September 4, 2026

Architecting memory and storage in the AI era

The era of AI inference has arrived. Imagine a healthcare system analyzing millions of data points in real time to accelerate life-saving medical research, or an intelligent assistant instantly resolving thousands of complex customer needs at once. These real-world breakthroughs rely on advanced infrastructure acting as the engine of continuous intelligence, powering real-time services while…

Technology

How AI plotted an interstellar journey to Alpha Centauri

September 1, 2026
A nonprofit organization called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today that it intends to launch a spacecraft to our nearest star system by the end of 2029.  It’s a hugely ambitious mission—if all goes well, the spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, which is 4.4 light-years away. And the…

Making the AI-powered case for legacy modernization

September 1, 2026
For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes…

The Download: engineered microbes for crops, and OpenAI’s culture problem

September 1, 2026
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 engineered microbes could help feed the world’s crops Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions.…

How engineered microbes could help feed the world’s crops

September 1, 2026
Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help. A growing body of research shows that seeding the soil around a crop’s roots with beneficial microbes can help feed the plant, providing crucial nitrogen to help…

Hugging Face hack could indicate cultural issues at OpenAI

August 31, 2026
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. By now you’ve probably heard about last month’s major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on…

The Download: a secretive antiaging drug and joining virtual power plants

August 28, 2026
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. A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young —Antonio Regalado I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” when a company called Generation Lab offered me the…

How to sign up for a virtual power plant—and decide whether you should

August 28, 2026
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such…

A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young

August 27, 2026
I knew I’d officially become a ‘longevity influencer’ this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about—and even receive—their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1-Generation. This wasn’t just any antiaging treatment, either. A company fact sheet says that it…

The Download: inside OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack, and a new EV takes on the US

August 27, 2026
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 inside story on why OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with…