Articles by Technology Review from December 2021

Four months after the Afghan government fell to the Taliban, 22-year-old Asad Asadullah had settled into a new routine.  In his hometown in Afghanistans northern Samangan province, the former com...

Weve never relied more on technology to solve our problems than we do now. Sometimes it works. Vaccines against covid-19 have cut the death toll. Weve got virus tests and drugs, too. But this isnt the...

A shock has reverberated inside Israel in the last few months. NSO Group, the billion-dollar Israeli company that has sold hacking tools to governments around the world for more than a decade, has dra...

When Hongzhi Gao was young, he lived with his family in Gansu, a province located in the center of northern China by the Tengger Desert. Thinking back to his childhood, he recalls the constant, steady...

New data shows that the polarization of political discourse online has remained largely unchanged since the end of 2020. Thats probably not surprising if youve looked at the internet at all in the pas...

The end of the year is always a good time for a bit of introspection and self-reflection. It also seems right to pause to celebrate some of the high points from a challenging year. We asked our writer...

Less than three hours after a jury in Boston began deliberating the fate of Harvard chemistry professor Charlies Lieber, the verdict was in: he was found guilty on Tuesday of six felony counts, includ...

November 1960 From Climate Control and the Oceans: Without a clear picture of how the ocean overturns and with no accurate time scale for interaction with the atmosphere, oceanographers and meteorolog...

From: Boreal, Emily <[email protected]> To: Picual, Jim <[email protected]>,Joss, Lillian <[email protected]>,Gupta, Mohan <Mohan.Gupta@samphire...

It might sound strange to think of storytelling as a climate solution, but after spending five years documenting 1,001 voices on climate change in 20 countries, I believe one of the most powerful form...

The Sulphur Springs Valley is a windswept desert in southeastern Arizona, bounded on three sides by forest-topped mountain ranges known as the sky islands. It can take an hour or more to drive between...

In the world of water, 2021 was yet another year for the record books. Parts of Western Europe reeled from deadly floods that sent rivers surging to levels not seen in 500 to 1,000 years. Destructive ...

The comings and goings of water define Mexico City, a mile-high metropolis sprawled across three dry lake beds. The city floods in the wet season and thirsts during regular droughts. CDMX, as the city...

When Ahsan Rehman graduated from one of Pakistans top engineering universities in 2016, he knew he wanted a job that would help people. He did not have to look far for ideas. At his home in Karachi, h...

In the waning weeks of 2017, many residents of Cape Town, South Africa, lined up day and night to fill old jugs with water from the citys few natural springs. Palpable angst hung in the air. After mon...

Every day, the Linggiu Reservoir does quiet battle with the ocean, feeding rainwater into the Johor River in southern Malaysia to keep its salt levels low enough to treat. Singapore, which built the r...

As we were closing this issue, I came across a video on Twitter of a highway just outside Vancouver, submerged in water. It wasnt the only one. The densely populated urban heart of British Columbia wa...

November 1960 From Climate Control and the Oceans: Without a clear picture of how the ocean overturns and with no accurate time scale for interaction with the atmosphere, oceanographers and meteorolog...

The deadly consequences of climate change only grew clearer this year, as record-shattering heat waves, floods, and wildfires killed thousands and strained the limits of our disaster responders. In th...

In 2021 we saw images from the deep reaches of geologic time, to visionaries working on today’s pressing issues, to a glimpse into a transhuman future....

The Congo River is the worlds second-largest river system after the Amazon. More than 75 million people depend on it for food and water, as do thousands of species of plants and animals that live in t...

Its been a year of supersized AI models. When OpenAI released GPT-3, in June 2020, the neural networks apparent grasp of language was uncanny. It could generate convincing sentences, convers...

For years, Beijing landscape architect Yu Kongjian was ridiculed by his fellow citizens as a backward thinker. Some even called him an American spya nod to his doctorate from Harvards Graduate School ...

While the covid-19 pandemic upended workplaces and ushered in rapid digital transformation, the turmoil around cybercrime has remained constant: attackers are always changing tactics to evade detectio...

Being on social media can feel a bit like living in a new kind of city. Its the greatest city in the world. Millions of people can do things their parents never dreamed of. They can live together...

About 20 miles outside El Paso, Texas, on a warm afternoon just before the fall harvest, Ramon Tirres Jr. turns his truck between two fields covered in nothing but dirt. Both should be lush with cotto...

Leslie Thornton: Begin Again, Again, at the MIT List Center through February 13, is the artists first US solo museum exhibition. It includes a new installation of Peggy and Fred in Hell (19832015)....

Raj Tahil credits MIT with sparking his entrepreneurial instincts. I learned to see problems as interesting opportunities, says the president of Torpac Capsules, which specializes in custom capsules a...

Cassandria Campbell, MCP 11, traces her interest in food to her first summer job working with the Food Project on farms in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and Roxbury, the Boston neighborhood where she grew u...

Geothermal power is a promising energy source limited by factors including the need to locate plants in areas where reservoirs of hot water deep below the earths surface are easily accessible. Carlos ...

When Jesse Solomon 91 first started teaching at a middle school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, he was overwhelmed. I had 25 students working at eight different grade levelssome that were l...

In 1982, when Lynn Best 69 joined the public utility Seattle City Light, her team faced an immediate challenge: evaluating the environmental, cultural, and financial impacts of its three dams generati...

Julian Adams remembers clearly the first time he saw a bonsai. He was wandering a botanical garden as a young man when, among the orchids, cacti, and acres of vegetables, he stumbled on a room full of...

At MIT, we believe that public service can beand should beas intense, meaningful, and intellectually rigorous as academic work. MIT alumni help convey this philosophy that serving others is not an ac...

