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…

The Download: OpenAI’s agent, and what to expect from robotics

January 24, 2025
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. OpenAI launches Operator—an agent that can use a computer for you What’s new: After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry…

The US withdrawal from the WHO will hurt us all

January 24, 2025
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. On January 20, his first day in office, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization. “Ooh, that’s a…

What’s next for robots

January 23, 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. Jan Liphardt teaches bioengineering at Stanford, but to many strangers in Los Altos, California, he is a peculiar man they see walking a four-legged robotic dog down…