November 8, 2024

The Download: AI vs quantum, and the future of reproductive rights in the US

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. Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse…

Job title of the future: Weather maker

August 28, 2024
Much of the western United States relies on winter snowpack to supply its rivers and reservoirs through the summer months. But with warming temperatures, less and less snow is falling—a recent study showed a 23% decline in annual snowpack since 1955. By some estimates, runoff from snowmelt in the western US could decrease by a…

This startup is making coffee without coffee beans

August 28, 2024
DJ Tan, cofounder of the Singaporean startup Prefer Coffee, pops open a bottle of oat latte and pours some into my cup. The chilled drink feels wonderfully refreshing in Singapore’s heat—and it tastes just like coffee. And that’s impressive, because there isn’t a single ounce of coffee in it.  It turns out that our beloved…

Will computers ever feel responsible?

August 28, 2024
“If a machine is to interact intelligently with people, it has to be endowed with an understanding of human life.”  —Dreyfus and Dreyfus Bold technology predictions pave the road to humility. Even titans like Albert Einstein own a billboard or two along that humbling freeway. In a classic example, John von Neumann, who pioneered modern…

AI’s growth needs the right interface

August 28, 2024
If you took a walk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco’s epicenter of AI froth, and asked the first dude-bro you saw wearing a puffer vest about the future of the interface, he’d probably say something about the movie Her, about chatty virtual assistants that will help you do everything from organize your email to book…

The author who listens to the sound of the cosmos

August 28, 2024
In 1983, while on a field recording assignment in Kenya, the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause noticed something remarkable. Lying in his tent late one night, listening to the calls of hyenas, tree frogs, elephants, and insects in the surrounding old-growth forest, Krause heard what seemed to be a kind of collective orchestra. Rather…

From the editor

August 28, 2024
Welcome to our 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. Instead, we decided to try to use history as a way to explore what things may look like over the next…

A hundred years of curiosity

August 27, 2024
Any facet of Josef Eisinger’s remarkably wide-ranging century of life would be enough to shape the entire identity of another person. If you were to ask how his experience has intersected with history, for example, he might tell you about escaping the Nazis’ reign of terror in his native Austria by fleeing to Britain by…

This is MIT and yes, we have bananas

August 27, 2024
Attending lectures and movies in 26-100 has been an integral part of the MIT experience for generations of students, but since 2018 they have also embraced what’s become another quintessential Institute experience just across the hall: picking up a banana in 26-110, officially the Karl Taylor Compton Room but now better known as the MIT…

In molecules, one chemist sees art

August 27, 2024
One Tuesday morning this past January, So Young Lee walked into a lab on the fourth floor of Building 18 and discovered that her equipment had exploded. It was a minor explosion—thankfully, no one was hurt—but the chemical she had painstakingly made had splattered all over the walls, the ceiling, and the broken shards of…

Transformative spaces

August 27, 2024
MIT people often find their greatest moments of inspiration in each other’s company. And two big, beautiful additions to West Campus now underway will open up new spaces for connection, collaboration, rigorous exploration, and joyful play.  Stretching along Mass. Ave. and Vassar Street, the familiar brick face of the historic Metropolitan Storage Warehouse may evoke…