Articles by Technology Review from October 2021

Theres probably no such thing as perfect privacy and security online. Hackers regularly breach corporate firewalls to gain customers private information, and scammers constantly strive to trick us int...

In March 2020, companies large and small, across industries, and around the world, had to pivot nearly overnight to remote work because of pandemic-related shutdowns. In fact, over a third of US worke...

A few years ago, a young man from Californias technology scene began popping up in the worlds leading developmental biology labs. These labs were deciphering the secrets of embryos and had a particula...

Thousands of delegates will amass in Glasgow, Scotland, in the coming days for the annual UN climate conference, where theyll spend two weeks squabbling over a lengthy list of action items that add up...

Algorithms now determine how much things cost. Its called dynamic pricing and it adjusts according to current market conditions in order to increase profits. The rise of e-commerce has propelled prici...

In the coming years, mobility solutionsor how we get from point A to point Bwill bridge the gap between ground and air transportationyes, that means flying cars. Technological advancements are transfo...

When Gadi Sassoon met Michele Ducceschi backstage at a rock concert in Milan in 2016, the idea of making music with mile-long trumpets blown by dragon fire, or guitars strummed by needle-thin alien fi...

As space scientists collect more and more data, observatories around the world are finding new ways to apply supercomputing, cloud computing, and deep learning to make sense of it all. Here are some e...

Mr. Fu, a driver in Beijing for the food delivery service Eleme, makes about a dozen deliveries per shift. But he could make moreand spill lessif he didnt have to constantly get his phone out to updat...

Im Mat Honan, the new editor in chief of MIT Technology Review. This is the first issue of the magazine Ive had the pleasure of working on. Maybe you have been reading Technology Review for years, lik...

February 1969 From Man, Machine, and Information Flight Systems: The flight of Apollo 8 to the moon involved obtaining and processing more bits of data than were used by all fighting forces in World W...

Freshman year of high school, my boyfriend asked, Whats it like having her around all the time? He meant Kim. The bell for third period rang. I shifted against him, a combination lock pressed into my ...

In May 2020, two months after covid-19 shut down schools and public life around the world, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he was giving $10 million to Californias Oakland Unified School Distri...

Maybe it never truly went away. But these days techno-optimismthe kind that raged in the late 1990s and early 2000s and then dried up and turned to pessimism during the last decadeis once again bubbli...

The computer scientist Alvy Ray Smith cofounded both Lucasfilms computer graphics division and Pixar Animation Studios. For those achievements alone, he is one of the most important technological inno...

Its time we began to fixate on data to solve our problems, says one of the worlds leading experts in data science. In 2006, Jeannette Wing, then the head of the computer science department at Carnegie...

Students returning to campus this fall found a new bit of public art in Kendall Square: two multicolored brick structures just outside the Marriott Cambridge by the Baltimore artists known as Jessie a...

Because of my time at MIT, I had the training and opportunity to work with some of the smartest people throughout my career, says Amit Sinha, chief technical officer and president of research and deve...

The awkward pause on a Zoom call. The brusque, ambiguous email. The context-free meeting invite. When online interactions are so easily misconstrued, effective communication is essential. As the autho...

For Mia Heavener 00, much of life revolves around water. As a senior civil engineer for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC), she designs water systems for communities in her home state....

Daryl J. Carter, MArch 81, SM 81 grew up in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Core City on Detroits west side during the 60s and 70s, when redlining practices that reinforced segregated housing ...

While working toward his PhD in sociotechnical studies at Stanford University in the 1980s, William Rifkin 78 examined how a water quality control board in California handled disputes over pollution c...

Organic chemistry classes can create all sorts of memories, but few as lasting and meaningful as those of Alfred Singer 68 and Dinah (Schiffer) Singer 69. Since meeting while taking 5.41 in 1965and gr...

The corridors of WMBR are quietempty of the DJs who should be combing the shelves in search of the perfect song, the engineers ensuring that the equipment is broadcasting to the whole Boston area. MIT...

A labyrinth of rooms stretches across the third floor of N51, the weathered gray building that has long housed the MIT Museum. The rooms look more like a handypersons workshop than a scientists lab. T...

In 1976, Alan Grodzinsky 71, ScD 74, was feeling a little frustrated.  He had spent two years teaching a basic course on semiconductor physics and circuits in MITs Department of Electrical Engine...

Reihaneh Irani-Famili knows a little about the fault line running through just about every business today: the IT/OT divide. Now vice president of emergency planning and business resiliency at gas and...

People can be your most important catalyst for digital transformationor the greatest obstacle. When people-related challenges to transformation progress emerge, the problems are usually very easy to i...

On Tuesday, a panel of experts at the FDA will meet to discuss whether Pfizers covid vaccine should be approved for 5-to-11-year-olds in the US. If that group says yes, the decision will go to the CDC...

With the supply-chain disruptions of the past two years showing no signs of easing anytime soon, businesses are turning to a new generation of AI-powered simulations called digital twins to help them ...

