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The Download: bad news for inner Neanderthals, and AI warfare’s human illusion

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 problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal There’s a theory that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” The idea is that Homo sapiens and a co...

How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history

Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba.  The real ambition for many of these researchers was the...

The case for fixing everything

The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering “a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.” One of Brand’s several biographers described him as a mainstay of both coun...

Treating enterprise AI as an operating layer

There’s a fault line running through enterprise AI, and it’s not the one getting the most attention. The public conversation still tracks foundation models and benchmarks — GPT versus Gemini, reasoning scores, and marginal capability gains. But in practice, the more durable advantage is structural:...

Making AI operational in constrained public sector environments

The AI boom has hit across industries, and public sector organizations are facing pressure to accelerate adoption. At the same time, government institutions face distinct constraints around security, governance, and operations that set them apart from their business counterparts. For this reason, pu...

The Download: cyberscammers’ banking bypasses, and carbon removal troubles

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. Cyberscammers are bypassing banks’ security with illicit tools sold on Telegram  Inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee o...

Why having “humans in the loop” in an AI war is an illusion

The availability of artificial intelligence for use in warfare is at the center of a legal battle between Anthropic and the Pentagon. This debate has become urgent, with AI playing a bigger role than ever before in the current conflict with Iran. AI is no longer just helping humans analyze intellige...

Is carbon removal in trouble?

Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell. The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-handedly purchased something like 80% of all contracted carbon removal. If you’re looking for someone to...

The quest to measure our relationship with nature

As a movement, environmentalism has been pretty misanthropic. Understandably so—we humans have done some destructive things to the ecosystems around us. In the 21st century, though, mainstream conservation is learning that humans can be a force for good. Foresters are turning to Indigenous burning p...

The noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up?

When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people sheltered at home and shifted to remote work. Air travel collapsed. Cities—normally filled with the...

The Download: NASA’s nuclear spacecraft and unveiling our AI 10

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. NASA is building the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft. How will it work?  Just before Artemis II began its historic slings...

Cyberscammers are bypassing banks’ security with illicit tools sold on Telegram

From inside a money-laundering center in Cambodia, an employee opens a popular Vietnamese banking app on his phone. The app asks him to upload a photo associated with the account, so he clicks on a picture of a 30-something Asian man. Next, the app requests to open the camera for a video “liveness”...

No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all

For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-­edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a com...

Building trust in the AI era with privacy-led UX

The practice of privacy-led user experience (UX) is a design philosophy that treats transparency around data collection and usage as an integral part of the customer relationship. An undertapped opportunity in digital marketing, privacy-led UX treats user consent not as a tick-box compliance exercis...

Redefining the future of software engineering

Software engineering has experienced two seismic shifts this century. First was the rise of the open source movement, which gradually made code accessible to developers and engineers everywhere. Second, the adoption of development operations (DevOps) and agile methodologies took software from siloed...

The Download: the state of AI, and protecting bears with drones

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. Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts.  If you’re following AI news, you’re probably getting whi...

NASA is building the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft. How will it work?

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Just before Artemis II began its historic slingshot around the moon, Jared Isaacman, the recently confirmed NASA administ...

Coming soon: 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now

Each year we compile our 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, featuring our educated predictions for which technologies will have the biggest impact on how we live and work. This year, however, we had a dilemma. While our final picks encompass all our core coverage areas (energy, AI, and biotech, plus...

The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal

You’ve probably heard some version of this idea before: that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” That is to say, around 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first arrived in Europe, they met members of a cousin species—the broad-browed, heavier-set Neanderthals—and, well, one thing led to another...

Why opinion on AI is so divided

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In an industry that doesn’t stand still, Stanford’s AI Index, an annual roundup of key results and trends, is a chance to take a breath. (It’s a marathon, not a s...

Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts.

If you’re following AI news, you’re probably getting whiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AI can’t even read a clock. The 2026 AI Index from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, AI’s annual report card, comes out today and cuts th...

The Download: how humans make decisions, and Moderna’s “vaccine” word games

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. You have no choice in reading this article—maybe How do humans make decisions? The question has been on Uri Maoz’s mind since he read an article in hi...

You have no choice in reading this article—maybe

Uri Maoz loved doing his human research, back when he was getting his PhD. He was studying a very specific topic in computational neuroscience: how the brain instructs our arms to move and how our gray matter in turn perceives that motion.  Then his professor asked him to deliver an undergrad l...