Is this the most energy-efficient way to build homes?
Passive houses now account for less than 1% of multifamily construction. It’s a marriage of efficiency and rigorously applied physics,...
World
The Download: recreating the early internet, and 2023 in climate data
This story is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday....
2023 is breaking all sorts of climate records
It’s a lot to make sense of, so for this last newsletter of 2023, let’s take a look back at...
Recapturing early-internet whimsy with HTML
The HTML Energy community advocates understanding HTML for what it quite literally is: a language. And it celebrates the way...
The Download: good climate news, and promising pixels
Scientists are loudly warning that the world is running out of time to avoid dangerous warming levels. The picture is...
China’s judicial system is becoming even more secretive
Human rights advocates hoped to show this was not just a one-off incident, but a systemic issue ignored by the...
There was some good climate news in 2023. Really.
As federal regulations go, preventing emissions of a combustible, planet-warming superpolllutant that isn’t even producing anything of economic value is...
These minuscule pixels are poised to take augmented reality by storm
The HMZ-T1 headset performed best with 3D films, which proved to be a fad. But Sony didn’t give up on...
Two-way reflections on MIT Technology Review’s 125th
I composed the following palindromes in honor of the 125th anniversary of MIT Technology Review. They include what I call...
The Download: the AI Edition
The internet changed everything—how we work and play, how we spend time with friends and family, how we learn, how...
Four trends that changed AI in 2023
Existential risk has become one of the biggest memes in AI. The hypothesis is that one day we will build an...
These six questions will dictate the future of generative AI
Still missing: AI’s killer app It’s strange to think that ChatGPT almost didn’t happen. Before its launch in November 2022, Ilya...
Developing climate solutions with green software
There's several standards that we've been focusing on in the Green Software Foundation, one's called the SEI, which is a...
Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI
A strategic imperative Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans...
The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan
Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over...
Get ready to fight misinformation in 2024. Eric Schmidt has advice.
One of the biggest areas to watch, of course, will be generative AI, particularly how it changes social media, political...
The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush
The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to...
Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation
6. Invest in research. For all these approaches to work at scale, we’ll require long-term engagement, starting now. My philanthropic...
The Download: beyond CRISPR, and OpenAI’s superalignment findings
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem The news: Google DeepMind has used a...
Vertex developed a CRISPR cure. It’s already on the hunt for something better.
Such drawbacks are why a pill to alleviate sickle-cell, if developed, could sweep CRISPR from the playing field. A pill...