Technology

Why Chinese apps chose to film super-short soap operas in Southeast Asia

February 28, 2024
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. TikTok has become an essential part of the digital landscape. Whether or not it’s ultimately banned in the United States (my bet is it won’t be), these short videos have transformed large…

Journey to the eclipse

February 28, 2024
In 1900, the recently completed Hotel Fitzpatrick in Washington, Georgia, stood out for its grand Queen Anne architecture, but even more for its technology—it offered electricity, an elevator, and a telephone. When Alfred E. Burton, MIT’s first dean (1902–1921), chronicled his expedition to Washington to record a total solar eclipse for Technology Review, he noted…

The citizen scientists chronicling a neglected but vital Mexican river

February 28, 2024
The city of Monterrey in northeastern Mexico is an industrial powerhouse that has rapidly devoured green space to make room for its 5.3 million people. The Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range around the city is still holding strong, though the hills are increasingly encroached on by the urban sprawl of skyscrapers, apartment buildings, industrial parks,…

This company makes wood products without trees

February 28, 2024
As she walks across Foray’s lab on the third floor of The Engine, Ashley Beckwith’s eyes brighten. Then, from an incubator, she pulls out petri dishes of wood-like cells that she and her team grew in the lab from black cottonwood plants. They envision turning those cells into wood-based perfumes, cosmetics, oils, and—someday—entire beams and…

Assessing Nvidia’s Significant Market Influence

February 27, 2024
Nvidia, a leading technology industry figure, is under intense scrutiny as it gears up to release its earnings report. The market is bracing for a significant shift in Nvidia’s stock,…

SynFlora is working on bioengineering a skincare revolution

February 27, 2024

Biotech startup SynFlora brought an enticing pitch for a new type of skin treatment technology to 4YFN at the MWC tradeshow in Barcelona this week. The Spanish startup, whose three co-founders all have PhDs, is working to improve understanding of the skin’s microbiome and engineer skin microbes with the goal of enabling more targeted and […]

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The first-ever mission to pull a dead rocket out of space has just begun

February 27, 2024
More than 9,000 metric tons of human-made metal and machinery are orbiting Earth, including satellites, shrapnel, and the International Space Station. But a significant bulk of that mass comes from one source: the nearly a thousand dead rockets that have been discarded in space since the space age began. Now, for the first time, a…

The Download: tiny TikTok-style soap operas, and how algorithms change us

February 27, 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. China’s next cultural export could be TikTok-style short soap operas Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they…

Algorithms are everywhere

February 27, 2024
Like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I find that my personal feed tends to be hit or miss. Usually more miss. The movies and shows the algorithms recommend often seem less predicated on my viewing history and ratings, and more geared toward promoting whatever’s newly available. Still, when a superhero movie starring one of the…