Articles by Technology Review from August 2021

By early August, dreams of hot vax summer had faded as the delta variant drove a surge in US covid cases. Just when many thought it couldnt get worse, outlets reported a new strain they called delta p...

As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan in mid-August, declaring the end of two decades of war, reports quickly circulated that they had also captured US military biometric devices used to collect da...

As covid-19 continues to evolve in the US, researchers are now developing the next generation of therapeutics, including a new approach that could help reduce the time it takes to recover from the dis...

Like many students, Liri has had several part-time jobs. A 23-year-old in Israel, she does waitressing and bartending gigs in Tel Aviv, where she goes to university. She also sells cars, works in reta...

Since becoming president of Belarus in 1994, Alexander Lukashenko has built Europes most repressive police state and ruthlessly used his power to stay in office as a dictator.  Now hackers are tr...

In 2016, Dell Technologies commissioned our first Digital Transformation Index (DT Index) study to assess the digital maturity of businesses around the globe. We have since commissioned the study ever...

When I was 19long before I ever thought I would land a career writing about spaceI dreamed I was standing on the surface of Mars, looking over a rusted desert dotted with rocks, stuck in a perpetual l...

October / November 1976 From Pharmacology and the Brain: Since ancient times, drugs have been used to restore mental health or explore the mind. It was said that the Homeric physician Polydama present...

These cross-sections of a human brain were used for teaching. The collection had been neglected for decades when photographer Adam Voorhes first visited, in 2011. These images are taken from a book he...

Inside the three-pound lumps of mostly fat and water inside our heads we can, in a very real sense, find the root of everything we know and ever will know. Sure, the universe gave rise to our brains. ...

Panpsychism is the belief that consciousness is found throughout the universenot only in people and animals, but also in trees, plants, and bacteria. Panpsychists hold that some aspect of mind is pres...

In September 2011, a group of neuroscientists and nanoscientists gathered at a picturesque estate in the English countryside for a symposium meant to bring their two fields together.  At the meet...

When you and I look at the same object we assume that well both see the same color. Whatever our identities or ideologies, we believe our realities meet at the most basic level of perception. But in 2...

Nathan McGee was only four years old when he experienced the trauma that would eventually lead him to MDMA therapy almost four decades later. Its still too painful to go into the details. In the inter...

Jefferson Test / AI subject: Robert / Date: 07.12.2098  Session #54  Interviewer: Hi, Robert. Tell me about your dream again. Subject: I was confused. It made me feel happy, but also scared....

DREAM VENDING MACHINE I feed it coins and watch the spring coil back,the clunk of a vacuum-packed, foil-wrappeddream dropping into the tray. It dispenses all kinds of dreamsbad dreams, good dreams,sho...

President Bidens early climate efforts prioritized popular actions: rejoining the Paris agreement, purchasing clean energy and vehicles, and eliminating fossil fuel subsidies. But the administrations ...

A 90-page report published Tuesday by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) details how federal agencies currently use, and plan to expand their use of, facial recognition systems. Ten of 24 a...

Last spring, strings of bistro lights and outdoor seating in a courtyard behind the Student Center beckoned students to gather safely outside. The lights were a hitand the plan is to make them permane...

One of the things Rod Bayliss III 20, MEng 21, remembers most clearly from his childhood is his fathers 1964 Ford Mustang. I was fascinated by that car, says Bayliss. Especially by the engine, this th...

Reshmaan Hussam 09, PhD 15, once dreamed of becoming a psychohistorian like the protagonist in Isaac Asimovs Foundation novels who combines sociology, history, and statistics to save the world. Maybe,...

As a boy, Eric Plosky 99, MCP 00, rode the New York subway with his grandmother to every city attraction on the map. Whenever anyone asks me how I got into transportation, I always ask them, How did y...

Abbie (Carlstein) Gregg 74 remembers giving up on wearing lab gloves during her undergraduate research at MIT. There werent any small enough to fit her, at a time when undergraduate men outnumbered wo...

