Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave, and the grid is being pushed to its limits as people turn to fans and air-conditioning to try to stay cool. Some power plants won’t be online to help handle the load. On June 23, France saw its hottest day since record-keeping began in 1947.…
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. Introducing: the Engineering issue We can’t fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human inge...
The common cold comes for us all—often more than once a year. And there is no way to prevent it. The best you can do is take vitamin C and stay away from people with the sniffles. Now the payment company Stripe, founded by brothers Patrick and John Collison, says it will fund a new…
AI is booming. New use cases are emerging each day. To capitalize on the technology’s potential, enterprises require data at scale. In many cases, though, the relevant information is blocked or unstructured, which limits its use by AI models. To understand this challenge, consider the foundation...
When I was 18, I skipped my high school graduation and headed to Kuwait. It was 1991, the first Gulf War had just ended, and the country was in complete chaos. There was little to no electricity, aside from generator power. Rubble and unexploded ordnance were everywhere. Massive oil fires lit up ...
As soon as August, a giant silver bullet will cut its way through the dry air of the southwestern US and cross the Pacific to reach the coast of Japan. Once there, the roughly 200-foot-long craft, built by the New Mexico–based company Sceye, will park some 18 kilometers above the ocean’s surface...
With a test being developed at MIT, diagnosing pneumonia and other lung conditions could someday be as easy as breathing into a tube. The test, dubbed PlasmoSniff, is a portable, chip-scale sensor that traps and detects biomarkers, synthetic compounds indicating disease. The idea is that a perso...
MIT engineers have found the first direct evidence that plant seeds can sense sounds in nature: Rice submerged in shallow water germinated 30% to 40% more quickly when exposed to vibrations from water dripping on the surface. They think other types of seeds may respond similarly. When a raindrop ...
A technology developed by Professor Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, and colleagues could offer new hope to the thousands of Americans with chronic liver disease who are waiting for an organ transplant or not strong enough to tolerate one. The liver is involved in regulating blood clotting, remo...
With an adaptable fastener designed at CSAIL, pitching a tent or adjusting the cast for a broken bone could be almost as easy as zipping your coat. The researchers, led by associate professor Stefanie Mueller, were inspired by an abandoned prototype for a three-sided zipper that William Freeman, ...
Our hands are the nimblest parts of our bodies, coordinating 34 muscles, 27 joints, and over 100 tendons and ligaments to perform countless nuanced movements and gestures. So far, robots have been notoriously bad at mimicking that dexterity, in part because researchers struggle to capture what is...
Right now, MIT alumni and friends are voicing their support for: America’s scientific and technological leadership Merit-based admissions and affordable education Advances that increase US health, security, and prosperity Our community is standing up for MIT and its mission to serve the nation an...
The national conversation about the value of education is currently dominated by speculation about the risks and positive potential of AI. Whatever your own perspective on that debate, I hope you’ll be glad to know that MIT is also working on a deeply important but comparatively old-fashioned ch...
Brian Sietsema has a favorite word. It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they’re given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee—arguably the world’s most prestigious competiti...
Here’s a problem you probably didn’t solve in school: You’re an ambitious young plumber from Brooklyn in a world inhabited by violent human-size mushrooms called Goombas. The love of your life has been kidnapped, so you embark on a quest to rescue her, venturing through stretches of pipe-filled a...
The Argentina v. France final of the 2022 Men’s World Cup in Qatar was shaping up to be one of the most epic games in soccer history. With just 12 minutes remaining in the extra time added to the game to break a tie, the referee had a critical decision to make—and fast. Lionel Messi,…
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 $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking It’s a bit of a schlep to get to the top of ASML’s newest machine. It’s about the size of a double-d...
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 gr...
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 be...
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 m...