March 6, 2026

Is the Pentagon allowed to surveil Americans with AI?

The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and AI company Anthropic over its technology has raised a deep open question: does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans? Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk…

Technology

America was winning the race to find Martian life. Then China jumped in.

February 26, 2026
To most people, rocks are just rocks. To geologists, they are much, much more: crystal-filled time capsules with the power to reveal the state of the planet at the very moment they were forged.  For decades, NASA had been on a time capsule hunt like none other—one across Mars. Its rovers have journeyed around a…

Roundtables: Why 2026 Is the Year for Sodium-Ion Batteries

February 25, 2026
Listen to the session or watch below Sodium-based batteries could be a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium-ion, and the technology is finally making its way into cars—and energy storage arrays on the grid. Sodium-ion batteries are one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026 list, and this subscriber-only discussion explains why. Watch a…

The Download: introducing the Crime issue

February 25, 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. Introducing: the Crime issue Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse. But those same new technologies that have allowed crime to outpace law have also reenergized…

Now is a good time for doing crime

February 25, 2026
Eons ago, in 2012, I had a weird experience. My iPhone suddenly shut down. When I restarted it, I found it was totally reset—clean, like a new device. This was the early days of iOS, so I wasn’t too concerned until I went to connect it to my computer to restore it from a backup.…