccines against covid-19, the disease at the center of the 2020 coronavirus pande...

Covid cases are on the rise in England, and a fast-spreading variant may be to blame. B.1.617.2, which now goes by the name Delta, first emerged in India, but has since spread to 62 countries, accordi...

Digital transformation has long been a well-established strategic imperative for organizations globally. The effects of covid-19which have transformed the world into a massively (and perhaps permanent...

The last 15 years have been tough times for many Americans, but there are now encouraging signs of a turnaround. Productivity growth, a key driver for higher living standards, averaged only 1.3% since...

Thats not my face, Tori Dawn thought, after opening TikTok to make a video in late May. The jaw reflected back on the screen was wrong, slimmer and more feminine. And when they waved their hand in fro...

When the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions to Venus were given the green light by NASA last week, the scientific community was stunned. Most had expected that NASA, which hadnt launched a dedicated m...

Despite their popularity with kids, tablets and other connected devices are built on top of systems that werent designed for them to easily understand or navigate. But adapting algorithms to interact ...

Angela Mitchell still remembers the night she nearly died. It was almost one year ago in July. Mitchellwho turns 60 this Junetested positive for covid-19 at her job as a pharmacy technician at the Uni...

Early on the morning of October 12, 2020, 27-year-old Jang Deok-joon came home after working his overnight shift at South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang and jumped into the shower. He had worked at t...

NASA has just released the first pictures of Jupiters largest moon, Ganymede, taken during a flyby by the Juno probe.  Juno passed Ganymede on June 7, making its closest approach at just around 1...

Long before the first covid-19 vaccines went into arms, certain groups in the US felt the impact of the pandemic more severely: those who whose jobs had to be done in person, who were suddenly labeled...

On Friday, Facebook announced that it would suspend former president Donald Trump from the social network for two years, until at least January 7, 2023, and said he would only be reinstated if conditi...

The 24-hour vigil started just after 8 a.m. US Eastern Time on June 3more or less on schedule, and without any major disruptions. The event, hosted on Zoom and broadcast live on other platforms such a...

For all of the recent advances in language AI technology, it still struggles with one of the most basic applications. In a new study, scientists tested four of the best AI systems for detecting hate s...

Just weeks after a major American oil pipeline was struck by hackers, a cyberattack hit the worlds largest meat supplier. What next? Will these criminals target hospitals and schools? Will they start ...

A few weeks ago, Michelle Watson woke up to a deafening, steadily oscillating screech. What the heck is that noise? she wondered. She went outside to her yard and saw hundreds of beady-eyed insects en...

The last time NASA launched a dedicated mission to Venus was in 1989. The Magellan orbiter spent four years studying Venus before it was allowed to crash into the planet’s surface. For almost 30...

But how many directors get lost in the technicalities of technology? The challenge for a chief information security officer (CISO) is talking to the board of directors in a way they can understand and...

The news:The European Unions digital vaccine passportsystemwent live in seven countries yesterday, ahead of a full launch for all 27 member states on July 1. The document, called a digital green certi...

The names of many of the new companies and technologies created to combat the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems can evoke thrilling acts of derring-do on the high seas. WaveKiller uses co...

Bruce Rosenblum switched on his Apple II, which rang out a high F note followed by the clatter of the floppy drive. After a string of thock thock keystrokes, the 12-inch Sanyo monitor began to phospho...