December 19, 2024

Digital twins of human organs are here. They’re set to transform medical treatment.

A healthy heart beats at a steady rate, between 60 and 100 times a minute. That’s not the case for all of us, I’m reminded, as I look inside a cardboard box containing around 20 plastic hearts—each a replica of a real human one. The hearts, which previously sat on a shelf in a lab…

AI is poised to automate today’s most mundane manual warehouse task

July 11, 2024
Before almost any item reaches your door, it traverses the global supply chain on a pallet. More than 2 billion pallets are in circulation in the United States alone, and $400 billion worth of goods are exported on them annually. However, loading boxes onto these pallets is a task stuck in the past: Heavy loads…

Here’s the problem with new plastic recycling methods

July 11, 2024
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Look on the bottom of a plastic water bottle or takeout container, and you might find a logo there made up of three arrows forming a closed loop shaped like a triangle.…