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

This architect is cutting up materials to make them stronger and lighter

April 23, 2024
As a child, Emily Baker loved to make paper versions of things: cameras, a spaceship cockpit, buildings for a town in outer space. It was a habit that stuck. Years later, studying architecture in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, she was playing around with some paper and scissors. It was…

A Grammy for Miguel Zenón

April 22, 2024
Nobel Prizes and other scientific honors are nearly routine at MIT, but a Grammy Award is something we don’t see every year. That’s what Miguel Zenón, an assistant professor of music and theater arts, has won: El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2, which he recorded with the pianist and composer Luis Perdomo, received the Grammy…

The Download: saving seals with artificial snow, and AI’s effects on politics

April 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. These artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change For millennia, during Finland’s blistering winters, wind drove snow into meters-high snowbanks along Lake Saimaa’s shoreline, offering prime real estate from which seals carved…

These artificial snowdrifts protect seal pups from climate change

April 22, 2024
Just before 10 a.m., hydrobiologist Jari Ilmonen and his team of six step out across a flat, half-mile-wide disk of snow and ice. For half the year this vast clearing is open water, the tip of one arm of the labyrinthine Lake Saimaa, Finland’s biggest lake, which reaches almost to Russia’s western border. As each…

TechCrunch Minute: Meta’s new Llama 3 models give open-source AI a boost

April 19, 2024

New AI models from Meta are making waves in technology circles. The two new models, part of the Facebook parent company’s Llama line of artificial intelligence tools, are both open-source, helping them stand apart from competing offerings from OpenAI and other well-known names. Meta’s new Llama models have differently sized underlying datasets, with the Llama […]

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The Download: Neuralink’s biggest rivals, and the case for phasing out the term “user”

April 19, 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. Beyond Neuralink: Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces In the world of brain-computer interfaces, it can seem as if one company sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Last month, Neuralink…

Beyond Neuralink: Meet the other companies developing brain-computer interfaces

April 19, 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.  In the world of brain-computer interfaces, it can seem as if one company sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Last month, Neuralink posted a video to…

It’s time to retire the term “user”

April 19, 2024
Every Friday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri speaks to the people. He has made a habit of hosting weekly “ask me anything” sessions on Instagram, in which followers send him questions about the app, its parent company Meta, and his own (extremely public-facing) job. When I started watching these AMA videos years ago, I liked them.…

Three ways the US could help universities compete with tech companies on AI innovation

April 19, 2024
The ongoing revolution in artificial intelligence has the potential to dramatically improve our lives—from the way we work to what we do to stay healthy. Yet ensuring that America and other democracies can help shape the trajectory of this technology requires going beyond the tech development taking place at private companies.  Research at universities drove…