Technology

Do animals have names? According to the poet T.S. Eliot, cats have three: the name their owner calls them (like George); a second, more noble one (like Quaxo or Cricopat); and, finally, a “deep and inscrutable” name known only to themselves “that no human research can discover.” But now, researchers armed with audio recorders and…

When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most prosthetics are static, cumbersome, and hard to move. Now a new neural interface developed by MIT researchers and colleagues connects a bionic lower limb to nerve endings in the thigh, allowing it to be controlled by the…

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. Kamala Harris should stand with tech workers, not their bosses —Stephen McMurtry is a Google Software Engineer and Communications Chair of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Tangled up in the contest to be the…

Tangled up in the contest to be the next US president, there is another battle brewing: Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Valley. In Donald Trump’s corner are venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, along with executives like Elon Musk. In the other are execs like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and SV Angel investing mogul…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Last year’s Canadian wildfires smashed records, burning about seven times more land in Canada’s forests than the annual average over the previous four decades. Eight firefighters were killed and 180,000 people displaced. …

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 125th Anniversary issue With this issue, we wanted to celebrate our milestone as a publication without dwelling too much on our own past. Victory laps are for race cars, not magazines.…

The magazine you now hold in your hands is 125 years old. Not this actual issue, of course, but the publication itself, which launched in 1899. Few other titles can claim this kind of heritage—the Atlantic, Harper’s, Audubon (which is also turning 125 this year), National Geographic, and Popular Science among them. MIT Technology Review…

Last year, as the harvest season drew closer, Olabokunde Tope came across an unpleasant surprise.  While certain spots on his 70-hectare cassava farm in Ibadan, Nigeria, were thriving, a sizable parcel was pale and parched—the result of an early and unexpected halt in the rains. The cassava stems, starved of water, had withered to straw. …