Six takeaways from a climate-tech boom
The surge of climate-tech startups seeking to reinvent clean energy and transform huge industrial markets is fueling optimism about our prospects for addressing climate change. Tens of billions are pouring into these venture-backed companies in just about every field you can imagine, from green steel to nuclear fusion. As I explain in “Climate tech is back—and this time, it can’t afford to fail,” investments led by venture capitalists could play a critical role in developing novel sources of clean energy and greener industrial processes. Speaking to numerous VCs, people at startups, and those academics who study innovation in so-called deep […]
A high-tech mouthguard that might help prevent concussions
When athletes or soldiers have a concussion, the most beneficial course of action is to simply get them off the playing field or out of the action so they can recover. Yet much about head injuries remains a mystery, including the reasons why some impacts result in concussion while others don’t. But new measuring devices are being developed that could help deliver a wealth of information about head impacts. By giving an immediate warning that a person needs to be removed from action or play, they could help protect soldiers and athletes alike from brain damage. Appreciation of the real […]
Meet the economist who wants the field to account for nature
What is the true value of a honeybee? A mountain stream? A mangrove tree? Gretchen Daily, cofounder and faculty director of the Stanford Natural Capital Project, has dedicated her career to answering such complex questions. Using emerging scientific data and the project’s innovative open-source software, Daily and her team help governments, international banks, and NGOs to not only quantify the value of nature, but also determine the benefits of conservation and ecosystem restoration. This marriage of ecological and economic concerns may seem an unusual one to some. But to Daily, it’s a union as natural as the planet’s ecosystems themselves. […]
This vibrating weight-loss pill seems to work—in pigs
What if all you needed to lose weight were some good vibrations? That’s the idea behind a new weight-loss pill that tricks the brain into thinking the stomach is full, by stimulating the nerve endings that sense when the stomach expands. The capsule, about the size of a large vitamin, houses a tiny motor that starts vibrating when it hits the stomach, stimulating the organ’s stretch receptors. So far this “electroceutical” has only been tested in a handful of young Yorkshire pigs, but with promising results. According to a new paper in Science Advances, the six pigs that were given […]
The Download: 2023’s worst tech failures, and the end of online anonymity in China
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 worst technology failures of 2023 Welcome to our annual list of the worst technologies. This year, one technology disaster in particular holds lessons for the rest of us: the Titan submersible that imploded in the shadow of the Titanic. Everyone had warned Stockton Rush, the sub’s creator, that it wasn’t safe. But he believed innovation meant tossing out the rule book and taking chances. He set aside good engineering in favor of wishful thinking. He and four […]
The worst technology failures of 2023
Welcome to our annual list of the worst technologies. This year, one technology disaster in particular holds lessons for the rest of us: the Titan submersible that imploded in the shadow of the Titanic. Everyone had warned Stockton Rush, the sub’s creator, that it wasn’t safe. But he believed innovation meant tossing out the rule book and taking chances. He set aside good engineering in favor of wishful thinking. He and four others died. To us it shows how the spirit of innovation can pull ahead of reality, sometimes with unpleasant consequences. It was a phenomenon we saw time and […]
Gene editing had a banner year in 2023
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Welcome back to The Checkup. This will be our last issue of 2023, so this week I’ve been reflecting on our biotechnology coverage over the past year. As I scrolled through our archives, I was struck by the vast number of stories we wrote about gene editing. It really shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Perhaps no technology has more power to transform medicine, and its vast potential is just beginning […]
How 2023 marked the death of anonymity online in China
If you think about it, there are so many people we meet on the internet daily whose real names we will never know. The TikTok teen who learned the trendy new dance, the anime artist who uploaded a new painting, the random commenter who posted under a YouTube video you just watched. That’s the internet we are familiar with. At the end of the day, nobody knows whether they are really interacting online with a person or, say, a dog. But in China, the dogs are losing their cover, as the government gradually makes it more and more difficult to […]
Is this the most energy-efficient way to build homes?
When the Canadian engineer Harold Orr and his colleagues began designing an ultra-efficient home in Saskatchewan in the late ’70s, responding to a provincial conservation mandate during the oil embargo, they knew that the trick wasn’t generating energy in a greener way, but using less of it. They needed to make a better thermos, not a cheaper coffee maker. ARTHUR MOUNT 1 High-performance windows with orientation and shading Heat loss and gain through standard windows accounts for 25% to 30% of residential energy use. 2 Airtight buildingenvelope Keeping air, and thus heat, from leaking out or in further reduces the […]
The Download: recreating the early internet, and 2023 in climate data
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. Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTML Websites weren’t always slick digital experiences. There was a time when surfing the web involved opening tabs that played music against your will and sifting through walls of text on a colored background. In the 2000s, before Squarespace and social media, websites were manifestations of individuality—built from scratch using HTML, by users who had some knowledge of code. Scattered across the web are communities of programmers working to revive this seemingly outdated […]