Articles by Technology Review from July 2021

They were gold miners in French Guiana, revelers in Cape Cod, and Indian health-care workers. Even though they inhabit worlds apart, they ended up having two things in common. All were vaccinated agai...

DeepMind has developed a vast candy-colored virtual playground that teaches AIs general skills by endlessly changing the tasks it sets them. Instead of developing just the skills needed to solve a par...

When covid-19 struck Europe in March 2020, hospitals were plunged into a health crisis that was still badly understood. Doctors really didnt have a clue how to manage these patients, says Laure Wynant...

Free doughnuts. Tickets to see the Los Angeles Lakers. Video visits with loved ones for people in prison. The chance to win a million-dollar lottery.  States, cities, and private companies are da...

The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in September 2020, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from an abridged version of her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook. Before she wa...

Israeli government officials visited the offices of the hacking company NSO Group on Wednesday to investigate allegations that the firms spyware has been used to target activists, politicians, busines...

When gas falls into a black hole, it releases an enormous amount of energy and spews electromagnetic radiation in all directions, making these objects some of the brightest in the known universe. But ...

On Tuesday,July 27,theUS Centers for Disease Control and Preventionrecommended that vaccinated individuals wear masksin publicindoorspacesin communities where covid cases are spiking. Along with the n...

Wildfires raging across the US West Coast have filled the air with enough carbon dioxide to wipe out more than half of the regions pandemic-driven emissions reductions last year. And that was just in ...

In March, when covid cases began spiking around India, Bani Jolly went hunting for answers in the viruss genetic code.  Researchers in the UK had just set the scientific world ablaze with news th...

In May, the longtime coronavirus researcher Ralph Baric found himself at the center of the swirling debate over gain-of-function research, in which scientists engineer new properties into existing vir...

NASAs InSight robotic lander has just given us our first look deep inside a planet other than Earth.  More than two years after its launch, seismic data that InSight ...

Oscar Maung-Haley, 24, was working a part-time job in a bar in Manchester, England, when his phone pinged. It was the UKs NHS Test and Trace app letting him know hed potentially been exposed to covid-...

Back in December 2020, DeepMind took the world of biology by surprise when it solved a 50-year grand challenge with AlphaFold, an AI tool that predicts the structure of proteins. Last week the London-...

Mice: check. Lizards: check. Squid: check. Marsupials check. CRISPR has been used to modify the genes of tomatoes, humans, and just about everything in between. Because of their unique reproductive b...

Your ability to land your next job could depend on how well you play one of the AI-powered games that companies like AstraZeneca and Postmates are increasingly using in the hiring process. Some compan...

The Facebook engineer was itching to know why his date hadnt responded to his messages. Perhaps there was a simple explanationmaybe she was sick or on vacation. So at 10 p.m. one night in the companys...

Increasingly, job seekers need to pass a series of tests in the form of artificial intelligence gamesjust to be seen by a hiring manager. In this third, of a four-part miniseries on AI and hiring, we ...

This time, there was a blastoff. Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and three other civilians watched the sky turn from blue to black this morning as the companys reusable rocket and capsule system N...

On June 29, former South African president Jacob Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in prison for corruption during his presidency. Zumathe first ethnic Zulu to hold the countrys highest officehas a loya...

On June 29, former South African president Jacob Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in prison for corruption during his presidency. Zumathe first ethnic Zulu to hold the countrys highest officehas a loya...

US cities are working to shore up their flood defenses in the face of climate change, building and upgrading pumps, storm drains, and other infrastructure. In many cases, their existing systems are ag...

Over the weekend, a consortium of international news outlets published their findings from an investigation into the use of Pegasus, the marquee spyware of secretive billion-dollar Israeli surveillanc...

In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, a 25-year-old amateur astronomer, spied a small, dim object in the night sky.   Hed been working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, ...

MIT Technology Reviewannounced today that veteran tech editor Mat Honan has been hired as its new editor in chief. Honan joins from BuzzFeed News,...

In an early May blog post, Google chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai shared the companys vision for its workplace futureover a year after the covid-19 pandemic forced offices around the world...

In an early May blog post, Google chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai shared the companys vision for its workplace futureover a year after the covid-19 pandemic forced offices around the world...

