Research & Development news

• Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why

  24-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  People have been talking to each other for at least 100,000 years, as best we can tell. And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fluency: a human child. Now there are two. Four short years after the release of ChatGPT, many of us now take it for granted that we can converse naturally with our phones or computers. LLMs like Claude, DeepSeek, and OpenAI’s GPT models are fluent and flexible enough to masquerade con
  
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• Bill Gates says we’ve passed AI’s danger thresholds. Now what?

  26-08-2026 09:01 via technologyreview.com
  
  It’s a glorious day in Kirkland, Washington, an affluent Seattle suburb on the eastern shore of Lake Washington. The temperature is in the mid-80s, and the sky is incapable of being any more blue. The view from the Gates Ventures conference room overlooks the Carillon Point Marina, where a flotilla of expensive boats bob in the water, and across the lake to the Olympic Mountains that define the horizon. It’s gorgeous. And vaguely terrifying. Because if the scene is placid, the m
  
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• YouTuber finds niche as college admissions mentor

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  As a first-generation student from a small town, Gohar Khan ’21 had to navigate the college admissions process largely on his own. He founded his YouTube channel, Gohar’s Guide, to make things easier for other young people.Today, more than 10 million people follow Khan on social media for college application advice, study tips, and life hacks. He is also the CEO and cofounder of Next Admit, a consulting business that provides help with college essays, applications, and test preparati
  
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• Your brain on AI

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Many people find AI-based chatbots helpful in keeping up with news, but a study by Pattie Maes and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab points to a big problem with this strategy. Participants who evaluated paired news headlines and images over the course of four weeks were initially 21% percent more accurate at telling fake news from real when aided by a chatbot—but by week four, they’d become 15% worse at identifying fake news without AI than they were before (though roughly a
  
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• Taking your temperature from the inside

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Oral and forehead thermometers may not accurately capture a person’s core body temperature, and the few ingestible temperature sensors on the market are so big they are hard to swallow and risk obstructing the GI tract. But MIT engineers created one that can send continuous temperature updates at a size of just six by four millimeters.To create it, the researchers built a circuit that can fit on a one-square-­millimeter silicon chip and designed an oscillator based on leakage current&m
  
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• Seeing through murky waters

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  When remotely operated vehicles settle on the seafloor or dig through a sand bed, they can kick up clouds of sediment that onboard cameras struggle to see through. Often, the only thing to do is wait until the dust settles. But a new system developed by Amy Phung, SM ’23, PhD ’26, and her advisor Richard Camilli, SM ’00, PhD ’03, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), offers a solution. In this technique, the vehicle first uses sonar to quickly map its s
  
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• MIT tech powered the Artemis II livestreams

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  During the original US missions to the moon in the 1960s and ’70s, astronauts relied on radio-­frequency systems to communicate, sending grainy, low-quality images and videos to Earth. But on the Artemis II Orion mission in April, spacecraft transmitted crystal-clear footage at speeds on par with those of home internet connections. The livestreams so many people enjoyed were made possible through the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O), developed by MIT Lincoln La
  
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• Launching youth entrepreneurship

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Even as a teenager, Laurie Stach ’06 says, she had a “crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems.” At MIT, she realized she wasn’t the only one.“Adults always see these youth who are good at math and science and say, ‘You’re going to do great things—someday,’” says Stach. “Meanwhile, traditional education isn’t preparing them.”That’s why in 2012 Stach founded LaunchX, a for-profit entrepreneurship pro
  
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• Amping up T cells to target cancer

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Vaccines that turn the body’s immune system against tumors have shown promise in clinical trials, and a handful have been FDA approved for certain cancers. In many patients, however, these vaccines don’t stimulate enough of a response, and the approach some researchers have taken to strengthening it—delivering the vaccine along with immune-stimulating molecules called cytokines—can cause severe side effects.Now MIT chemical engineer Daniel Anderson and colleagues at MIT,
  
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• AgeLab research inspires an A I startup

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  When Don Yansen ’63 arrived at the MIT AgeLab for a study on technology in care­giving for older adults, he didn’t plan to launch another company. But when he heard participants talk about how hard modern devices can be to use, he decided to develop an alternative.Yansen, a serial entrepreneur who retired to care for his wife, earned an MIT degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in physics from Northeastern. “What I took from MIT was a good education and
  
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• Addressing a sticking point in sustainable adhesives

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Petroleum-based adhesives are everywhere: bonding the wood and drywall in a construction project, holding together the joints of furniture, and even sticking labels to otherwise recyclable containers. “The labels on a container are held up with petroleum-based glue. And because of that, even though you’re putting the container in the recycle bin, it will not get recycled,” says Patty Ferreira, MBA ’97, CEO and cofounder of Silvis Materials, which is combating th
  
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• A new stamp on cyberfraud prevention

  25-08-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  For Rupert Young ’95, SM ’95, his career in data science and cybersecurity began when his grandfather gifted him thousands of stamps: He built intricate databases to catalogue them, displaying the “precise eye” for detail and nuance that his MIT application essay said would make him a good engineer.Young is now chief product officer of ­MaxMind, whose work with IP-address location data and fraud prevention has made it a go-to resource. Streaming companies, security ve
  
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• Art and algorithms at Sotheby’s

  25-08-2026 20:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Do fine art and high tech ever converge? At Sotheby’s they do, thanks to Kelly Shen ’17. Shen works in the growing field of art intelligence for the New York auction house.Shen builds algorithms to predict prices, using factors like buying trends and artists’ popularity. She has also worked on such efforts as cataloguing and ensuring that real-time systems can handle thousands of potential bidders visiting the house’s website. At the same time, she serves MIT as a class o
  
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• The Download: smarter AI in schools, and a robot “carnival” in Shanghai

  25-08-2026 14:10 via technologyreview.com
  
  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.
  How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroomChatbots took schools by surprise. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any homework question or spin up an essay in seconds.Organizations ranging from OpenAI to UNESCO encourage AI use in the classroom, but many teachers aren’t sure how to handle
  
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• Welcome to the spiderverse, a world measured through webs

  25-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Counting the creatures in the world around us is critical for a raft of conservation efforts. It helps scientists gauge biodiversity, track migration, and spot invasive species. That census-taking, though, often requires humans to tabulate what they see, trap, or otherwise sense—a potentially laborious, costly process that can still leave gaps.But developments over the last decade have revolutionized eco-surveillance. Biologists have tapped into sequencing technology to analyze environment
  
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• I spent a day at a robot “carnival” in Shanghai. Here’s what I saw.

