MIT Technology Review
18 stories
Six wild ideas for perpetuating your mind
Technologists are exploring brain freezing, digital avatars, head transplants and more to achieve cognitive immortality. Most remain decades away.
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Frozen pig kidneys revived, nuclear power pushed harder
Scientists thaw year-old pig kidneys successfully, while US nuclear plants race to squeeze out more power.
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Nuclear plants race to squeeze out more power
US nuclear operators are upgrading existing reactors to meet surging electricity demand from AI data centers, but uprates alone cannot fill the gap.
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AI's limits in robotics and a flood-fighting rubber dam
Researchers doubt AI breakthroughs will soon enable humanoid robots, while a startup tackles rising seas with portable barriers.
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US military’s race to make fake blood
DARPA aims to create shelf-stable synthetic blood by 2029 to save lives in combat zones.
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GLP-1 drugs show anti-aging effects but side effects remain unclear
Weight-loss drugs reduce biological age markers, but researchers are still discovering unexpected effects on hair, nails, vision and more.
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The new air traffic controller: managing delivery drones
As delivery drones fill the skies over Dallas, a new job has emerged: remote pilots who coordinate fleets and keep them safe.
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The Download: faking blood and future batteries
The US military funds synthetic blood research while a Chinese startup races to build safer, denser batteries.
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AI designs virus blueprints in Stanford breakthrough
Researcher Samuel King used generative AI to propose genetic blueprints for viruses, raising questions about AI's role in creating new life forms.
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AI's refusal problem runs deeper than we think
Companies train AI to say no to harmful requests, but the technology remains unreliable, easily jailbroken, and vulnerable to authoritarian abuse.
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Open AI models: power or peril?
As AI companies debate whether powerful models should be freely available or tightly controlled, the stakes involve both safety and who gets to shape the future.
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AI labs are buying data from dead startups
As startups shut down, AI companies are buying their archived emails, code and workspace data to train models. The market is booming, but raises questions about worker privacy and fair pricing.
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AI's refusal problem and weight-loss drug side effects
Today's AI models are trained to refuse harmful requests, but those refusals sometimes fail catastrophically. Meanwhile, weight-loss drugs show unexpected side effects beyond their intended use.
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Open AI models: safety versus access
Anthropic warns that freely available AI models pose cyberattack risks, reigniting debate over whether powerful technology should stay locked behind lab doors.
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Building cities on the moon
NASA and China race to establish permanent lunar bases by the 2030s, but the moon's extreme conditions pose staggering technical and human challenges.
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The ecologist who proved forests heal themselves
Daisy Dent's two decades of research show that tropical rainforests can regenerate naturally and capture far more carbon than planted monocultures, challenging the global reforestation industry.
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The Download: moon city problems and drone traffic controllers
Building a lunar base, cement that cuts emissions, and the new job of drone air traffic controller.
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AI still can't do the research that builds better AI
Princeton researchers gave AI agents six days, $3,000, and a GPU budget to write a conference paper. The authors rejected both.
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