This company makes wood products without trees
As she walks across Foray’s lab on the third floor of The Engine, Ashley Beckwith’s eyes brighten. Then, from an incubator, she pulls out petri dishes of wood-like cells that she and her team grew in the lab from black cottonwood plants. They envision turning those cells into wood-based perfumes, cosmetics, oils, and—someday—entire beams and planks that can be created without clearing any forested land. The Engine is a coworking and shared lab space located in Building 750 on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where startups and technology entrepreneurs try to develop inventions that can tackle the world’s most challenging […]
Job title of the future: Climate equity specialist
Our world reflects a carbon divide, with the richest 10% of the population contributing half of net carbon emissions and the poorest 50% bearing the brunt of the climate crisis. So extreme is this climate inequality that marginalized communities are around five times more likely to be displaced by extreme disasters. This growing realization led Nancy M. Brown to pursue a career as a climate equity specialist. “All we are offering [people] is data, science, and jargon right now. This has to change.” A growing and multifaceted role: At Energy Solutions, which specializes in implementing carbon-reduction and clean-energy strategies, Brown works […]
The citizen scientists chronicling a neglected but vital Mexican river
The city of Monterrey in northeastern Mexico is an industrial powerhouse that has rapidly devoured green space to make room for its 5.3 million people. The Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range around the city is still holding strong, though the hills are increasingly encroached on by the urban sprawl of skyscrapers, apartment buildings, industrial parks, and highways. The same can’t be said for the Río Santa Catarina, the river that has been the vital core of the city for hundreds of years. Lizbeth Ovalle, founder of Viaje al Microcosmos, gathers water from the Río Santa Catarina ANDREA VILLARREAL Participants in […]
Journey to the eclipse
In 1900, the recently completed Hotel Fitzpatrick in Washington, Georgia, stood out for its grand Queen Anne architecture, but even more for its technology—it offered electricity, an elevator, and a telephone. When Alfred E. Burton, MIT’s first dean (1902–1921), chronicled his expedition to Washington to record a total solar eclipse for Technology Review, he noted the modern amenities and warm Southern welcome the hotel provided. It was a town, he wrote, characterized by “great magnolia-trees in full bloom, gardens running over with rose-bushes, shaded walks and drives leading to stately old mansions surrounded by colonnades reaching to the eaves.” Much […]
The first-ever mission to pull a dead rocket out of space has just begun
More than 9,000 metric tons of human-made metal and machinery are orbiting Earth, including satellites, shrapnel, and the International Space Station. But a significant bulk of that mass comes from one source: the nearly a thousand dead rockets that have been discarded in space since the space age began. Now, for the first time, a mission has begun to remove one of those dead rockets. Funded by the Japanese space agency JAXA, a spacecraft from the Japanese company Astroscale was launched on Sunday, February 18, by the New Zealand firm Rocket Lab and is currently on its way to rendezvous […]
The Download: tiny TikTok-style soap operas, and how algorithms change us
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. China’s next cultural export could be TikTok-style short soap operas Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they got a casting call for their first shot at live-action content: a Chinese series called Adored by the CEO, which was being remade for an American audience. Coker was hired to dub one of the main characters. But you won’t find Adored by the CEO […]
China’s next cultural export could be TikTok-style short soap operas
Until last year, Ty Coker, a 28-year-old voice actor who lives in Missouri, mostly voiced video games and animations. But in December, they got a casting call for their first shot at live-action content: a Chinese series called Adored by the CEO, which was being remade for an American audience. Coker was hired to dub one of the main characters. But you won’t find Adored by the CEO on TV or Netflix. Instead, it’s on FlexTV, a Chinese app filled with short dramas like this one. The shows on FlexTV are shot for phone screens, cut into about 90 two-minute […]
How Wi-Fi sensing became usable tech
Over a decade ago, Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed, carefully timing his breathing. Around him, 20 wireless transceivers stood sentry. As Patwari’s chest rose and fell, their electromagnetic waves rippled around him. Patwari, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, had just demonstrated that those ripples could reveal his breathing patterns. A few years later, researchers from MIT were building a startup around the idea of using Wi-Fi signals to detect falls. They hoped to help seniors live more independently in their homes. In 2015, their prototype made it to the Oval Office: by way of […]
Bans on deepfakes take us only so far—here’s what we really need
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. There has been some really encouraging news in the fight against deepfakes. A couple of weeks ago the US Federal Trade Commission announced it is finalizing rules banning the use of deepfakes that impersonate people. Leading AI startups and big tech companies also unveiled their voluntary commitments to combatting the deceptive use of AI in 2024 elections. And last Friday, a group of civil society groups, including the Future of Life Institute, SAG-AFTRA, and Encode Justice came out with a new […]
Algorithms are everywhere
Like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I find that my personal feed tends to be hit or miss. Usually more miss. The movies and shows the algorithms recommend often seem less predicated on my viewing history and ratings, and more geared toward promoting whatever’s newly available. Still, when a superhero movie starring one of the world’s most famous actresses appeared in my “Top Picks” list, I dutifully did what 78 million other households did and clicked. As I watched the movie, something dawned on me: recommendation algorithms like the ones Netflix pioneered weren’t just serving me what they thought I’d like—they […]