Technology

Roundtables: Unveiling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025

January 3, 2025
Recorded on January 3, 2025 Unveiling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025 Speakers: Amy Nordrum, executive editor, and Charlotte Jee, news editor. MIT Technology Review publishes an annual list of MIT Technology Review selects the top ten breakthrough technologies that will have the greatest impact on how we live and work in the future. This…

The Download: feeding the world with poop, and 2024’s performing stories

January 3, 2025
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. How poop could help feed the planet A new industrial facility in suburban Seattle is giving off a whiff of futuristic technology. It can safely treat fecal waste from people and livestock while…

Small language models: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

January 3, 2025
WHO Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI WHEN Now Make no mistake: Size matters in the AI world. When OpenAI launched GPT-3 back in 2020, it was the largest language model ever built. The firm showed that supersizing this type of model was enough to send performance through the roof. That…

Long-acting HIV prevention meds: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

January 3, 2025
WHO Gilead Sciences, GSK, ViiV Healthcare WHEN 1 to 3 years In June 2024, results from a trial of a new medicine to prevent HIV were announced—and they were jaw-dropping. Lenacapavir, a treatment injected once every six months, protected over 5,000 girls and women in Uganda and South Africa from getting HIV. And it was…

How poop could help feed the planet

January 3, 2025
A new industrial facility in suburban Seattle is giving off a whiff of futuristic technology. It can safely treat fecal waste from people and livestock while recycling nutrients that are crucial for agriculture but in increasingly short supply across the nation’s farmlands.  Within the 2.3-acre plant, which smells lightly of ammonia, giant rotating spindles turn…

The Download: AI flops, and what the year ahead holds for EVs

January 2, 2025
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 biggest AI flops of 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…

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…