England is about to take a huge gamble.  On Monday July 19, the country is ditching all of its remaining pandemic-related restrictions. People will be able to go to nightclubs, or gather in group...

The Greek mathematician Euclid may very well have proved, circa 300 BCE, that there are infinitely many prime numbers. But it was the British mathematician Christian Lawson-Perfect who, more recently,...

Orgies are back. Or at least thats what advertisers want you to believe. One commercial for chewing gumwhose sales tanked during 2020 because who cares what your breath smells like when...

Its nighttime on the streets of Ibaraki prefecture in Japan when the Olympic torch comes through. A viral video shows the torch bearers slow jog past spectators lining the road. Then, as the flame pas...

Is it time to start thinking about booster shots? Pfizer seems to think so. In a private meeting with top US scientists and regulators on July 12, the firms representatives argued that the US should m...

The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Techs campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musks new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is wor...

The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Techs campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musks new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is wor...

A few lonely academics have been warning for years that solar power faces a fundamental challenge that could halt the industrys breakneck growth. Simply put: the more solar you add to the grid, the le...

One of the most prolific ransomware gangs in the world suddenly disappeared from the internet on Tuesday morning. The unexplained exodus comes just one day before senior officials from the White House...

Debates about technology and progress are often framed in terms of optimism vs. pessimism. For instance, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Johan Norberg, Max Roser, and the late Hans Rosling have been calle...

Ziggi Tyler is part of TikToks Creator Marketplace, a private platform where brands can connect with the apps top creators. And last week, he noticed something pretty disturbing about how the creator ...

When it comes to covid, kids have largely been spared. They can get infected and spread the virus, but they have little risk of becoming seriously ill or dying. Yet, just like adults, they can have sy...

Advanced cybersecurity capabilities are essential to safeguard software, systems, and data in a new era of cloud, the internet of things, and other smart technologies. In the real estate industry, for...

The timing could have been better. Yesterday, July 11, British entrepreneur and billionaire Richard Branson shot to the edge of space in a vehicle made by his own company, Virgin Galactic at a t...

Climate change is making extreme heat more common and more severe, as we’ve seen in the heat waves that have swept the western US for the past two weeks. Some climate models predict that swaths ...

Whether you call them semis, tractor-trailers, or 18-wheelers, heavy-duty trucks keep the economy (literally) moving. And at least some of them might be ready to go electric. These workhorses have an ...

The company blog post drips with the enthusiasm of a 90s US infomercial. WellSaid Labs describes what clients can expect from its eight new digital voice actors! Tobin is energetic and insightful. Pai...

More than a thousand species use echolocation, but after billions of years of evolution, bats brains are especially well optimized for navigation. A new paper released today in Science suggests that a...

More than a thousand species use echolocation, but after billions of years of evolution, bats brains are especially well optimized for navigation. A new paper released today in Science suggests that a...

The American cops took the slower, cheaper train from Kyiv to Donetsk.  After repeatedly traveling between Ukraine and the United States, there were more comfortable ways to make this final, 400-...

In February, oil giant Shell trumpeted a scenario in which the world pulls global warming back to 1.5 C by 2100, even as natural gas, oil, and coal continue to generate huge shares of the worlds energ...

Yes, blame climate change. Human-driven global warming fueled the heat wave that likely killed hundreds of people last week across the US Pacific Northwest and Canada. The massive buildup of greenhous...

In 2009, using NASAs Interstellar Boundary Explorer, also known as IBEX, astronomers spied a strange ribbon-like structure dancing between our solar system and the rest of interstellar space. The disc...

In 2009, using NASAs Interstellar Boundary Explorer, also known as IBEX, astronomers spied a strange ribbon-like structure dancing between our solar system and the rest of interstellar space. The disc...

After more than a year of the covid-19 pandemic, millions of people are searching for employment in the United States. AI-powered interview software claims to help employers sift through applications ...

In the past, hiring decisions were made by people. Today, some key decisions that lead to whether someone gets a job or not are made by algorithms. The use of AI-based job interviews has increased sin...

On June 20, about 20,000 fans gathered at Madison Square Garden in New York City for a Foo Fighters concert. The venue was at full capacity for the first time since the start of the pandemic, but it w...

On April 21, Ashley Delaney brought his father-in-law to the Goa Medical College and Hospital, the largest public hospital in the small southwestern Indian state. The hospital was in chaos and the war...

