Huawei’s 5G chip breakthrough needs a reality check
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. This is going to be a BIG week for US-China relations: On Wednesday, Xi Jinping will sit down with Joe Biden in San Francisco and talk about military issues, trade, and more.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/15/1083413/huaweis-5g-chip-smartphone-sanction/
The Biggest Questions: Is it possible to really understand someone else’s mind?
Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. It’s not easy, mind you. First, you must lie motionless within the narrow pore of a hulking fMRI scanner, perhaps for hours, while you watch films or listen to audiobooks. Meanwhile, the machine will bang and knock as it records the shifting patterns…
Emtech MIT is happening right now
EmTech MIT, MIT Technology Review’s flagship event on emerging technology and global trends is November 14-15, 2023. This year’s event looks at the AI, biotech, and climate innovations and the new rules of business. You can sign up and watch it live here.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/14/1083387/emtech-mit-is-happening-right-now/
Google DeepMind’s weather AI can forecast extreme weather faster and more accurately
This year the Earth has been hit by a record number of unpredictable extreme weather events made worse by climate change. Predicting them faster and with greater accuracy could enable us to prepare better for natural disasters and help save lives. A new AI model from Google DeepMind could make that easier. In research published…
The Download: the origins of life, and building Facebook’s AI empire
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 did life begin? How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and…
How Facebook went all in on AI
The following is excerpted from BROKEN CODE: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Harmful Secrets by Jeff Horwitz. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Jeff Horwitz. In 2006, the U.S. patent office received a filing…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/14/1083336/how-facebook-went-all-in-on-ai/
The Biggest Questions: How did life begin?
How life begins is one of the biggest and hardest questions in science. All we know is that something happened on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago, and it may well have occurred on many other worlds in the universe as well. But we don’t know what does the trick. Somehow a soup of…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/14/1082828/how-did-life-begin/
The Download: are we alone, and private military data for sale
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. Are we alone in the universe? The quest to determine if anyone or anything is out there has gained greater scientific footing over the past 50 years. Back then, astronomers had yet to…
The US military’s privacy problem in three charts
This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. Highly personal and sensitive data about military members, such as home addresses, health and financial information, and the names of family members and friends, is…
The Biggest Questions: Are we alone in the universe?
In 1977, the New York Times published an article titled “Seeking an End to Cosmic Loneliness,” describing physicists’ attempts to pick up radio messages from aliens. The endeavor, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), was still in its early stages, and its proponents were struggling to persuade their peers and Congress that the…
The Download: how to fight pandemics, and a top scientist turned-advisor
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 open-source drug discovery could help us in the next pandemic When the covid pandemic hit, our antiviral coffers were bare. After all, developing drugs for diseases that don’t pose an immediate threat…
How open-source drug discovery could help us in the next pandemic
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. When the covid pandemic hit, our antiviral coffers were essentially bare. Sure, pharmaceutical companies had developed drugs to combat influenza and a handful of chronic infections.…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/10/1083222/covid-moonshot-drug-discovery-open-source/
Customer experience horizons
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Customer experience (CX) is a leading driver of brand loyalty and organizational performance. According to NTT’s State of CX 2023 report, 92% of CEOs believe improvements in CX directly impact their improved productivity, and customer brand advocacy. They also recognize that the quality of their employee experience (EX) is critical to success. The real potential…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/09/1083068/customer-experience-horizons/
The Download: cancelling out noises, and tastes like (lab-grown) chicken
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. Noise-canceling headphones could let you pick and choose the sounds you want to hear The news: A new system for noise-canceling headphones lets users opt back in to certain sounds they’d like to…
I tried lab-grown chicken at a Michelin-starred restaurant
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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 waiter lifted the lid with a flourish. Inside the gold-detailed ceramic container, on a bed of flower petals, rested a small black plate cradling two bits of chicken. Each was coated…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/09/1083139/lab-grown-chicken/
Noise-canceling headphones could let you pick and choose the sounds you want to hear
Future noise-canceling headphones could let users opt back in to certain sounds they’d like to hear, such as babies crying, birds tweeting, or alarms ringing. The technology that makes it possible, called semantic hearing, could pave the way for smarter hearing aids and earphones, allowing the wearer to filter out some sounds while boosting others. …
Bridging the expectation-reality gap in machine learning
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Machine learning (ML) is now mission critical in every industry. Business leaders are urging their technical teams to accelerate ML adoption across the enterprise to fuel innovation and long-term growth. But there is a disconnect between business leaders’ expectations for wide-scale ML deployment and the reality of what engineers and data scientists can actually build…
The Download: Hong Kong’s crypto obsession, and digitizing India’s documents
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. Why Hong Kong is still bullish on crypto While Sam Bankman-Fried was waiting for the jury in his fraud trial to return their verdict last week, Hong Kong FinTech Week 2023, a new…
Why Hong Kong is still bullish on crypto
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. We were far from the courtroom where Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven criminal charges, but everyone still wanted to talk about him. That said, I have a feeling the conversations…
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/08/1083098/hong-kong-crypto-web3-regulation/
The Download: combating Parkinson’s with implants, and counting carbon’s cost
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. A man with Parkinson’s regained the ability to walk thanks to a spinal implant The news: A man with Parkinson’s disease has regained the ability to walk after physicians implanted a small device…