February 6, 2025

What a return to supersonic flight could mean for climate change

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. As I’ve admitted in this newsletter before, I love few things more than getting on an airplane. I know, it’s a bold statement from a climate reporter because of all the associated…

Technology

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…

The humans behind the robots

December 24, 2024
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Here’s a question. Imagine that, for $15,000, you could purchase a robot to pitch in with all the mundane tasks in your household. The catch (aside from the price tag) is…

Forging the digital future

December 23, 2024
Dan Huttenlocher, SM ’84, PhD ’88, leads the way up to the eighth floor of Building 45, the recently completed headquarters of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. “There’s an amazing view of the Great Dome here,” he says, pointing out a panoramic view of campus and the Boston skyline beyond. The floor features a…

More puzzles, less sleep

December 23, 2024
We need a strategy to deal with a hydra.  It’s Sunday, January 14, 2024, more than 50 hours since the annual MIT Mystery Hunt kicked off at noon on Friday, and Setec Astronomy is one of more than 200 teams racing to solve hundreds of puzzles over three days. The 60-some members of Setec, many…

The cult of tech

December 23, 2024
“THE CULT OF THE FOUNDER.” “THE CULT OF THE TECH GENIUS.”  “Beware: Silicon Valley’s cultists want to turn you into a disruptive deviant.” “Tech’s cult of the founder bounces back.” “Silicon Valley’s Strange, Apocalyptic Cults.” “How the cult of personality and tech-bro culture is killing technology.” “Company or cult?” “Is your corporate culture cultish?” “The…

Tapping the wisdom of human-centered fields

December 23, 2024
When I last wrote to you in this magazine, I told you a bit about the MIT Collaboratives, an effort to spark new ideas and modes of inquiry and help the people of MIT solve global problems. Since then, we’ve launched the first collaborative, grounding it in the human-centered fields represented by our School of…

The Download: trustworthy humanoid robots, and Anduril’s latest project

December 23, 2024
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. Will we ever trust robots? The world might seem to be on the brink of a humanoid-robot heyday. New breakthroughs in artificial intelligence promise the type of capable, general-purpose robots previously seen only…

Will we ever trust robots?

December 23, 2024
The world might seem to be on the brink of a humanoid-robot heyday. New breakthroughs in artificial intelligence promise the type of capable, general-purpose robots previously seen only in science fiction—robots that can do things like assemble cars, care for patients, or tidy our homes, all without being given specialized instructions.  It’s an idea that…