Research & Development news

• How much more can nuclear power plants give?

  15-10-2026 12:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  In this age of rising electricity demand, people are trying to squeeze every last bit of power out of every power plant possible.Over the past few weeks, there’s been big news about nuclear power plants trying to do just that. Constellation, the largest nuclear operator in the US, announced plans to add nearly a gigawatt of new capacity across 11 existing nuclear reactors at six plants. And on October 5, the Department of Energy awarded a $4.2 billion loan to Vistra for previously announc
  
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• Trump's green card curbs test Indian tech workers' American dream

  22-10-2026 01:06 via BBC News
  
  With immigration curbs and tech firms cutting foreign hiring, US residency is becoming a distant dream for many Indians.
  
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• Why is Elon Musk plotting a mega-merger of SpaceX and Tesla?

  22-10-2026 01:04 via BBC News
  
  Musk says there's "a lot to be gained" by combining the firms in what would be the biggest merger in history.
  
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• Websites taken down worldwide as critical cyber-security update issued

  21-10-2026 21:54 via BBC News
  
  The vulnerabilities with PHP, a programming language widely used across the internet, have been described as the most significant ever found by AI.
  
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• Just Eat apologises for AI food mistakes after social media ridicule

  21-10-2026 19:04 via BBC News
  
  A spokesperson said it was removing inaccurate AI images and pausing the rollout of the tool.
  
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• The Download: introducing the Impossible issue

  21-10-2026 14:10 via 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.Introducing: the Impossible issueWe wanted our last print edition of 2026 to include a slate of stories that check in on impossible ideas. Why? Because it’s fun to dream about living on other planets or uploading our brains. But also because scientists and engineers who won’t give up on daring endeavors remind us what technology is suppo
  
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• We can do impossible things

  21-10-2026 11:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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?” Whenever I’ve gotten it, I take a slow—even pensive—breath and rattle off my line: “I say no to myself too much.” I won’t lie. It’s a bit shameless—a definite humblebrag. I’m a systems thinker: When an idea pops up, I immediately spin up a feasibility assessment
  
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• Solid-state batteries

  21-10-2026 11:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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. But as anyone who’s boarded a plane in the last decade could tell you, storing and pumping out energy by moving charged lithium ions through a liquid electrolyte soup has its drawbacks, not least that the batteries have a troubling tendency to catch fire. Enter the solid-state battery, which swaps liquid for a sol
  
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• Nuclear-powered spaceships

  21-10-2026 11:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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. SR-1, the first-ever nuclear-reactor-­powered interplanetary spacecraft, is meant to fly an uncrewed mission to Mars by the end of 2028, arriving in 2029. A successful mission would herald a new era of more efficient, potentially faster spaceflight—saving astronauts time and cutting their exposure to harmful cosmic radiation as they travel
  
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• Interspecies communication

  21-10-2026 11:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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. Decoding how animals communicate with one another could offer a window into the inner lives of other species and help humans realize that “animals are sentient creatures who think, who have hopes and dreams of their own,” says Con Slobodchikoff, the founder of Zoolingua, a company working on dog-to-human speech.The sticking pointsTeasing all this out is
  
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• Exercise in a pill

  21-10-2026 11:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  We all know exercise is good for us. It builds muscle, strengthens bones, lowers blood pressure, and boosts mood. By deciphering how movement benefits the body, researchers hope to develop medicines that can offer some of the same perks—without the workout. The idea isn’t to replace exercise but to bring its upsides to people who struggle with frailty, disability, or chronic illness. The sticking pointsIt will take a lot of experimentation to untangle the myriad pathways by whic
  
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• Eliminating traffic deaths

  21-10-2026 11:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  Every year, traffic crashes kill more than one million people, and they’re the leading cause of death for children and young adults. In the US, 100 people a day lose their lives this way, in many cases not on highways but on rural and local streets. “Traffic deaths are a leading cause of preventable death, yet we treat it like it’s inevitable,” says Leah Shahum, founder and director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit focused on making streets less deadly. The st
  
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• Cleaning up PFAS

  21-10-2026 11:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  Scrubbing Earth of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—a.k.a. PFAS or forever chemicals—could eliminate a list of woes for people and planet. Used for decades in everything from nonstick pans to firefighting foams, PFAS have been linked to increased risks of fertility challenges, developmental delays, cancer, and reduced immune response. They are known for a strong bond between carbon and fluorine, which the environment struggles to break down. The sticking pointsPFAS are everyw
  
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• Elon Musk confirms he is considering merging Tesla and SpaceX

  21-10-2026 10:42 via BBC News
  
  Musk says special committees within both companies have been formed to look at a possible mega-merger.
  
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• The tech helping crack decades-old cold cases

  21-10-2026 01:13 via BBC News
  
  Investigative genetic genealogy can help hunt down criminals but raises worries over privacy.
  