Editors Note: In 2020, an MIT Task Force produced a comprehensive report on the Work of the Future. Since then, the global pandemic has had a significant effect on work and businesses, providing the i...

When Mike Koval, the police chief of Madison, Wisconsin, abruptly resigned on a Sunday in September 2019, the communitys relationship with its men and women in blue was already strained. Use-of-force ...

Julius Mutero has harvested virtually nothing in the past six years. For his entire adult life, he has farmed a three-hectare plot in Mabiya, a farming community in eastern Zimbabwe. There he grows ma...

Right now, Volkan Yazici is working 22 hour days for free.  Yazici is a member of the Log4J project, an open-source tool used widely to record activity inside various types of software. It helps ...

By midnight on December 1, 2015, when Eric Wastl first launched his annual Santa-themed puzzle-a-day programming challenge Advent of Code, 81 people had signed up. That pretty much matched his capacit...

Enabling a touchless supply chain involves more than incremental automation. Organizations need to re-examine the supply chain, across internal processes and external touch points, and find ways to de...

Private, mercenary-style surveillance and hacking groups have used Facebook and Instagram to target 50,000 people in over 100 countries, according to a newly published investigation by Meta, Facebooks...

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” The history of cybersecurity has been a series of increasingly complex, powerful, and alternating waves of attacks...

Thank you for joining us on “The cloud hub: From cloud chaos to clarity.” Traditionally, the IT service catalog focused on handling IT-related issues. That has now evolved to enhance busin...

Ahmad Fawad Yusufi, 31, was sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a San Francisco playground around 5 a.m. on November 28 when someone walked up to the car, attempted to steal his wallet, and shot...

The wind finally blew the other way last night and kicked out the smoke from the burning Sierra. Down here in the flatland of California, we used to regard the granite mountain as a place apart, our g...

Last week, Meta (the umbrella company formerly known as Facebook) opened up access to its virtual-reality social media platform, Horizon Worlds. Early descriptions of the platform make it seem fun and...

Next-generation solutions and products are hitting a wall with wi-fi: its not fast enough, and latency and connectivity issues mean its not reliable enough. Whats an innovator to do? Focus on whats ne...

You can find Dubna, a small town three hours away from Moscow by train, both on a map and in the periodic table: dubnium, element number 105, was discovered at a research center there, and named after...

A Chinese company is selling its surveillance technology to Irans Revolutionary Guard, police, and military, according to a new report by IPVM, a surveillance research group. The firm, called Tiandy, ...

The internet of things and smart devices are everywhere, which means computing needs to be everywhere, too. And this is where edge computing comes in, because as companies pursue faster, more efficien...

On a Saturday morning in December of 2020, the RRS Discovery floated in calm waters just east of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the massive undersea mountain range that runs from the Arctic nearly to th...

In February of 2020, agents arrived at Harvard University looking for Charles Lieber, a renowned nanotechnology researcher who chaired the schools department of chemistry and chemical biology. They we...

Businesses that want to be digital leaders in their markets need to embrace automation, not only to augment existing capabilities or to reduce costs but to position themselves to successfully maneuver...

Fae Saulenas does not want your sympathy.  Saulenas, along with her 46-year-old daughter Lauren, spent last wintertheir covid winterin Saugus, Massachusetts, in a house without a working furnace....

In a now-famous 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore introduced the business world to the concept of the experience economy. The theory went something li...

A double dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech covid-19 vaccine cant stop the omicron virus, according to labs tests done in in South Africa and Germany, and either a booster or a new vaccine will be needed.
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In the two years since OpenAI released its language model GPT-3, most big-name AI labs have developed language mimics of their own. Google, Facebook, and Microsoftas well as a handful of Chinese firms...

The global pandemic accelerated the trend toward a work-from-anywhere, distributed workforce. As we approach a post-pandemic world, companiesand employeesexpect this trend to become the norm. While IT...

Theres enough heat flowing from inside the earth to meet total global energy demand twice over. But harnessing it requires drilling deep underground and transforming that heat into a usable form of en...

NASA plans to launch a new x-ray telescope this week to help answer questions like whats inside a black hole and how bright pulsars can get.   On Thursday, December&...

Voice technology is one of the biggest trends in the healthcare space. We look at how it might help care providers and patients, from a woman who is losing her speech, to documenting healthcare record...

If all goes to plan, next month SpaceX will launch the largest rocket in human history. Towering nearly 400 feet tall, the rocket Starship is designed to take NASA astronauts to the moon. And SpaceX...

The potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) seems almost unboundedin its abilityto derive and drivenew sources of customer, product, service, operational, environmental, an...

Kevin Cowley remembers many things about April 15, 1989. He had taken the bus to the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield, England, to watch the semifinal championship game between Nottingham Fore...

Countries are slamming their borders shut again. Since the omicron variant was discovered in southern Africa and reported to the World Health Organization last week, more than 50 countries have impose...

A visiting researcher at UCLA accused of hiding his connection to Chinas Peoples Liberation Army. A hacker indicted for breaking into video game company servers in his spare time. A Harvard professor ...

Since the US government launched the China Initiative in 2018, the main source of information about it has been press releases on the Department of Justices China Initiative webpage announcing arrests...

Construction of solar farms, wind turbines, and other sources of renewable power will soar over the next five years as nations set stricter climate policies and more ambitious emissions targets. New r...

The discovery of the omicron variant of covid-19 in southern Africa shows how sequencing the genes of a virus can give an early alert to dangerous-looking changes in its genome. Omicron has more than ...

The news: A US Food and Drug Administration panel has voted by 13 to 10 to recommend that the government authorize Mercks antiviral pill for patients with early covid-19 who are at high risk for sever...