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Clara Brenner, MBA ’12, arrived in Cambridge on the lookout for a business partner. She wanted to start her own ­company—and never have to deal with a boss again. She would go it alone if she had to, but she hoped to find someone whose skills would complement her own. It’s a common MBA tale.…

Tiny flying robots could perform such useful tasks as pollinating crops inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture’s harmful impacts on the environment. The latest robo-bug from an MIT lab, inspired by the anatomy of the bee, comes closer to matching nature’s performance than ever before.  Led by Kevin Chen, an associate…

After decades of working as a biologist at a Southern school with a Division 1 football team, coming to MIT was a bit of a culture shock—in the best possible way. I’ve heard from MIT alumni all about late-night psetting, when to catch MITHenge, and the best way to celebrate Pi Day (with pie, of course).…

It all began with a simple origami model.  As an undergrad at Harvard, Danna Freedman went to a professor’s office hours for her general chemistry class and came across an elegant paper model that depicted the fullerene molecule. The intricately folded representation of chemical bonds and atomic arrangements sparked her interest, igniting a profound curiosity…

When the prison doors first closed behind him more than 50 years ago, Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, felt decidedly unsettled.   In his first job out of college, as a researcher for a consulting company working on a project for the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, he had been tasked with interviewing incarcerated participants in…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging in everyday use cases, thanks to advances in foundational models, more powerful chip technology, and abundant data. To become truly embedded and seamless, AI computation must now be distributed—and much of it will take place on device and at the edge.  To support this evolution, computation for running AI workloads…

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. $8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025 This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale…

“My mind is still sharp and my hands work just fine, so I have no interest in getting help from AI to draw or write stories,” says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist best known for his seminal series A Daunting Team, a 1983 manhwa about the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball players. “Still,…

Architecture often assumes a binary between built projects and theoretical ones. What physics allows in actual buildings, after all, is vastly different from what architects can imagine and design (often referred to as “paper architecture”). That imagination has long been supported and enabled by design technology, but the latest advancements in artificial intelligence have prompted…

In satellite images, the 20-odd coral atolls of the Maldives look something like skeletal remains or chalk lines at a crime scene. But these landforms, which circle the peaks of a mountain range that has vanished under the Indian Ocean, are far from inert. They’re the products of living processes—places where coral has grown toward…

This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale projects worth $8 billion in total in the first quarter of 2025, according to a new report. That’s far more cancellations than have typically occurred in recent years, according to a new report from E2, a…

A lawsuit to hold Yahoo responsible for “willfully turning a blind eye” to the mismanagement of a human rights fund for Chinese dissidents was settled for $5.425 million last week, after an eight-year court battle. At least $3 million will go toward a new fund; settlement documents say it will “provide humanitarian assistance to persons…

At first glance, the Bathhouse spa in Brooklyn looks not so different from other high-end spas. What sets it apart is out of sight: a closet full of cryptocurrency-­mining computers that not only generate bitcoins but also heat the spa’s pools, marble hammams, and showers.  When cofounder Jason Goodman opened Bathhouse’s first location in Williamsburg…

The quest for long, healthy life—and even immortality—is probably almost as old as humans are, but it’s never been hotter than it is right now. Today my newsfeed is full of claims about diets, exercise routines, and supplements that will help me live longer. A lot of it is marketing fluff, of course. It should…

Forests are the second-largest carbon sink on the planet, after the oceans. To understand exactly how much carbon they trap, the European Space Agency and Airbus have built a satellite called Biomass that will use a long-prohibited band of the radio spectrum to see below the treetops around the world. It will lift off from…

Americans don’t agree on much these days. Yet even at a time when consensus reality seems to be on the verge of collapse, there remains at least one quintessentially modern value we can all still get behind: creativity.  We teach it, measure it, envy it, cultivate it, and endlessly worry about its death. And why…

Google DeepMind’s latest update to a top Gemini AI model includes a dial to control how much the system “thinks” through a response. The new feature is ostensibly designed to save money for developers, but it also concedes a problem: Reasoning models, the tech world’s new obsession, are prone to overthinking, burning money and 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. US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio,…

While it’s rare to look at the news without finding some headline related to AI and energy, a lot of us are stuck waving our hands when it comes to what it all means. Sure, you’ve probably read that AI will drive an increase in electricity demand. But how that fits into the context of…

As a child of an electronic engineer, I spent a lot of time in our local Radio Shack as a kid. While my dad was locating capacitors and resistors, I was in the toy section. It was there, in 1984, that I discovered the best toy of my childhood: the Armatron robotic arm.  Described as…

President Trump and his appointees have repeatedly stressed the need to establish “American energy dominance.”  But the White House’s profusion of executive orders and aggressive tariffs, along with its determined effort to roll back clean-energy policies, are moving the industry in the wrong direction, creating market chaos and economic uncertainty that are making it harder…

On Thanksgiving weekend of 2013, Jeff Bezos, then Amazon’s CEO, took to 60 Minutes to make a stunning announcement: Amazon was a few years away from deploying drones that would deliver packages to homes in less than 30 minutes.  It lent urgency to a problem that Parimal Kopardekar, director of the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute,…

The only office within the US State Department that monitors foreign disinformation is to be eliminated, according to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, confirming reporting by MIT Technology Review. The Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub is a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracks and counters…

Anyone who crammed for exams in college knows that an impressive ability to regurgitate information is not synonymous with critical thinking. The large language models (LLMs) first publicly released in 2022 were impressive but limited—like talented students who excel at multiple-choice exams but stumble when asked to defend their logic. Today’s advanced reasoning models are…