Technology

“Spare” living human bodies might provide us with organs for transplantation

March 28, 2025
This week, MIT Technology Review published a piece on bodyoids—living bodies that cannot think or feel pain. In the piece, a trio of scientists argue that advances in biotechnology will soon allow us to create “spare” human bodies that could be used for research, or to provide organs for donation. If you find your skin…

What is Signal? The messaging app, explained.

March 27, 2025
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. With the recent news that the Atlantic’s editor in chief was accidentally added to a group Signal chat for American leaders planning a bombing in Yemen,…

Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model

March 27, 2025
The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what it does as it comes up with a response, revealing key new insights into how the technology works. The takeaway: LLMs are even stranger than we thought. The Anthropic team was surprised by some of the counterintuitive…

The Download: how people fall for pig butchering schemes, and saving glaciers

March 27, 2025
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. Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there Gavesh’s journey had started, seemingly innocently, with a job ad on Facebook promising work he desperately needed. Instead, he found himself…

How to save a glacier

March 27, 2025
Glaciers generally move so slowly you can’t see their progress with the naked eye. (Their pace is … glacial.) But these massive bodies of ice do march downhill, with potentially planet-altering consequences.   There’s a lot we don’t understand about how glaciers move and how soon some of the most significant ones could collapse into the…

Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there

March 27, 2025
Heading north in the dark, the only way Gavesh could try to track his progress through the Thai countryside was by watching the road signs zip by. The Jeep’s three occupants—Gavesh, a driver, and a young Chinese woman—had no languages in common, so they drove for hours in nervous silence as they wove their way…

19 founders and VCs working with Elon Musk’s DOGE

March 26, 2025
Silicon Valley used to take a backseat to Washington, D.C. But now, the people disrupting technology have taken the wheel at the highest echelons of government. And that’s thanks, in large part, to the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE. Much reporting on DOGE has focused on its staffers’ ties to Musk, the billionaire bestie of […]

The Download: China’s empty data centers, and OpenAI’s new practical image generator

March 26, 2025
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. China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused. Just months ago, China’s boom in data center construction was at its height, fueled by both government…

Rivian spins out a new micromobility startup called Also with $105M from Eclipse

March 26, 2025
Before RJ Scaringe founded Rivian in 2009, he had micromobility on his mind. More than a decade later, his musings took root in a small skunkworks program inside Rivian that set out to answer one question: Could the company’s technology be condensed down into something smaller and more affordable than its electric vans, trucks, and SUVs? […]

China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused.

March 26, 2025
A year or so ago, Xiao Li was seeing floods of Nvidia chip deals on WeChat. A real estate contractor turned data center project manager, he had pivoted to AI infrastructure in 2023, drawn by the promise of China’s AI craze.  At that time, traders in his circle bragged about securing shipments of high-performing Nvidia…