Linda (Getch) Dawson 71 grew up during the height of the space race between the US and the USSR. She recalls driving with her family to an observatory to hear the beeping of the Soviet satellite Sputn...

Continuing an annual tradition, Technology Day offered alumni an inside view of MITs role in solving global challenges. The online symposium focused on online learning, cancer research, computing, and...

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A record-breaking total of more than 5,000 alumni and friends attended this years MIT Tech Reunions, held online June 46. There were special events for reunion-year classes, and the entire MIT communi...

On February 11, I got a call from MITs executive director of Institute events and protocol, Gayle Gallagher. President Reif had just announced that MIT would again be conducting commencement onlineand...

The Boston genetic engineering company Ginkgo Bioworks and its CEO, Jason Kelly, have been spectacularly successful selling a story: that synthetic biology will transform the manufacture of physical p...

The Boston genetic engineering company Ginkgo Bioworks and its CEO, Jason Kelly, have been spectacularly successful selling a story: that synthetic biology will transform the manufacture of physical p...

Despite their terrible human costsor perhaps because of themwars are often times of technological innovation. The Napoleonic Wars brought us canned goods; the American Civil War drove the development ...

In the coming weeks, Congress may pass one of the most important climate policies in US history. The $3.5 trillion budget plan includes a provision known as the Clean Electricity Payment Program, whic...

Thanks mainly to the rise of satellite megaconstellation projects like OneWeb and SpaceXs Starlink, the American AstronomicalSociety suggests,its possible we may see more than 100,000 satellites orbit...

Over the past several years, our world has been confronted with a range of unprecedented and, at times, deadly challengesfrom the covid-19 pandemic to severe weather conditions, and a concurrent rise ...

Afghanistans banking system is in a state of collapse, and people throughout the country are running out money. And this cash crisispartly due to the international communitys efforts to starve the Tal...

Afghanistans banking system is in a state of collapse, and people throughout the country are running out of money. And this cash crisispartly due to the international communitys efforts to starve the ...

The worlds best astronomical observatories are mainly located in the Western Hemisphere, in high-altitude places like the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, La Palma in the Canary Islands, and the Cerro P...

Millions of solar panels have been installed in the last two decadesand since they typically last between 25 and 30 years, many will soon be ready for retirement and probably headed to a landfill. But...

The world has already banded together to enact an international treaty that prevented significant global warming this centuryeven though that wasnt the driving goal. In 1987, dozens of nations adopted...

The sudden collapse of Afghanistan’s government has led to a frantic attempt to accelerateonline relief and evacuation efforts. These attempts, organized largely via Google Forms, WhatsApp and p...

The sudden collapse of Afghanistan’s government has led to a frantic attempt to accelerateonline relief and evacuation efforts. These attempts, organized largely via Google Forms, WhatsApp and ,...

When Apple announced new technology that will check its US iCloud service for known child sexual abuse images, it was met with fierce criticism over worries that the feature could be abused for broad ...

When Apple announced new technology that will check its US iCloud service for known child sexual abuse material, it was met with fierce criticism over worries that the feature could be abused for broa...

With the rise of ransomware attacks and cybercrime in the headlines week after week, fighting cybercriminals takes a multi-faceted approach that’s not just the realm of the CTO, but of...

Like millions of Americans, Ryan Steward was afraid of getting the covid-19 vaccine.  Im generally distrusting of the government, he says. Im not the foil-hat-wearing type, but Im the type of fel...

Artificial intelligence holds an enormous promise, but to be effective, it must learn from massive sets of dataand the more diverse the better. By learning patterns, AI tools can uncover insights and ...

With its massive rings stretching out 175,000 miles in diameter, Saturn is a one-of-a-kind planet in the solar system. Turns out its insides are pretty unique as well. A new study published ...

