July 8, 2025

Why the US and Europe could lose the race for fusion energy

Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and…

Technology

The fascinating evolution of typing Chinese characters

August 23, 2023
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. The idea of downloading a third-party keyboard to your phone may seem unnecessary to most people, but in China it’s the norm.  Chinese is the only modern language that’s logographic, meaning…

Job titles of the future: Chief heat officer

August 23, 2023
In Miami, extreme heat is a deadly concern. Rising temperatures now kill more people than hurricanes or floods, and do more harm to the region’s economy than rising sea levels. That’s why, in 2021, Florida’s Miami-Dade County hired a chief heat officer, Jane Gilbert—the first position of its kind in the world. Heat has been…

The beautiful complexity of the US radio spectrum

August 23, 2023
Somewhere above you right now, a plane is broadcasting its coordinates on 1090 megahertz. A satellite high above Earth is transmitting weather maps on 1694.1 MHz. On top of all that, every single phone and Wi-Fi router near you blasts internet traffic through the air over radio waves. A carefully regulated radio spectrum is what…

How culture drives foul play on the internet, and how new “upcode” can protect us

August 23, 2023
The world of online misdeeds is an eerie biome, crawling with Bored Apes, Fancy Bears, Shiba Inu coins, self-­replicating viruses, and whales. But the behavior driving fraud, hacks, and scams on the internet has always been familiar and very human. New technologies change little about the fact that illegal operations exist because some people are…

Crypto lender Maple Finance raises $5M to enter Asia amid regulatory clarity

August 23, 2023
Maple Finance, an on-chain, institutional credit marketplace that’s aspiring to fill a gap left behind by the collapses of crypto lending heavyweights like BlockFi and Celcius, has its sight set on Asia as financial hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore provide more regulatory clarity around digital assets. Maple, which falls under the so-called decentralized finance […]

Smart sutures for better healing

August 22, 2023
Inspired by a technology developed thousands of years ago, MIT engineers have designed “smart” sutures that can not only hold tissue in place but also detect inflammation and release drugs. The new sutures are derived from animal tissue, similar to the “catgut” sutures first used by the ancient Romans. Catgut—which is made from strands of…

Like palm oil, but better for the planet

August 22, 2023
Palm oil is used in everything from soaps and cosmetics to sauces and crackers, but its production can be environmentally devastating. Producers burn down rainforests and swamps to make way for plantations, decimating wildlife habitats and producing staggering greenhouse-gas emissions. A company started by MIT classmates has used synthetic biology to develop an alternative. David…

Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures VCs and Sunshine founder join Startup Battlefield judges at TC Disrupt

August 22, 2023
We’re in the less-than-30-day countdown to TechCrunch Disrupt 202 and the show’s crown jewel, the Startup Battlefield competition. You do not want to miss the global launching pad of some of tech’s most successful companies, including Cloudflare, Dropbox, Fitbit, Mint and Yammer. More than 900 Startup Battlefield alumni companies have generated over 121 exits and […]

IBM taps AI to translate COBOL code to Java

August 22, 2023
COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, is one of the oldest programming languages in use, dating back to around 1959. It’s had surprising staying power; according to a 2022 survey, there’s over 800 billion lines of COBOL in use on production systems, up from an estimated 220 billion in 2017. But COBOL has a reputation […]