Research & Development news

• Melt it, spin it, use it again

  20-10-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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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• Taking a swing at a pickleball startup

  20-10-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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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• It’s a bird, it’s a plane … it’s a robo-puffin?

  20-10-2026 23:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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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• The new economics of enterprise AI

  20-10-2026 17:20 via technologyreview.com
  
  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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• The Download: the claim shaking up AI and the internet’s agent problem

  20-10-2026 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.“We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wi
  
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• AI adoption by industry shows what other sectors can learn

  20-10-2026 14:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  The current narrative around artificial intelligence in the workplace is largely driven by Silicon Valley. But treating the tech sector as an island misses the actual trends in technology adoption–tech is just the first industry in line.As generative AI and automation tools mature, the shifts currently reshaping software engineering and product management will inevitably filter into healthcare, education, retail, and manufacturing. The variation in adoption rates today isn’t a sign t
  
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• How to study a swiftly melting climate disaster

  20-10-2026 12:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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. He knelt in front of a blue tarp, lined the barrel up with a plastic tray, and pushed a rod through the opposite end. A perfect solid, cylindrical core of ancient soil emerged—dark, rich permafrost at least a foot long.On that late morning in ea
  
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• These startups hope “blended” food will cut our appetite for red meat 

  20-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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. When the first rush of about 150 hungry students hit, he was waiting with slow cookers filled with steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. Kids love a taste test, but they’re also discerning, and Dodge wasn’t sure what they would make of his product, a blend featuring both meat and mushrooms. As students swarmed the tabl
  
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• A visit to Samsung’s massive new semiconductor hub

  20-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  _____________
  THE PLACE
  Pyeongtaek,
  South KoreaGenerative AI models run on powerful chips known as GPUs, which depend on stacks of specialized memory chips packaged with the processor. To meet growing demand for memory, Samsung is building a massive new semiconductor manufacturing complex in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. Three fabs already operate around the clock, and a fourth is coming online. Construction of a fifth was halted during a drop in demand for memory chips in 2024 but restarted when the
  
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• Ex-OpenAI worker accused of planting device had Saudi support, says court filing

  19-10-2026 23:12 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The Saudi government did not immediately respond to BBC requests for comment.
  
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• Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else

  19-10-2026 20:22 via technologyreview.com
  
  This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people. Websites have long allowed bots to perform automated tasks, like capturing the content of web pages, but rules govern what they can access and how they behave. The web, after all, is designed primarily for people, even if we occasionally have to solve puzzles and cap
  
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• US bans China's DeepSeek from government in race for AI dominance

  19-10-2026 20:21 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The Chinese technology is removed from most US government agencies as race for AI dominance steps up.
  
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• “We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world

  19-10-2026 19:45 via technologyreview.com
  
  “I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well as cautious (and not-so-cautious) celebration.Cammarata’s claim is that LLMs might in fact be far easier to understand—and thus to monitor and control—than people previously thought. If true (and we&
  
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• Uber wins bid to throw out £200m black cab claims

  19-10-2026 14:58 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Claims that Uber misled TfL over its licence were thrown out because they were brought too late.
  
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• The Download: preserving the Arctic permafrost, and playful AI agents

  19-10-2026 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.
  Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbon—James TempleIn July 2021, a wildfire burned through a forest on the University of Alaska, Fairbanks campus, stripping away the moss and organic-rich soil insulating the permafrost below. Five years later, I followed researchers into the forest to investigat
  
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• Musk and Anthropic pledge public share giveaways

  19-10-2026 11:38 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Musk's announcement comes after Anthropic pledged to create a public benefit fund ahead of its blockbuster stock market listing.
  
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• Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbon

  19-10-2026 11:22 via technologyreview.com
  
  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. The blaze, possibly sparked by lightning, burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the crowns. By the time fire agencies responded, flames had reached 12 feet in length and sent up a 500-foot column of smoke. A few days shy of the five-year anniversary of
  
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• AI researchers stranded Claude on a virtual desert island. It started to “play.”

  19-10-2026 11:08 via technologyreview.com
  
  What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play.Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone. The agents—copies of Claude Opus 4.7 nicknamed Eko—were able to write instructions that moved their virtual avatars around the simulated island, which was loosely based on the video game Roblox.Some surprising behaviors emerged. The agen
  
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• How far can we push computing?

  19-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” on how we might manipulate and control things on an extremely small scale. There is no physical law stopp
  
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• China's growth accelerates as AI boom helps boost exports

  19-10-2026 08:08 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Exports have helped offset weak spending at home, but trade tensions and AI doubts cloud its outlook.
  
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• Don't fall for this - how to protect yourself from AI scams

  19-10-2026 01:24 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Trading standards officers say AI is "super-charging" existing scams through clones and fake websites.
  
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• No further action against government adviser's wife over Palestine Action post, police say

  17-10-2026 22:24 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Sarah Helm, who is married to Jonathan Powell, was responding to a discussion about the author Sally Rooney.
  
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