When Lise was a young teenager in Georgia, her classmates bullied her relentlessly. She had moved with her family from Haiti a few years earlier, and she didnt fit in with the other students. They tea...

If youve been worried by recent news stories about a strain of covid called delta plus, it may freak you out to hear that scientists just expanded the delta family from four variants to 13. Please tak...

If youve been worried by recent news stories about a strain of covid called delta plus, it may freak you out to hear that scientists just expanded the delta family from four variants to 13.  Plea...

In 2016, hoping to spur advancements in facial recognition, Microsoft released the largest face database in the world. Called MS-Celeb-1M, it contained 10 million images of 100,000 celebrities faces. ...

The maps for US congressional and state legislative races often resemble electoral bestiaries, with bizarrely shaped districts emerging from wonky hybrids of counties, precincts, and census blocks. It...

In recent weeks, every day that the weather permitted, a helicopter contracted by KoBold Metals flew over a remote part of northern Quebec carrying some unusual cargo.  A 115-foot-wide copper coi...

When hackers broke into computers across Israels government and tech companies, investigators looked for clues to find out who was responsible. The first evidence pointed directly at Iran, Israels mos...

Chameleons have long been a symbol of adaptation because of their ability to adjust their iridophoresa special layer of cells under the skinto blend in with their surroundings. In a new study publishe...

The UNs long-awaited climate report on Monday offered a stark reminder that removing massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be essential to prevent the gravest dangers of global wa...

Covid cases in the US have doubled over the past two weeks, and scientists are now racing to understand the delta variant, which appears to account for the vast majority of new infections. Disturbingl...

Apple has boasted a few iconic ads during the companys 45-year history, from the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad for Macs to the companys combative 2019 ad campaign promising that what happens on your iPhon...

Apple has boasted a few iconic ads during the companys 45-year history, from the famous 1984 Super Bowl ad for Macs to the companys combative 2019 ad campaign promising that what happens on your iPhon...

In the months before the first reports of covid-19 would emerge, a new kind of robot headed to work. Built on years of breakthroughs in deep learning, it could pick up all kinds of objects with remark...

Any effective plan to tackle climate change hinges on a basic technology: long wires strung across tall towers. The US needs to add hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission lines in the coming d...

The WHO has called for a halt to any booster shots until the end of September, so that more people in low-income countries can get vaccinated first. The agencys director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebre...

Even as climate change and urbanization make floods more frequent and their consequences more severe, a higher proportion of people are living in areas that experience them. In a new study published t...

Even as climate change and urbanization make floods more frequent and their consequences more severe, a higher proportion of people are living in areas that experience them. In a new study published t...

Through job-matching platforms and AI-powered games and interviews, companies are relying more and more on artificial intelligence to streamline the hiring process. But some job seekers feel frustrate...

New York City will be the first city in the US to require proof of vaccination to enter a variety of indoor places, the citys mayor announced yesterday. Mayor Bill de Blasio told a press conference th...

When it comes to hiring, its increasingly becoming an AIs world, were just working in it. In this, the final episode of Season 2, and the conclusion of our series on AI and hiring, we take a look at h...

In the middle of the night on May 24, TikTok changed its voice. The ubiquitous womans voice that could read your videos text out loud in a slightly stilted, robotic cadence was suddenly replaced by on...

Neuroscientists have released the most detailed 3D map of the mammalian brain ever made, created from an animal whose brain architecture is very similar to our ownthe mouse. The map and underlying dat...

Neuroscientists have released the most detailed 3D map of the mammalian brain ever made, created from an animal whose brain architecture is very similar to our ownthe mouse. The map and underlying dat...

Neuroscientists have released the most detailed 3D map of the mammalian brain ever made, created from an animal whose brain architecture is very similar to our ownthe mouse. The map and underlying dat...

December 20, 2019, was supposed to be a landmark moment for the US space program and the US space industry, Boeing in particular. Boeing has been a partner of NASA since the agencys inception in 1958t...