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MIT Technology Review · Science

Elephant alert! AI warning systems aim to avoid deadly clashes

India is home to about 60% of the world’s wild Asian elephants, and around 80% of the animals’ habitat lies outside protected areas, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. That brings people and wildlife into close contact, and clashes can turn lethal: There have been...

Kanika Gupta 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking

Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine.  It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the...

Clive Thompson 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Three things to watch amid Anthropic’s latest feud with the government

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic’s latest feud with the US government, here’s a recap: In April the company said it had built an AI mode...

James O'Donnell 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The Download: record-breaking subsea tunnels and flexible data centers

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. Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel —Niall Firth I’m currently around 1,000 feet beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It...

Thomas Macaulay 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel

It’s cold, it’s very, very noisy, and—if I can be quite honest with you—I’m not feeling super relaxed. I’m currently around 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I am increasingly aware of the pressure from millions of tons of seawater just abov...

Niall Firth 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The Download: AI bottleneck debates, and BCI trials take off

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 startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it h...

Thomas Macaulay 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs

Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade. The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has sta...

Will Douglas Heaven 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The inevitable weakness of metrics

There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement. Like a lo...

Bryan Gardiner 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Brain-computer interface trials are taking off

This week, I covered the story of Casey Harrell—a man with ALS who is “the first power user” of a brain implant, according to the researchers who worked with him. Harrell is paralyzed and unable to speak coherently without the device. He has now spent almost three years using a brain-computer interf...

Jessica Hamzelou 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The Download: a new hunt for dark matter and Kenya’s case for going solar

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. The search for dark matter has been blown wide open For decades, physicists have hunted for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading ca...

Thomas Macaulay 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Geoengineering still faces major practical challenges

Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of Pull in case of climate emergency to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet. But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicate...

Casey Crownhart 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The search for dark matter has been blown wide open

Underneath an Apennine massif, below the Jinping Mountains of Sichuan, and at the bottom of a South Dakota mine, there is a cosmic hunt afoot. Isolated deep beneath these rocky shields, massive detectors filled with liquid xenon aim to make the first direct detections of dark matter, the long-sought...

Dan Garisto 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The Download: a reality check for geoengineering and the science of interoception

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. Hacking the atmosphere: geoengineering gets a reality check Solar geoengineering, the controversial idea that we could deliberately intervene in the c...

Thomas Macaulay 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Entrepreneurs in Nairobi make the case for going solar

Most of Kenya’s power grid runs on renewables. But with 25% of communities lacking centralized electricity, the nation is looking to off-grid solar to hit its goal of delivering universal electricity access by 2030 without driving up emissions. The ever-­improving economics of solar technology have...

Geoffrey Kamadi 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Hacking the atmosphere: Geoengineering gets a reality check

Jim Franke pulls away the cover page of a presentation on the wraparound desk in his office, revealing an illustration of an odd-­looking aircraft with massive wings stretching out from a stubby fuselage. The uncrewed plane is soaring thousands of meters higher than commercial jets fly—so high you c...

James Temple 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Exclusive eBook: How AI is becoming the next military advisor

A collection of stories about how militaries are using AI models to make decisions. This subscriber-only eBook is a package of six stories that were originally published in MIT Technology Review between April 11, 2025, and April 21, 2026, and have been updated to reflect recent developments. by Jame...

MIT Technology Review 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The Download: the first brain implant power user and South Korea’s AI obsession

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. This man with ALS is the first “power user” of a brain implant that lets him speak Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for...

Thomas Macaulay 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Want to get a data center online quickly? Give it some flex.

At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however, caused a different&#82...

Amos Zeeberg 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

Why do South Koreans love AI so much?

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 12-hour flight from San Francisco, I walked through an unmanned immigration checkpoint, where a machine scanned my face an...

Michelle Kim 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

This man with ALS is “the first power user” of a brain implant that lets him speak

Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for almost three years. Harrell, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and is paralyzed, first used his brain-computer interface (BCI) to “speak” sentences with the help of a research team in 2023. Since then, Harrell has clocked...

Jessica Hamzelou 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The Download: cutting AC emissions, and nature’s drug designer

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. These new solid-state ACs promise a cool future. Scientists aren’t so sure. After three years of record-­breaking heat and another scorcher underway,...

Thomas Macaulay 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

These new solid-state ACs promise a cool future. Scientists aren’t so sure.

After three years of record-­breaking heat, this one is set to be yet another scorcher. Air-conditioning? Not going anywhere. The International Energy Agency projects that the number of AC units will triple by 2050. That’s good for health—one Lancet study estimated that AC prevented nearly 200,000 p...

Sara Kiley Watson 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

The Download: “reprogramming” aging, and the hidden sense of interoception

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 “reprogramming” is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing...

Thomas Macaulay 2 months ago

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MIT Technology Review · Science

You do your own time

There we were, a regular murderers’ row of librarians. Little Jo. Eustace. And me. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn’t respect sanctuary. Little Jo had a stack of books under one arm. Eustace was holding the...

Elizabeth Bear 2 months ago

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