MIT Technology Review

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.

Every year, traffic crashes kill more than one million people, and they’re the leading cause of death for children and young adults.

The rise of the lithium-ion battery, which powers everything from the smallest personal electronics to gargantuan energy storage systems, has been nothing short of revolutionary.

Scrubbing Earth of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—a.k.a.

Humans are far from the only species with a gift for gab, and our furry, feathered, and finned friends could have a lot to tell us.

We all know exercise is good for us.

Just before the Artemis II crew began its historic slingshot around the moon this past April, NASA announced plans to build Space Reactor-1 Freedom.

I’d wager everyone has a rehearsed response to what’s absolutely one of the world’s worst interview questions: “What’s your biggest weakness?”

Tomás Villalón Jr. ’14 was raised in San Antonio, Texas, but vividly remembers smog hanging over the city his family came from—Monterrey, Mexico, a steel manufacturing and metal fabrication hub.

Alissa Totman ’13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and socializing.

Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue ’85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library.

These are images of quizzes I took in 3.091, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry, in the fall of 1980.

In corporate America, Stanley Anderson ’79 says, executives often assume that their peers grew up in privileged circumstances.

Strokes leave 5 million people with long-term impairments each year, and a growing shortage of physical therapists makes it hard for them to get the care they need.

A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can help some people lose weight, and some research has shown that it may protect against colon cancer.

The average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothing each year, and there are few options for recycling it.

When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed at Old South Meeting House, he had no reason to doubt its story.

Given that water is 1,000 times denser than air, moving through those two mediums requires very different mechanics—or so one might assume.

Imagine your company just discovered electricity.

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 current narrative around artificial intelligence in the workplace is largely driven by Silicon Valley.

Andrew Haverdink, a tall grad student in a rain bib and rubber boots, wrenched a double-handed drill from the frozen soil that underlies much of Alaska’s Denali National Park and then unclipped the hollow barrel from the end of the bit.

In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge set up a six-foot folding table in the cafeteria of Cane Bay High School in Summerville, South Carolina, to conduct a taste test.

_____________ THE PLACE Pyeongtaek, South Korea Generative AI models run on powerful chips known as GPUs, which depend on stacks of specialized memory chips packaged with the processor.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI.

“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.”

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.

In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything?

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.

This week my colleague Antonio Regalado had an interesting update on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.

The moment Trevor Wischnewsky heard that drones were delivering pizza and sushi around his Texas neighborhood, his mind was made up.

Ever since people first seriously contemplated giving machines an intelligence modeled on our own, there has never been any question that they would, like us, be able to say no.

Friday, October 16, 2026 Can AI design new life forms?

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.

This week, we released our 2026 version of our Climate Tech Companies to Watch list.

The story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live.

Industrial AI is entering a new phase.

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.

Popular weight-loss drugs may do more than help people shed pounds.

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. 10 climate tech companies to watch Each year, MIT Technology Review puts together a list of the most promising climate

BasiGo aims to replace the tens of thousands of diesel-powered buses on sub-Saharan African roads with electric ones that generate far fewer emissions.

As sea levels rise and flood risks worsen due to global warming, WaveSave’s easy-to-erect portable dam offers a quick-response tool.

Brimstone is making strides on two industrial problems, reducing the emissions from cement and providing a way to produce more critical minerals within the US.

There’s a growing need for long-duration storage to meet energy demand and balance out renewables on the grid.

X-energy is developing small modular reactors to satisfy some of the planet’s most power-hungry users: industrial manufacturers that need high temperatures to produce billions of tons of concrete, plastics, fibers, and chemicals.

Form Energy is building iron-based batteries that can store energy for multiple days.

WeLion New Energy is on a quest to make safer, better batteries.

As the team at MIT Technology Review set out to choose companies for this year’s edition of our annual list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch, the challenge felt more daunting than any year since we started compiling the list in 2023.