Research & Development news

• Solid-state batteries

  21-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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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• We can do impossible things

  21-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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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• Nuclear-powered spaceships

  21-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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 technologyreview.com
  
  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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• 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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• 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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• 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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