December 26, 2025

MIT Technology Review’s most popular stories of 2025

It’s been a busy and productive year here at MIT Technology Review. We published magazine issues on power, creativity, innovation, bodies, relationships, and security. We hosted 14 exclusive virtual conversations with our editors and outside experts in our subscriber-only series, Roundtables, and held two events on MIT’s campus. And we published hundreds of articles online,…

Technology

The paints, coatings, and chemicals making the world a cooler place

December 26, 2025
It’s getting harder to beat the heat. During the summer of 2025, heat waves knocked out power grids in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Global warming means more people need air-­conditioning, which requires more power and strains grids. But a millennia-old idea (plus 21st-century tech) might offer an answer: radiative cooling. Paints, coatings,…

AI Wrapped: The 14 AI terms you couldn’t avoid in 2025

December 25, 2025
If the past 12 months have taught us anything, it’s that the AI hype train is showing no signs of slowing. It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of the year, DeepSeek had yet to turn the entire industry on its head, Meta was better known for trying (and failing) to make the metaverse…

Four bright spots in climate news in 2025

December 24, 2025
Climate news hasn’t been great in 2025. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit record highs (again). This year is set to be either the second or third warmest on record. Climate-fueled disasters like wildfires in California and flooding in Indonesia and Pakistan devastated communities and caused billions in damage. In addition to these worrying indicators of our…

Researchers are getting organoids pregnant with human embryos

December 23, 2025
At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses gently into the receptive lining of the uterus and then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of a future placenta appear.  This is implantation—the moment that pregnancy officially begins. Only none of it is happening inside a…

How social media encourages the worst of AI boosterism

December 23, 2025
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, summed it up in three words: “This is embarrassing.”   Hassabis was replying on X to an overexcited post by Sébastien Bubeck, a research scientist at the rival firm OpenAI, announcing that two mathematicians had used OpenAI’s latest large language model, GPT-5, to find solutions to 10 unsolved problems in…

How I learned to stop worrying and love AI slop

December 23, 2025
Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. Then something impossible happens. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives…

Welcome to Kenya’s Great Carbon Valley: a bold new gamble to fight climate change

December 22, 2025
The earth around Lake Naivasha, a shallow freshwater basin in south-central Kenya, does not seem to want to lie still.  Ash from nearby Mount Longonot, which erupted as recently as the 1860s, remains in the ground. Obsidian caves and jagged stone towers preside over the steam that spurts out of fissures in the soil and…