Katherine D. Morgan was super burnt out on dating apps. Shed seen people using services like Tinder and Bumblebut they didnt make a lot of sense to her. A lot of my friends were talking about how they...

Fall 2021: the season of pumpkins, pecan pies, and peachy new phones. Every year, right on cue, Apple, Samsung, Google, and others drop their latest releases. These fixtures in the consumer tech calen...

Around the world, citizens, governments, and corporations are mobilizing to reduce carbon emissions. The unprecedented and ongoing climate disasters have put the necessity to decarbonize into sharp re...

The world has changed dramatically in a short amount of timechanging the world of work along with it. The new hybrid remote and in-office work world has ramifications for techspecifically cybersecurit...

The news: Surgeons have successfully attached a pig’s kidney to a human patient and watched it start to work, the AP reported today. The pig had been genetically-engineered so that its organ was...

The potential impact of the ongoing worldwide data explosion continues to excite the imagination. A 2018 report estimated that every second of every day, every person produces 1.7 MB of data on averag...

An endless variety of virtual creatures scamper and scuttle across the screen, struggling over obstacles or dragging balls toward a target. They look like half-formed crabs made of sausagesor perhaps ...

Christine McMonigal is director of hyperconverged marketing at Intel Corporation. Never before has the need for businesses to make progress along their digital journeys been more pressingwith more opt...

More than 18 months after the 2020 coronavirus pandemic struck, its clear that the ability to make quick decisions based on high-quality data has become essential for business success. In an increasin...

NASAs Lucy spacecraft, named for an early human ancestor whose skeleton provided insights into our species muddled origins, has begun the first leg of its 12-year journey. Lifting off from Cape Canave...

In the past decade, machine learning has become a familiar technology for improving the efficiency and accuracy of processes like recommendations, supply chain forecasting, developing chatbots, image ...

The last 20 months turned every dog into an amateur epidemiologist and statistician. Meanwhile, a group of bona fide epidemiologists and statisticians came to believe that pandemic problems might be m...

The importance of data to today’s businesses can’t be overstated. Studies show data-driven companies are 58% more likely to beat revenue goals than non-data-driven companies and ...

We take it for granted that machines can recognize what they see in photos and videos. That ability rests on large data sets like ImageNet, a hand-curated collection of millions of photos used to trai...

A warning: Conspiracy theories about covid are helping disseminate anti-Semitic beliefs to a wider audience, warns a new report by the antiracist advocacy group Hope not Hate. The report says that not...

Welcome to I Was There When, a new oral history project from the In Machines We Trust podcast. It features stories of how breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and computing happened, as told by th...

Load up the website This Person Does Not Exist and itll show you a human face, near-perfect in its realism yet totally fake. Refresh and the neural network behind the site will generate another, and a...

Sometime in mid-2019, a police contractor in the Chinese city of Kuitun tapped a young college student from the University of Washington on the shoulder as she walked through a crowded market intersec...

The plummeting costs of renewables, the growing strength of the clean energy sector, and the rising influence of activists have begun to shift the politics of climate action in the US, panelists argue...

The moon may have been more volcanically active than we realized. Lunar samples that Chinas Change 5 spacecraft brought to Earth are revealing new clues about volcanoes and la...

After the Taliban took over Kabul in mid-August, a black-bearded man with a Kalashnikov appeared on the streets. He visited former politicians and gave a sermon during Friday prayers at the capitals h...

After the Taliban took over Kabul in mid-August, a black-bearded man with a Kalashnikov appeared on the streets. He visited former politicians and gave a sermon during Friday prayers at the capitals h...

Plastic is an environmental scourge, and most isn’t recycled. Enzymes, natures catalysts, may be able to help. In late September, Carbios, a French startup, opened a demonstration plant in centr...

On Sunday night, the primary source for the Wall Street Journals Facebook Files, an investigative series based on internal Facebook documents, revealed her identity in an episode of 60 Minutes. France...

What if managers and leaders at companies focused on a new goal: to elevate the human experience? This paradigm shift is something Amelia Dunlop, chief experience officer at Deloitte Digital, advocate...

In the early days of the pandemic, as billions of dollars poured into the hunt for novel treatments and vaccines, veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch did what hes always done: He went loo...

One of the last messages that Vaiva Bezhan sent on Facebook Messenger on Monday afternoon, Central European Time, was a bit of a cliffhangerand incredibly time sensitive. The Lithuanian photojournalis...

Sarah, a 36-year-old woman living in California, had lived with chronic depression for five years. She felt suicidal multiple times an hour and was unable to make decisions about basic questions like ...

On September 28, Amazon introduced Astro, a household robot. Amazons launch video promises that the $999 robot, which is squat with two wheels and a rectangular screen that features two orbs for eyes,...

Were keeping track of the covid vaccine apps rolling out in the US and some of the ways people can now prove theyre vaccinated. But theres a lot of conflicting and confusing information, and a lot of ...