21st century cities: Asia Pacific’s urban transformationMIT Technology Review Insights
The Asia Pacific region has enjoyed decades of economic growth—from the post-Second World War rise of Japan, to the rapid industrialization of the “Four Asian Tigers” (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong) between the 1960s and 1990s, along with China’s meteoric rise through the late 20th century, and today’s fast-growing markets in Southeast Asia. At the heart of this transformation is the region’s rapid urbanization. Between 1970 and 2017, Asia’s developing economies outpaced the rest of the world in both population expansion and growth rate, with the urban population increasing 3.4% per annum, compared to 2.6% in the rest […]
An E. coli biocomputer solves a maze by sharing the workSiobhan Roberts
E. coli thrives in our guts, sometimes to unfortunate effect, and it facilitates scientific advances—in DNA, biofuels, and Pfizer’s covid vaccine, to name but a few. Now this multitalented bacterium has a new trick: it can solve a classic computational maze problem using distributed computing—dividing up the necessary calculations among different types of genetically engineered cells. This neat feat is a credit to synthetic biology, which aims to rig up biological circuitry much like electronic circuitry and to program cells as easily as computers. The maze experiment is part of what some researchers consider a promising direction in the field: […]
Meet MIT Technology Review’s covid inequality fellowsBobbie Johnson
In the spring of 2021, MIT Technology Review announced a fellowship focused on exploring the different ways in which technology and data were being used to address issues of inequality during the pandemic. With the assistance of the Heising-Simons Foundation—a Los Altos and San Francisco, California-based family foundation that supports projects focused on climate and clean energy, community and opportunity, education, human rights, and science—our call aimed to find journalists who could report thoughtfully and with insight into the systematic, technological, and challenges covid has brought to under-covered communities. Fellows each receive at least $7,500 to conduct their work and […]
“A grim outlook”: How cyber surveillance is booming on a global scalePatrick Howell O’Neill
The increasing overlap between the world’s arms trade and the secretive surveillance industry risks damaging US national security and will create the potential for even more abuse unless more accountability is introduced, according to a new study. The research, from the American think tank the Atlantic Council, offers one of the most thorough accountings ever assembled of a booming, cross-continental surveillance industry that makes billions of dollars and yet mostly manages to stay out of the limelight. After years of rising demand for hacker-for-hire products and an increase in reported abuses by companies like NSO Group, countries around the world […]
US astronomers want a giant telescope to hunt for new Earth-like planetsTatyana Woodall
Every 10 years, US astronomers and astrophysicists release a new report to guide the next decade of astronomy and astrophysics research. Today the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published the latest, setting a new trajectory for modern space exploration. Dubbed Astro2020, the decadal survey draws from hundreds of white papers and several years of deliberation from more than 13 sub-panels. The 600-page report tags three key scientific priorities for the coming decade and makes a case for the US to invest in two major projects: the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope. The report states that […]
India’s 2070 net-zero pledge is achievable, appropriate, and right on timeCasey Crownhart
India has officially joined the net-zero pledge club, and its 2070 target presents a reasonable, if challenging, timeline for the country. The commitment was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on November 1 at the COP26 UN climate conference. While the target date is still decades away, and later than the 2050 goal set by many other countries, experts say it’s an ambitious and meaningful commitment by one of the world’s fastest-developing nations. Now it’s time for wealthier countries that have polluted far more for far longer, like the US, to step up their support for efforts by India and […]
Hackers are stealing data today so quantum computers can crack it in a decadePatrick Howell O’Neill
While they wrestle with the immediate danger posed by hackers today, US government officials are preparing for another, longer-term threat: attackers who are collecting sensitive, encrypted data now in the hope that they’ll be able to unlock it at some point in the future. The threat comes from quantum computers, which work very differently from the classical computers we use today. Instead of the traditional bits made of 1s and 0s, they use quantum bits that can represent different values at the same time. The complexity of quantum computers could make them much faster at certain tasks, allowing them to […]
NASA’s new rovers will be a fleet of mobile robots that work togetherTatyana Woodall
NASA is exploring a concept for a new fleet of mini-rovers that can work together to solve problems and make decisions as a unit. If one fails or gets stuck somewhere, the others could carry on without it. As part of the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project, NASA engineers are designing compact, mobile robots the size of a shoebox (for comparison, Perseverance is the size of a small SUV) to autonomously explore the moon and other planets. These rovers will operate as a group to collect data in hard-to-reach places like craters and caves. In a demonstration mission […]
Hybrid cloud adoption demands a holistic cybersecurity postureTalal Alqinawi
This is the second article in a series of three. The first focused on the importance of making businesses more future-ready and how to work through common obstacles on the path to digitization. We also discussed how modernizing on-premises infrastructure as part of a hybrid cloud approach can best be managed via hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), enabling modernization that blends the best of the old and new. In this article, we’ll examine challenges enterprises should consider to develop and maintain a holistic security strategy in a hybrid environment. Talal Alquinawi is a senior director of product marketing at Azure. Security begins […]
Dismantling three common cloud strategy assumptionsMIT Technology Review Insights
Cloud is ubiquitous: according to Gartner, spending on public cloud services is predicted to reach $396 billion in 2021 and grow 21.7% to $482 billion in 2022. And by 2026, Gartner predicts public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all enterprise IT spending, up from less than 17% in 2021. But how much do companies fully understand the potential benefits of the cloud—and possible limitations—as they race to migrate? In an evolving, complex landscape, the current offerings by major cloud players may not allow for the important combination of flexibility and control that today’s organizations expect. At the same time, […]