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

“I wanted to save lives”

October 22, 2024
When Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell ’06 won the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the country’s top honor for early-career researchers, she sat on a panel with her two fellow awardees, surrounded by the academic luminaries on the National Science Board. The atmosphere was formal, even weighty, but when asked by a board member…

How MIT’s Rad Lab rescued D-Day

October 22, 2024
On June 6, 1944, the Allies deposited nearly 160,000 troops on the beaches of Normandy, France, in what still stands as the largest land invasion by sea in world history. D-Day would, of course, prove to be a critical milestone leading to the Allied victory in World War II. But were it not for the…

The Renaissance man from Port Gamble Bay

October 22, 2024
When Anthony Jones ’08 reminisces about his childhood, he thinks of clams. Growing up on the reservation of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, about an hour from Seattle, he spent a lot of time playing outside with his brothers—fishing, digging clams, and gathering oysters on the beach. Those idyllic childhood memories wouldn’t have been possible,…

Harnessing MIT’s collective power

October 22, 2024
One of the things I’ve come to value deeply about the MIT community is the near-universal willingness to name a problem, measure it, design a solution, and keep iterating until it’s right. It’s an approach that has worked for a long time, and it’s one we’ll continue to rely on. As we step into the…

Arvola Chan ’74, SM ’76, EE ’78, PhD ’80

October 22, 2024
“I spent 10 years at MIT, earning four degrees in electrical engineering and computer science,” says Arvola Chan ’74, SM ’76, EE ’78, PhD ’80. “I was a beneficiary of scholarships through my undergraduate years and research assistantships through my graduate years, so I’m forever grateful.” As planned-giving chair for the Class of 1974 50th…

The Download: beyond freezing food, and AI mediation

October 22, 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. How refrigeration ruined fresh food Three-quarters of everything in the average American diet passes through the cold chain—the network of warehouses, shipping containers, trucks, display cases, and domestic fridges that keep meat, milk,…

Would you trust AI to mediate an argument?

October 22, 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. I’ve recently been feeling heartbroken. A very close friend recently cut off contact with me. I don’t really understand why, and my attempts at fixing the situation have backfired. Situations like…

How refrigeration ruined fresh food

October 22, 2024
Before you buy orange juice, it probably waited, for as long as two years, in a two-story, stainless-steel tank filled with 265,000 gallons of viscous brown slush. It’s orange juice, but with its water and volatile flavor molecules burned off. The result is a simple syrup six times more sugary than juice and devoid of…

Investing in AI to build next-generation infrastructure

October 21, 2024
The demand for new and improved infrastructure across the world is not being met. The Asian Development Bank has estimated that in Asia alone, roughly $1.7 trillion needs to be invested annually through to 2030 just to sustain economic growth and offset the effects of climate change. Globally, that figure has been put at $15…

These companies are creating food out of thin air

October 21, 2024
Dried cells—it’s what’s for dinner. At least that’s what a new crop of biotech startups, armed with carbon-guzzling bacteria and plenty of capital, are hoping to convince us. Their claims sound too good to be true: They say they can make food out of thin air. But that’s exactly how certain soil-dwelling bacteria work. In…