  25-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  __________________________
  THE PLACE
  Shanghai, ChinaHumanoid robots are having a moment in China. The popular machines are part of the country’s strategy to bring artificial intelligence into daily life. Embedding the technology into physical systems—an idea called embodied AI—was a key facet of China’s latest five-year plan, and companies here are already world leaders in humanoids. Nearly 90% of the more than 13,000 two-armed, two-legged robots delivered globally last
  
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• How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroom

  24-08-2026 16:20 via technologyreview.com
  
  This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here.Chatbots took many schools by surprise upon their release a few years ago. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any homework question or spin up an essay in seconds. Of course, teachers can often tell when a student is using AI—models make mistakes that most humans d
  
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• The Download: kids outlearning AI, and space travel agents

  24-08-2026 14:10 via technologyreview.com
  
  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.Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know whyTeaching a computer to use human language requires an inhuman amount of data. An LLM can easily churn through a hundred thousand times more words than a person will experience in the process of mastering their mother tongue.This yawning divide between children and machines is called the data ef
  
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• The Download: threats from space mirrors and credit for AI drugs

  21-08-2026 14:10 via technologyreview.com
  
  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 company’s plans to deploy space mirrors could jeopardize the night sky for manyA company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the night sky for many more people than intended, according to a new study.Later this year, Reflect Orbital plans to launch a test satellite that will extend an
  
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• When AI designs a drug, who gets the credit?

  21-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  When the biotech company Insilico Medicine used its computer models to propose a promising drug for pulmonary fibrosis, it enthusiastically claimed in a press release that the molecule had been “discovered by” its generative AI platform.Insilico leads a pack of companies using AI to rapidly come up with drug ideas humans might never think of, potentially speeding the race to new cures. AI models are now able to generate atomic designs for drugs almost as easily as ChatGPT can write
  
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• This company’s plans to deploy space mirrors could jeopardize the night sky for many

  21-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the night sky for many more people than intended, according to a new study.Later this year, the US company Reflect Orbital plans to launch a test satellite called Eärendil-1 that will extend an 18-by-18-meter mirror in orbit. The goal is to test the feasibility of the company’s plans to launch up to 50,000 larger satellites, measuring 54 by 54 meters, and reflect sunlight to Earth on de
  
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• Mother tongue

  21-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  “Daddy?” Theo curled against my side in bed. “Where do words go when they die?”I’d orchestrated the bedtime routine flawlessly: bath (taken), teeth (brushed), potty (tinkled), books (two), song (one, poorly sung), and snuggle (his chin on my second rib). Now was the moment when our son’s eyelids were supposed to flutter gently closed, his breath sighing into a slower rhythm. Like clockwork; like magic. You remember how easy it was, don’t you? All those n
  
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• How landscape gardening is being electrified

  21-08-2026 01:12 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The switch to quieter electric equipment is not going as fast as some would like.
  
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• Is Vine back? Short-form video-sharing app Divine opens to public

  20-08-2026 18:58 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The app lets users create six-second looping videos and hosts more than two million classic videos.
  
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• Debates over AI consciousness are a trap

  20-08-2026 17:42 via technologyreview.com
  
  “Runaway” AI, “rogue” agents, and “autonomous” actors—the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly “superhuman” systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations and academic philosophers often aligned with the effective altruism movement, debat
  
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• The Download: polycrisis support networks and a hydrogen gold rush

  20-08-2026 14:10 via technologyreview.com
  
  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.
  Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisisSometime in the late 2000s, six-year-old Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car in Thailand when she saw a mountain that had been quarried away. It was the first time she recognized that humans could alter the world for the worse.She carried that knowledge with her, later joini
  
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• The next big thing in hydrogen could be underground

  20-08-2026 12:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  There’s a hunt for new sources of hydrogen, and the gas (or at least the right conditions to make it) could be hiding beneath our feet.Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in everything from large trucks to planes to steelmaking. It’s often hailed as a climate solution because when burned, it produces water and oxygen—none of the carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.In a new story for our latest print issue, freelance reporter James Dineen took a look at the 21st-centu
  
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• Unlocking hidden revenue streams with market models

  20-08-2026 11:47 via technologyreview.com
  
  Each day, an airline transports tens of thousands of passengers on hundreds of flights. Often these are not straightforward point-to-point routes, with passengers requiring multiple connections. The airline can consider potentially hundreds of variables to price each of these journeys: demand, season, time of day, current events, global markets, and competitor airline activity to name just a few. It is a nuanced process that must constantly adapt to the goings on in the wider world.Generative AI
  
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• UK business hit by 'daylight robbery' 1500% price hike for invoicing software

  20-08-2026 11:44 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Richard Haldenby says his average monthly bill for Harvest had risen from $130 (£95.50) to $2,110.
  
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• Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis

  20-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried out,” she says. “Like half the mountain just dug out and disappeared, and so there was just this huge orange face.” Although she probably didn’t
  
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