February 5, 2025

XOi raises $230M, acquires Specifx to expand its tech for field service technicians

Field service engineers may not be the first group of customers that come to mind when you think about lucrative opportunities in B2B technology. But that same blind spot speaks of the opportunity in the space for those who are stepping up and targeting “the job site.” One of the players in that space, XOi  […]

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Technology

How wind tech hopes to help decarbonize cargo shipping

January 2, 2025
Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands—a chain of coral atolls in the center of the Pacific Ocean—rely on sea transportation for almost everything: moving people from one island to another, importing daily necessities from faraway nations, and exporting their local produce. For millennia they sailed largely in canoes, but much of their seafaring movement today involves…

Why EVs are (mostly) set for solid growth this year

January 2, 2025
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. It looks as though 2025 will be a solid year for electric vehicles—at least outside the United States, where sales will depend on the incoming administration’s…

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready to transform our understanding of the cosmos

January 1, 2025
High atop Chile’s 2,700-meter Cerro Pachón, the air is clear and dry, leaving few clouds to block the beautiful view of the stars. It’s here that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon use a car-size 3,200-megapixel digital camera—the largest ever built—to produce a new map of the entire night sky every three days. Generating…

The biggest AI flops of 2024

December 31, 2024
The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel Prizes. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in…

China wants to restore the sea with high-tech marine ranches

December 30, 2024
A short ferry ride from the port city of Yantai, on the northeast coast of China, sits Genghai No. 1, a 12,000-metric-ton ring of oil-rig-style steel platforms, advertised as a hotel and entertainment complex. On arrival, visitors step onto docks and climb up to reach a strange offshore facility—half cruise ship, half high-tech laboratory, all laid…

The world’s first industrial-scale plant for green steel promises a cleaner future

December 27, 2024
As of 2023, nearly 2 billion metric tons of it were being produced annually, enough to cover Manhattan in a layer more than 13 feet thick.  Making this metal produces a huge amount of carbon dioxide. Overall, steelmaking accounts for around 8% of the world’s carbon emissions—one of the largest industrial emitters and far more…

This international surveillance project aims to protect wheat from deadly diseases

December 26, 2024
When Dave Hodson walked through wheat fields in Ethiopia in 2010, it seemed as if everything had been painted yellow. A rust fungus was in the process of infecting about one-third of the country’s wheat, and winds had carried its spores far and wide, coating everything in their path. “The fields were completely yellow. You’d…

These stunning images trace ships’ routes as they move

December 25, 2024
As we run, drive, bike, and fly, we leave behind telltale marks of our movements on Earth—if you know where to look. Physical tracks, thermal signatures, and chemical traces can reveal where we’ve been. But another type of trail we leave comes from the radio signals emitted by the cars, planes, trains, and boats we…

Revisiting a year of Roundtables, MIT Technology Review’s subscriber-only events

December 25, 2024
The worst technologies of 2024. The future of mixed reality. AI’s impact on the climate. These are just a few of the topics we covered this year in MIT Technology Review’s monthly event series, Roundtables.  The series offers a unique opportunity to hear straight from our reporters and editors about what’s next for emerging technologies.…

Here are MIT Technology Review’s best-performing stories of 2024

December 24, 2024
Another year is coming to a close, so let’s look back at the MIT Technology Review stories that resonated most with you, our readers.  We published hundreds of stories in 2024, about AI, climate tech, biotech, robotics, space, and more. There were six new issues of our magazine, on themes including food, play, and hidden…