January 9, 2025

2025 is a critical year for climate tech

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. I love the fresh start that comes with a new year. And one thing adding a boost to my January is our newest list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. In case you haven’t…

Why EVs are (mostly) set for solid growth this year

January 2, 2025
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. It looks as though 2025 will be a solid year for electric vehicles—at least outside the United States, where sales will depend on the incoming administration’s…

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready to transform our understanding of the cosmos

January 1, 2025
High atop Chile’s 2,700-meter Cerro Pachón, the air is clear and dry, leaving few clouds to block the beautiful view of the stars. It’s here that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon use a car-size 3,200-megapixel digital camera—the largest ever built—to produce a new map of the entire night sky every three days. Generating…

The biggest AI flops of 2024

December 31, 2024
The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel Prizes. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in…