Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier,…
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 has brought a new web search tool to ChatGPT The news: ChatGPT can now search the web for up…
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. Over the past month or so, I’ve been working on a…
When you walk around in a version of the video game Minecraft from the AI companies Decart and Etched, it feels a little off. Sure, you can move forward, cut down a tree, and lay down a dirt block, just like in the real thing. If you turn…
In late October, News Corp filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, a popular AI search engine. At first glance, this might seem unremarkable. After all, the lawsuit joins more than two dozen similar cases seeking credit, consent, or…
ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries, OpenAI announced today. Until now, ChatGPT was mostly restricted to generating answers from its training data, which is current up to October 2023 for GPT-4o, and…
Inspired by an unprecedented opportunity, the life sciences sector has gone all in on AI. For example, in 2023, Pfizer introduced an internal generative AI platform expected to deliver $750 million to $1 billion in value. And Moderna…
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. Housing is an election issue. But the US sucks at it. Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration,…
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. On an overcast day in early October, I picked up a rental car and drove to Devens, Massachusetts,…
Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration, and way ahead of climate change, US voters under 30 are most concerned about one issue: housing affordability. And it’s not just young voters who are identifying soaring rents and eye…
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. The arrhythmia of our current age Arrhythmia means the heart beats, but not in proper time—a critical…
It turns out that you don’t need to be a scientist to encode data in DNA. Researchers have been working on DNA-based data storage for decades, but a new template-based method inspired by our cells’ chemical processes is easy enough for…
Thumpa-thumpa, thumpa-thumpa, bump, thumpa, skip, thumpa-thump, pause … My heart wasn’t supposed to be beating like this. Way too fast, with bumps, pauses, and skips. On my smart watch, my pulse was topping out at 210 beats per minute and…
A few years ago, I had to make one of the biggest decisions of my life: continue as a professor at the University of Melbourne or move to another part of the world to help build a brand new university focused entirely on artificial…
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. Exosomes are touted as a trendy cure-all. We don’t know if they work. There’s a trendy new cure-all…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. War is a catalyst for change, an expert in AI and warfare told me in 2022. At the time, the war in…
There’s a trendy new cure-all in town—you might have seen ads pop up on social media or read rave reviews in beauty magazines. Exosomes are being touted as a miraculous treatment for hair loss, aging skin, acne, eczema, pain conditions,…
Generative AI could account for up to 5 million metric tons of e-waste by 2030, according to a new study. That’s a relatively small fraction of the current global total of over 60 million metric tons of e-waste each year. However, it’s…
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. Palmer Luckey on the Pentagon’s future of mixed reality Palmer Luckey has, in some ways, come full…
Palmer Luckey has, in some ways, come full circle. His first experience with virtual-reality headsets was as a teenage lab technician at a defense research center in Southern California, studying their potential to curb PTSD symptoms in…
The US has a major problem with education inequality. Children from low-income families are less likely to receive high-quality education, partly because poorer districts struggle to retain experienced teachers. Artificial intelligence…
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. How Wayve’s driverless cars will meet one of their biggest challenges yet The UK driverless-car…
“This new AI technology—it’s very interesting to learn how it works and understand it more,” says 10-year-old Luca, a young AI model maker. Luca is one of the first kids to try Little Language Models, a new application from Manuj and…
Mission-critical digital transformation projects too often end with a whimper rather than a bang. An estimated three-quarters of corporate transformation efforts fail to deliver their intended return on investment. Given the rapidly…
Generative AI has the power to surprise in a way that few other technologies can. Sometimes that’s a very good thing; other times, not so good. In theory, as generative AI improves, this issue should become less important. However, in…
The UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firm’s cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well. And that brings a new challenge…
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. Introducing: The AI Hype Index There’s no denying that the AI industry moves fast. Each week brings a…
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 a climate reporter, I’m all too aware of the greenhouse-gas emissions that come from food…
Google DeepMind has developed a tool for identifying AI-generated text and is making it available open source. The tool, called SynthID, is part of a larger family of watermarking tools for generative AI outputs. The company unveiled a…
In his quest to understand the hermit crab housing market, biologist Mark Laidre of Dartmouth College had to get creative. Crabs are always looking to move into a bigger, better shell, but having really nice digs also comes with risks.…