February 5, 2025

Supersonic planes are inching toward takeoff. That could be a problem.

Boom Supersonic broke the sound barrier in a test flight of its XB-1 jet last week, marking an early step in a potential return for supersonic commercial flight. The small aircraft reached a top speed of Mach 1.122 (roughly 750 miles per hour) in a flight over southern California and exceeded the speed of sound…

Technology

The Download: AI for debates, and what to know about the Oropouche virus

October 18, 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. AI could help people find common ground during deliberations Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views. Perhaps an AI tool could help.…

Oropouche virus is spreading. Here’s what we know.

October 18, 2024
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. There have been plenty of reports of potentially concerning viruses this last year. Covid is still causing thousands of deaths, and bird flu appears set to make the…

AI could help people find common ground during deliberations

October 17, 2024
Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.  Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important…

Transforming software with generative AI

October 17, 2024
Generative AI’s promises for the software development lifecycle (SDLC)—code that writes itself, fully automated test generation, and developers who spend more time innovating than debugging—are as alluring as they are ambitious. Some bullish industry forecasts project a 30% productivity boost from AI developer tools, which, if realized, could inject more than $1.5 trillion into the…

The Download: farming on Mars, and lab robots

October 17, 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. The quest to figure out farming on Mars Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from…

The quest to figure out farming on Mars

October 17, 2024
Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from thick, cloudy skies. It wasn’t really so different from our own planet 4 billion years ago, except for one crucial detail—its size. Mars is about half the diameter of Earth,…

Cloud transformation clears businesses for digital takeoff

October 16, 2024
In an age where customer experience can make or break a business, Cathay Pacific is embracing cloud transformation to enhance service delivery and revolutionize operations from the inside out. It’s not just technology companies that are facing pressure to deliver better customer service, do more with data, and improve agility. An almost 80-year-old airline, Cathay…

The Download: an intro to AI, and ChatGPT’s bias

October 16, 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. Intro to AI: a beginner’s guide to artificial intelligence from MIT Technology Review It feels as though AI is moving a million miles a minute. Every week, it seems, there are product launches,…

Super-light materials that help suppress EV battery fires just got a big boost

October 16, 2024
A company making fire-suppressing battery materials just got a $670.6 million loan commitment from the US Department of Energy. Aspen Aerogels makes insulating materials that can be layered inside an EV’s battery to prevent or slow heat and fires from spreading within the pack. The company is building a new factory in Georgia to produce…