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

Google’s Parisa Tabriz on how the company stays ahead of hackers

September 22, 2023
Google is constantly under attack. But while hackers have compromised gaming giants, casinos, and other technology giants in recent months, Google has so far remained largely unscathed. Parisa Tabriz, who is responsible for Chrome web browser security and Project Zero, credits much of this to the company’s approach to access control. “We’re evolving Google’s infrastructure […]

These scientists live like astronauts without leaving Earth

September 22, 2023
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article. In January 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level…

The Download: inverse vaccines, and Microsoft’s big deal

September 22, 2023
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 inverse vaccines might tackle diseases like multiple sclerosis On the whole, typical vaccines prime the immune system to respond. But scientists are also working on “inverse vaccines” that teach the immune system…

How inverse vaccines might tackle diseases like multiple sclerosis

September 22, 2023
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. I’ve written about vaccines for years, but recently I stumbled across a concept I had never heard of before. Typical vaccines prime the immune system to respond. But…

Bolstering enterprise LLMs with machine learning operations foundations

September 21, 2023
Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), will play a crucial role in the future of customer and employee experiences, software development, and more. Building a solid foundation in machine learning operations (MLOps) will be critical for companies to effectively deploy and scale LLMs, and generative AI capabilities broadly. In this uncharted territory, improper management…

The Download: what’s next for supercomputers, and electrifying everything

September 21, 2023
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. What’s next for the world’s fastest supercomputers When the Frontier supercomputer came online last year, it marked the dawn of so-called exascale computing, with machines that can execute an exaflop—or a quintillion (1018)…

How electricity could clean up transportation, steel, and even fertilizer

September 21, 2023
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Have you ever repeated a word so many times it started to sound like gibberish? Try saying “peanut butter,” “roughhousing,” or “warbler” about 50 times, and you’ll be wondering whether the words…

What’s next for the world’s fastest supercomputers

September 21, 2023
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 our series here. It can be difficult to wrap your brain around the number-crunching capability of the world’s fastest supercomputer. But computer scientist Jack Dongarra, of the University…

New approaches to the tech talent shortage

September 21, 2023
We live in a tech-enabled world, but for organizations to advance world-changing innovations, they need skilled people who can build, install, and maintain the systems that underlie them. Finding that talent is one of the biggest ongoing problems — and opportunities — in tech. The IT staffing shortages brought on by covid-19 and the Great…