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• Taking a swing at a pickleball startup

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  In corporate America, Stanley Anderson ’79 says, executives often assume that their peers grew up in privileged circumstances. He did not.“I spent my early years trying not to get recruited into gangs, getting shot at, watching my friends get murdered, and thinking that if I don’t leave, I will die,” says Anderson, who was raised in Chicago. “I was fortunate to survive.”But he thrived, building an impressive career at the likes of HP, Intel, and the Palo
  
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• Robotic therapy for stroke patients

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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 new approach tries to solve that problem by combining artificial intelligence and human therapy. Johannes Lachner, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Purdue University, and Noah Geiger, a former visiting student at MIT, developed a robotic system that uses generative AI and real-time force feedback to le
  
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• Nebraska native explores galaxies far, far away

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue ’85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library. Today, she is learning how the wider universe works by studying galaxy clusters.Donahue discovered her passion for physics in that library at age 12 and started her path into astronomy thanks to “a providential interaction.” Through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, she got introduced to cutting-edge x-ray imaging—work
  
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• Melt it, spin it, use it again

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  The average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothing each year, and there are few options for recycling it. MIT engineers hope to cut down on that textile waste with a new type of yarn. The thermoplastic yarn mimics the properties of conventional elastic yarns, which typically combine spandex with polyester or nylon. Those fibers would have to be separated for recycling—a process that isn’t practical. But the MIT team found a way to create a similarly stretchy yarn from
  
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• It’s a bird, it’s a plane … it’s a robo-puffin?

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  Given that water is 1,000 times denser than air, moving through those two mediums requires very different mechanics—or so one might assume. Yet birds like gulls and puffins can plunge into the sea, swim underwater, and leap back into the air to fly away. And now engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can do likewise. The “flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle,” or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is equipped w
  
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• Here’s the tea

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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. Descendants of the Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label in 1987, saying it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. But after a year of research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later. The decisive clue came when he r
  
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• A reason to eat carbs

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can help some people lose weight, and some research has shown that it may protect against colon cancer. But a new study suggests that such a ketogenic diet may also increase the risk of cancer in the small intestine.This type of diet forces the body to burn fatty acids instead of carbohydrates for fuel, producing by-products called ketone bodies. One of these, BHB, was thought to be responsible for the protective effect observed against colon cancer.Omer Yilmaz,
  
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• A good TA: priceless

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  These are images of quizzes I took in 3.091, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry, in the fall of 1980.One is my very first exam at MIT, and getting 49 out of 100 was a soul-crushing experience. I can still picture the TA, Leszek Pawlowicz, PhD ’87, returning my paper. He had a big smile on his face, and he said something to the effect of “I expect to see you double your score on the next quiz!” Well, I got the message. Studying at MIT was not like studying in high school
  
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• A cleaner path to rare earth metals

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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. Even as a child, he realized it was problematic to breathe that air. “I’m motivated because I’ve seen what metal-making does,” says Villalón, who majored in materials science and engineering. He started thinking about sustainable metallurgy se
  
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• A champion for brain injury patients

  20-10-2026 23:00 via MIT Technology Review
  
  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. “That group was a great way to learn about the human experience of what people go through when they experience a brain injury,” she says. And it laid the foundation for her life’s work.Today, Totman is a physician specializing in brain injury medicine at the University of Pittsburgh
  
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• Astrolab’s upcoming rover will run the first LLMs on the moon

  20-10-2026 22:07 via MIT Technology Review
  
  Large language models are set to go lunar. A computer capable of running AI software is one of the payloads aboard Astrolab’s FLIP lunar rover, which is slated to head to Earth’s celestial companion as early as November 2026.The 480-kilogram FLIP rover, short for “FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform,” is the first in a series of vehicles NASA’s contracted from Astrolab, including future buggies that will move Artemis astronauts across the moon’s surface. Fitted wit
  
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• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wins dismissal of sister's lawsuit

  20-10-2026 21:42 via BBC News
  
  A US district judge dismissed the case after Ann Altman had refused to attend an independent medical examination.
  
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• Google resolves cloud outage affecting UK banks and websites

  20-10-2026 20:03 via BBC News
  
  Revolut was one of the hardest hit, with banking services going down for many customers.
  
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• The new economics of enterprise AI

  20-10-2026 17:20 via MIT Technology Review
  
  Imagine your company just discovered electricity. At first only a few machines run on it, and nobody worries about efficiency — consumption is low and the value is obvious. But once electricity becomes infrastructure, every process depends on it, and the question changes from “can we use it?” to “how efficiently are we using it?”Enterprise AI is going through the same shift. What began as isolated chatbot and copilot experiments is becoming a foundational layer of t
  
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• UK asks Apple to widen access to its payment tech

  20-10-2026 14:29 via BBC News
  
  Proposed changes could lead to new digital wallets and keys as well as ticketing apps, the regulator says.
  
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