The computer scientist Marijn Heule is always on the lookout for a good mathematical challenge. An associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Heule has an impressive reputation for solving int...

Shale gas and oil extraction, also known as fracking, is often credited by conservatives with creating hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of US manufacturing jobs. As the Saudi Arabia of natural ...

The big data era has created valuable resources for public interest outcomes, like health care. In the last 18 months, the speed with which scientists were able to respond to the covid-19 pandemicfast...

A year ago, vaccines to tackle the covid pandemic seemed like a far-off idea. Today, though, doses have been delivered to almost one-quarter of the worlds peopleand some are being asked to prove theyr...

Not all astronauts start off as test pilots. I spoke with David Saint-Jacques, a Canadian astronaut with a medical degree whos spent 203 days aboard the ISS, and learned some of the career twists and ...

The 35 Innovators Under 35 is our yearly opportunity to take a look at not just where technology is now, but where its going and whos taking it there. More than 500 people are nominated every year, an...

October 1967 From How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Live with Irrationality: Whatever form it takes, resistance to any change is essentially an act of self-protection. When an individual perceives...

Climate change is warping geological time, compressing the time scales of natural processes. In photographs taken around the world, Ian van Coller has documented these shifts, reflected in rocks, sedi...

In 2017, MIT Technology Review honored Tracy Chou as one of our 35 Innovators Under 35. At the time, Chou was working to expose Silicon Valleys diversity issues. As an engineer at Pinterest, shed publ...

Though weve called it the Change issue, this edition of the magazine is really about two things: reflection and empowerment.  For far too many of us, the pandemic has been a study in feeling powe...

One day in late March, Peoples Daily, the Chinese Communist Partys official newspaper, shared a pair of photos on Chinese social media.  The first, in black and white, was of the signing of the B...

In late 2007, less than 10 years into the companys existence, Google came out swinging on the clean energy front. To a fanfare of plaudits up and down Silicon Valley and well beyond, it declared RE...

For Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Alphabet, covid-19 was an economic blessing. Even as the pandemic sent the global economy into a deep recession and cratered most companies profits, these companiesoft...

The workers at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, wanted a union.  The center opened in March of last year, just as stay-at-home orders for covid-19 went into effect. While much ...

A year into the covid-19 pandemic, Apple commemorated the growing array of devices featuring its custom M1 chip with great fanfare, including a Mission Implausible ad on TV featuring a young man runni...

As an MIT senior, Jerome Jerre Spurr had paid little attention to the articles in the Boston Globe about the new reservoir planned for Western Massachusetts. But in 1927, just a month before his gradu...

Its Ursulas third time in the functional MRI machine. Heather Kosakowski, a PhD student in cognitive neuroscience, is hoping to get just two precious minutes of data from her session. Even though Ursu...

Admissions applications in this pandemic year jumped 66% after MIT temporarily lifted the requirement to submit test scores. But for the 1,340 students who got good news from MIT on Pi Day, coming to ...

Last May, when we issued our Climate Action Plan for the Decade, we were mobilizing MIT to take on the climate problem as never before. The complexity and uncertainty of climate change make tackling i...

Which is more powerful: the urge for sex or the instinct to stay away from someone whos sick? A new study suggests that at least in mice, its the latter. Researchers in the lab of Gloria Choi, an asso...

Arup K. Chakraborty and Paula Hammond 84, PhD 93, have been named Institute Professors, the highest honor for MIT faculty members. Chakraborty, the founding director of MITs Institute for Medical Engi...

Early detection is key to surviving melanoma, a type of malignant tumor responsible for more than 70% of skin-cancer-related deaths worldwide, but suspicious pigmented skin lesions (SPLs) are so commo...

When water used in many industrial systems evaporates, salts and other dissolved minerals can be left behind on component surfaces, where they eventually degrade equipment, block pipes, and reduce the...

In April, thanks to an MIT-designed instrument, NASAs Mars rover Perseverance achieved a remarkable milestone: it generated the first breathable oxygen on another planet.  The Martian atmosphere ...

City planners have standard methods of estimating the car traffic that a project is likely to generate, but they have no equivalent for foot traffic. Now Andres Sevtsuk, director of MITs City Form Lab...