How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history
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.
Knowledge catalogue
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