Three pieces of good news on climate change in 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. The vibes in the climate world this year have largely been … less than great. Global greenhouse-gas emissions hit a new high, reaching 37.4 billion metric tons in 2024. This year is […]
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 […]
The Download: AI tracking birds, and a pig kidney transplant
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. AI is changing how we study bird migration In a warming world, migratory birds face many existential threats. Scientists rely on a combination of methods to track the timing and location of their […]
This is where the data to build AI comes from
AI is all about data. Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out. But here’s the problem: AI developers and researchers don’t really know much about the sources of the data they are using. AI’s data collection […]
AI is changing how we study bird migration
A small songbird soars above Ithaca, New York, on a September night. He is one of 4 billion birds, a great annual river of feathered migration across North America. Midair, he lets out what ornithologists call a nocturnal flight call to communicate with his flock. It’s the briefest of signals, barely 50 milliseconds long, emitted […]
Roundtables: The Worst Technology Failures of 2024
Recorded on December 17, 2024 The Worst Technology Failures of 2024 Speakers: Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine, and Niall Firth, executive editor. MIT Technology Review publishes an annual list of the worst technologies of the year. This year, The Worst Technology Failures of 2024 list was unveiled live by our editors. Hear from MIT Technology […]
A woman in the US is the third person to receive a gene-edited pig kidney
Towana Looney, a 53-year-old woman from Alabama, has become the third living person to receive a kidney transplant from a gene-edited pig. Looney, who donated one of her kidneys to her mother back in 1999, developed kidney failure several years later following a pregnancy complication that caused high blood pressure. She started dialysis treatment in […]
The Download: 2024’s biggest technology flops, and AI’s search for energy
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 8 worst technology failures of 2024 They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review’s annual roll call of the biggest […]
The 8 worst technology failures of 2024
They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review’s annual roll call of the biggest flops, flimflams, and fiascos in all domains of technology. Some of the foul-ups were funny, like the “woke” AI which got Google in trouble after it drew Black Nazis. […]
AI’s search for more energy is growing more urgent
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. If you drove by one of the 2,990 data centers in the United States, you’d probably think little more than “Huh, that’s a boring-looking building.” You might not even notice it […]