The Download: introducing the Build issue
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 Build issue Building is a popular tech industry motif—especially in Silicon Valley, where “Time to build” has become something of a call to arms. Yet the future is built brick by brick from the imperfect decisions we make in the present. We don’t often recognize that the seeming steps forward we are taking today could be seen as steps back in the years to come. Sometimes the things we don’t do, or the steps we skip, […]
Three takeaways about the state of Chinese tech in the US
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. I’ve wanted to learn more about the world of solar panels ever since I realized just how dominant Chinese companies have become in this field. Although much of the technology involved was invented in the US, today about 80% of the world’s solar manufacturing takes place in China. For some parts of the process, it’s responsible for even more: 97% of wafer manufacturing, for example. So I jumped at the opportunity to interview Shawn Qu, the founder […]
Building momentum
One of the formative memories of my youth took place on a camping trip at an Alabama state park. My dad’s friend brought an at-the-time gee-whiz gadget, a portable television, and we used it to watch the very first space shuttle launch from under the loblolly pines. It was thrilling. And it was hard not to believe, watching that shuttle go up (and, a few days later, land), that we were entering an era when travel into the near reaches of space would become common. But as it turns out, that’s not the future we built. This is our Build […]
How we transform to a fully decarbonized world
In 1856, Napoleon III commissioned a baby rattle for his newborn son, to be made from one of the most precious metals known at the time: light, silvery, and corrosion-resistant aluminum. Despite its abundance—it’s the third most common element in Earth’s crust—the metal wasn’t isolated until 1824, and the complexity and cost of the process made the rattle a gift fit for a prince. It wasn’t until 1886 that two young researchers, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, developed the method that is still used for refining aluminum commercially. The Hall-Héroult process is extraordinarily energy intensive: the chemically modified ore […]
Quartz, cobalt, and the waste we leave behind
Some time before the first dinosaurs, two supercontinents, Laurasia and Gondwana, collided, forcing molten rock out from the depths of the Earth. As eons passed, the liquid rock cooled and geological forces carved this rocky fault line into Pico Sacro, a strange conical peak that sits like a wizard’s hat near the northwestern corner of Spain. Today, Pico Sacro is venerated as a holy site and rumored, in the local mythology, to be a portal to hell. But this magic mountain has also become valued in modern times for a very different reason: the quartz deposits that resulted from these […]
What tech learned from Daedalus
Today’s climate-change kraken may have been unleashed by human activity—which has discharged greenhouse-gas emissions into Earth’s atmosphere for centuries—but reversing course and taming nature’s growing fury seems beyond human means, a quest only mythical heroes could fulfill. Yet the dream of human-powered flight—of rising over the Mediterranean fueled merely by the strength of mortal limbs—was also the stuff of myths for thousands of years. Until 1988. That year, in October, MIT Technology Review published the aeronautical engineer John Langford’s account of his mission to retrace the legendary flight of Daedalus, described in an ancient Greek myth recorded by the Roman […]
This creamy vegan cheese was made with AI
As Climax Foods CEO Oliver Zahn serves up a plate of vegan brie, feta, and blue cheese in his offices in Emeryville, California, I’m keeping my expectations modest. Most vegan cheese falls into an edible uncanny valley full of discomforting not-quite-right versions of the real thing. But the brie I taste today is smooth, rich, and velvety—and delicious. I could easily believe it was made from cow’s milk, but it is made entirely from plants. And it couldn’t have come into existence, says Zahn, without the use of machine learning. Climax Foods is one of several startups, also including Shiru […]
Job titles of the future: AI prompt engineer
The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. Companies define it in different ways, but its principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations. Danai Myrtzani of Sleed, a digital marketing agency in Greece, describes herself as more prompter than engineer. She joined the company in March 2023 as one of two experts on its new experimental-AI team. Go-to AI experts: Since joining Sleed, Myrtzani has helped develop a tool that generates personalized LinkedIn posts for clients. The tool works with OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform, which automates […]
A linguistic warning sign for dementia
Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early—when any available treatments are likely to be most effective. The issue has to do with a subtle aspect of language processing: people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) struggle with certain ambiguous sentences in which pronouns could refer to people not referenced in the sentences themselves.For instance, in “The electrician […]
The energy transition’s effects on jobs
A county-by-county analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the US that stand to see the biggest economic changes from the switch to cleaner energy because their job markets are most closely linked to fossil fuels. While many of those places have intensive drilling and mining operations, the researchers find, areas that rely on industries such as heavy manufacturing could also be among the most significantly affected—a reality that policies intended to support American workers during the energy transition may not be taking into account, given that some of these communities don’t qualify for federal assistance under the Inflation […]