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When SpaceX’s Crew Dragon took NASA astronauts to the ISS near the end of May, the launch brought back a familiar sight. For the first time since the space shuttle was retired, American rockets were launching from American soil to take Americans into space. Inside the vehicle, however, things couldn’t have looked more different. Gone was […]
In 1996 John Perry Barlow, cofounder of internet rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote “A declaration of the independence of cyberspace.” It begins: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the
Astronomers from Caltech have reported that they’ve observed a collision between two black holes. Normally such an event is invisible, but this time a more massive black hole sitting nearby helped illuminate the other two as they collided. If confirmed, the findings, published in Physical Review Letters, would be the first optical observations ever made
“We have the greatest testing program anywhere in the world,” US President Donald Trump told reporters on June 23. “We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases.” Trump went on to say
The news: US Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would ban the use of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement agencies. Specifically, it would make it illegal for any federal agency or official to “acquire, possess, access, or use” biometric surveillance technology in the US. It would also require state and local law
Even before president Trump’s executive order on June 22, the US was already bucking global tech immigration trends. Over the past five years, as other countries have opened up their borders to highly skilled technical people, the US has maintained—and even restricted—its immigration policies, creating a bottleneck for meeting domestic demand for tech talent. Now
The virus “I am very wary of simplistic projections about the ongoing outbreak based solely off of its current growth patterns” —Maimuna Majumder, SM ’15, PhD ’18, faculty, Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program, and research associate, Harvard Medical School (ABC News, March 16) “Closing schools, bars, and movie theaters are good measures, but not
This report is part of “The global AI agenda,” a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and
We’re still not very sure how covid-19 immunity works. As we inch closer to a vaccine and pin our hopes on herd immunity to allow us to safely open up communities again, the uncertainties will only get more pressing. Here’s a look at some of the biggest questions we’re still trying to answer. How much
There are advantages to being one of the world’s largest single-payer health-care systems. For the UK’s National Health Service, the NHS, big data is increasingly one of them. Its Recovery Trial, launched early in the coronavirus outbreak to collect information from across the system, has led to the discovery of dexamethasone as one of the
Ahead of President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. “Just passed 800,000 tickets,” he wrote. “Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time by 10x. Saturday is going to be amazing!” Parscale’s numbers for the rally—originally scheduled for Juneteenth and still set to occur
Potential weapons against covid-19 include manufactured antibodies, serum transfusions from survivors, antivirals, steroids, and more than 100 vaccine candidates, some now advancing toward decisive tests in volunteers. But there’s another approach to battling the virus—one that hasn’t won much attention, but which in the future could become the fastest way to beat back a pandemic.
Deepfakes have struck a nerve with the public and researchers alike. There is something uniquely disturbing about these AI-generated images of people appearing to say or do something they didn’t. With tools for making deepfakes now widely available and relatively easy to use, many also worry that they will be used to spread dangerous misinformation.
In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 civil rights and research organizations wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon stop providing face recognition technology to governments. As part of an increased focus on the role that tech companies were playing in enabling the US government’s tracking and deportation of immigrants, it called on
It was a surge unlike any other, even for Amazon. In the first quarter of 2020, the e-commerce giant’s net sales increased by 26% over the same period a year earlier. It was panic-buying on a grand scale. Amazon.com search rankings from mid-March awarded top billing to toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and Clorox wipes, but
The coronavirus pandemic and the protests sparked by the May 25 murder of George Floyd have been the defining events of 2020 so far, and in both cases one 17-year-old has played a major role online: Avi Schiffmann, the creator of the web’s preeminent covid-19 case tracker and, more recently, a protest tracking site. The
The news: Twitter is testing a new feature on Android phones that prompts people to read articles before they share them. Someone who goes to retweet a link on Twitter without having clicked through to the story it leads to may be shown a pop-up message saying “Want to read this before retweeting?” It’s currently
When the Dallas police called for the public to send them videos of illegal activity during protests a week ago, they didn’t get the evidence of law-breaking demonstrators they expected. Instead, fans of Korean pop music downloaded the police department’s app en masse, rallied each other to flood it with short, fan-produced videos, and gave
Three thousand light-years from Earth sits Kepler 160, a sun-like star that’s already thought to have three planets in its system. Now researchers think they’ve found a fourth. Planet KOI-456.04, as it’s called, appears similar to Earth in size and orbit, raising new hopes we’ve found perhaps the best candidate yet for a habitable exoplanet
In the week after George Floyd’s murder, hundreds of thousands of people joined protests across the US and around the globe, demanding education, attention, and justice. But one of the key tools for organizing these protests is a surprising one: it’s not encrypted, doesn’t rely on signing in to a social network, and wasn’t even
