Los Angeles is finally going underground
Los Angeles deserves its reputation as the quintessential car city—the rhythms of its 2,200 square miles are dictated by wide boulevards and concrete arcs of freeways. But it once had a world-class ra
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Los Angeles deserves its reputation as the quintessential car city—the rhythms of its 2,200 square miles are dictated by wide boulevards and concrete arcs of freeways. But it once had a world-class ra
“Pull over!” I order my brother one sunny February afternoon. Our target is in sight: a gaggle of Canada geese, pecking at grass near the dog park. As I approach, tiptoeing over their grayish-white po
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Introducing: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now What actual
When people talk about “nature,” they’re generally talking about things that aren’t made by human beings. Rocks. Reefs. Red wolves. But while there is plenty of God’s creation to go around, it is hard
Embedded in the body’s mucosal surfaces, proteins called lectins bind to sugars found on cell surfaces. A team led by MIT chemistry professor Laura Kiessling has found that one such protein, intelecti
At MIT, AI has become so pervasive that you can almost find your way into it without meaning to. Take Sili Deng, an associate professor of mechanical engineering. Deng says she still doesn’t know whet
Heat generated by electronic devices is usually a problem, but a team led by Giuseppe Romano, a research scientist at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, has found a way to use it for data p
As AI agents increasingly work alongside humans across organizations, companies could be inadvertently opening a new attack surface. Insecure agents can be manipulated to access sensitive systems and
In the past, even with an icebreaker and during peak melt season, getting to the North Pole wasn’t a sure bet. It took favorable winds to crack the frozen ocean surface, and ships had to fight through
Around 2.3 billion years ago, a pivotal period known as the Great Oxidation Event set the evolutionary course for oxygen-breathing life on Earth. But MIT geobiologists and colleagues have found eviden
A long stretch of humid heat followed by a powerful thunderstorm is a familiar weather pattern in the tropics, but it’s also becoming more common in midlatitude regions such as the US Midwest. A recen
If you’ve been to an eye doctor and had an image taken of the inside of your eye, chances are good it was done with optical coherence tomography (OCT)—a technology invented by clinician-scientist Davi
Priority Technologies: Ensuring US Security and Shared ProsperityEdited by Elisabeth B. Reynolds, professor of the practice of urban studies and planning and former executive director of the MIT Task
Listen to the session or watch below Watch a special edition of Roundtables simulcast live from EmTech AI, MIT Technology Review’s signature conference for AI leadership. Subscribers got an exclusive
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up?
Single-use plastics are a persistent source of environmental pollution, and the need to house a growing global population puts increasing pressure on resources such as timber. MIT engineers have an id
How does the physical matter in our brains translate into thoughts, sensations, and emotions? It’s hard to explore that question without neurosurgery. But in a recent paper, MIT philosopher Matthias M
Tech workers in China are being instructed by their bosses to train AI agents to replace them—and it’s prompting a wave of soul-searching among otherwise enthusiastic early adopters. Earlier this mont
If you want to capture something wolflike, it’s best to embark before dawn. So on a morning this January, with the eastern horizon still pink-hued, I drove with two young scientists into a blanket of
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all In Feb
Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants.
Ellie’s Pi Day post: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/pi-day-2026-food-institute/ How Ellie orchestrated the baking of 30 pies: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/behind-the-scenes-of-thirty-p
The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational imp
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal There’s a th
Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell. The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-hand
The AI boom has hit across industries, and public sector organizations are facing pressure to accelerate adoption. At the same time, government institutions face distinct constraints around security,
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Cyberscammers are bypassing banks’ security with illicit tools
When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people
As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so—we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conserv
There’s a fault line running through enterprise AI, and it’s not the one getting the most attention. The public conversation still tracks foundation models and benchmarks—GPT versus Gemini, reasoning
The availability of artificial intelligence for use in warfare is at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon. This debate has become urgent, with AI playing a bigger role than
The practice of privacy-led user experience (UX) is a design philosophy that treats transparency around data collection and usage as an integral part of the customer relationship. An undertapped oppor
From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone. The app asks him to upload a photo associated with the account, so he clicks on a pi
For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting ideas
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. NASA is building the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanet
Each year we compile our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, featuring our educated predictions for which technologies will have the biggest impact on how we live and work. This year, however, we had a
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Just before Artemis I
Software engineering has experienced two seismic shifts this century. First was the rise of the open source movement, which gradually made code accessible to developers and engineers everywhere. Secon
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these ch
You’ve probably heard some version of this idea before: that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” That is to say, around 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first arrived in Europe, they met member
Grizzly bears have made such a comeback across eastern Montana that in 2017, the state hired its first-ever prairie-based grizzly manager: wildlife biologist Wesley Sarmento. For some seven years, Sar
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. You have no choice in reading this article—maybe How do humans
If you’re following AI news, you’re probably getting whiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AI can’t even read a clock. The 2026 AI Index from Stanford University’s Instit
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In an industry that doesn’t stand still, Stanford’s AI Index,
Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gra
I. We had crash-landed on the planet. We were far from home. The spaceship could not be repaired, and the rescue beacon had failed. Besides me, only the astrogator, part of the captain, and the ship’s
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Constellations —Constellations is a short story by Jeff Vander
Is it the Department of Defense or the Department of War? The Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America? A vaccine—or an “individualized neoantigen treatment”? That’s the Trump-era vocabulary paradox faci
When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn’t help but obsess over the numbers. I’d known on some level that desalination—pulling salt out of seawater to produce fres
A rare warm spell in January melted enough snow to uncover Cornell University’s newest athletic field, built for field hockey. Months before, it was a meadow teeming with birds and bugs; now it’s more
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Is fake grass a bad idea? The AstroTurf wars are far from over
We evolved for a linear world. If you walk for an hour, you cover a certain distance. Walk for two hours and you cover double that distance. This intuition served us well on the savannah. But it catas
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Desalination plants in the Middle East are increasingly vulner