Research & Development news

• X-energy and its helium-cooled nuclear reactors

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  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.
  Solar panels and wind turbines are great at producing electricity but what heavy industry also needs is raw heat—and lots of it. The manufacture of concrete, glass, and steel, as well as the production of many chemicals, plastics, and fertilizers, are
  
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• Weight-loss drugs show signs of slowing biological aging, say drugmakers

  06-10-2026 18:40 via technologyreview.com
  
  Popular weight-loss drugs may do more than help people shed pounds. They might also melt away the years.Drug giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk say patients taking their drugs age less quickly, according to readouts from molecular “aging clocks.”Such clocks assess a person’s biological age by looking at changes to DNA that accumulate with time, or, in newer versions, by tracking levels of key proteins.Both companies found that overweight or diabetic patients taking the drugs, ca
  
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• The Download: 10 climate tech companies to watch

  06-10-2026 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.10 climate tech companies to watchEach year, MIT Technology Review puts together a list of the most promising climate tech companies in the world. This year, the stakes feel higher than ever. The world is on track for one of its hottest years on record, climate-fueled disasters are taking lives and costing billions, while political shifts and intern
  
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• WeLion New Energy and its semi-solid-state batteries

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  WeLion New Energy is on a quest to make safer, better batteries. The company’s semi-solid-state cells could improve safety and offer greater energy density than lithium-ion batteries to power electric cars, boats, and drones.
  From the EVs that carry commuters home to the ships that transport goods across countries, more and more vehicles around us are powered by batteries. Lithium-ion batteries are commonly used to power personal devices and vehicles today. But as the need for batter
  
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• WaveSave and its portable rubber dam

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  As sea levels rise and flood risks worsen due to global warming, WaveSave’s easy-to-erect portable dam offers a quick-response tool. People can use the dam to protect themselves and their property, and it can also store freshwater for later use. Communities in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia have deployed it successfully. Now, the company is expanding into other water-related services to help vulnerable places become more resilient.
  One in five people globally are at high risk of being
  
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• Moment Energy and its shipping containers packed with old EV batteries

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  Demand for energy storage is surging, with capacity expected to grow eightfold in the next decade. To meet that demand, Moment Energy wants to shortcut a supply chain that now flows largely through China, by domestically repurposing EV batteries into new grid-connected storage systems.
  Moment Energy’s four founders met while studying mechatronics engineering in college and worked together on a team that built and raced electric cars. After graduating, they scattered to companies including
  
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• Here’s how our climate team picked 10 promising companies to watch

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  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. This year is shaping up to be one of the hottest ever recorded. The world must begin to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to address the climate crisis, which is already affecting communities around the globe. Wildfires, floods, and other climate-fueled d
  
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• Form Energy and its iron batteries

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  Form Energy is building iron-based batteries that can store energy for multiple days. The company is ramping up supply at its factory and signing deals for commercial projects.
  New solar and wind installations produce electricity more affordably than fossil fuels in most places, but their output varies based on season, time of day, and weather. To compensate, utilities are increasingly investing in battery storage systems, which can charge when power is abundant and discharge when the grid need
  
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• Energy Dome and its carbon dioxide batteries

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  There’s a growing need for long-duration storage to meet energy demand and balance out renewables on the grid. Energy Dome uses compressed carbon dioxide gas in its massive grid batteries, which can deliver power for up to 24 hours. 
  As the world races to meet growing electricity demand, solar and onshore wind power have become the cheapest and quickest-to-deploy sources to install on the grid. But, despite their upsides, both are subject to variations in weather patterns, which mean
  
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• Brimstone and its one-stop process for making cleaner cement and critical minerals

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  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. If the company can do both, with the same rocks in the same plant, it would unlock a cleaner and more efficient process for manufacturing building materials, aluminum, steel, and more.
  Brimstone is a code-switching climate tech company for these polarized political times. The US-based startup—part green cement company, part critica
  
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• BasiGo and its fleet of electric buses

  06-10-2026 12:35 via technologyreview.com
  
  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. The company’s pay-as-you-drive business model has helped make EVs more attainable and is changing the way public transport operates.
  In a bid to contain the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the Kenyan government temporarily suspended public transportation. The suspension lasted only three days, yet the change in air quality was dramatic. The air
  
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• Connecting AI agents to enterprise knowledge

  05-10-2026 17:47 via technologyreview.com
  
  For all the data that AI systems continually amass and analyze, enterprise AI agents often suffer from a curious shortcoming: a lack of knowledge. More than data, knowledge is the understanding of what the data means in the context of individual organizations. AI agents need this understanding to reason about situations, make decisions, and ultimately take actions. Without sufficient knowledge, agents are prone to making flawed and unreliable decisions.
  A lack of knowledge, our research finds, i
  
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• Bringing predictive analytics to the agentic AI era 

  05-10-2026 15:29 via technologyreview.com
  
  In 2026, the question for enterprise AI is no longer whether predictive models can outperform statistical forecasts—that argument is settled. The big question now is how to enable predictive systems to act on their own conclusions without drifting from business intent. The frontier has moved from prediction to autonomous decision making, and the gap between leaders and laggards is widening accordingly.“Enterprises are done with a backward-looking point of view; they want to be more f
  
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• The Download: AI’s popularity paradox and EmTech Future 2026

  05-10-2026 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.People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?—Will Douglas HeavenOver the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM designed to come up with a wide variety of responses. He said something that’s been stuck in my head since: “We often say that we’re a self-loathing AI company. We don&rs
  
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• People really hate AI, so why can’t they get enough?

  05-10-2026 10:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that’s been stuck in my head since: “We often say that we’re a self-loathing AI company. We don’t know if we really like what we’re doing.”“I guess that makes me a self-loathing AI journalist,” I replied. It was a joke! I love my
  
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• EmTech Future 2026: When AI Meets Everything

  05-10-2026 06:00 via technologyreview.com
  Yossi Matias, Vice President & Head of Google Research, explores how AI is beginning to reshape biology, infrastructure, manufacturing, and science, and why its greatest impact may come when it intersects with other fields. Step inside the newsroom with our MIT Technology Review editors for sharp analysis and unpublished insights from the team that researches and reports on emerging tech daily. There’s much more to discover These are just two sessions from 
  
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• Trump unveils 'Super Intelligence Force' to oversee AI policy

  05-10-2026 05:22 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The president named his national intelligence chief as the taskforce's head as worries over AI grow.
  
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• Redefining enterprise intelligence with autonomous AI

  02-10-2026 17:49 via technologyreview.com
  
  Enterprise AI is no longer a future ambition. It is in full operational flight. Model capabilities are advancing faster than most organizations can absorb, while the cost of performance continues to fall. Globally, AI investment is set to reach $2.5 trillion in 2026, up 44% from the previous year.For many enterprises, this investment has produced fragmentation. Intelligence can accumulate in silos so that sales agents are unaware of open support tickets, for instance, or marketing systems are pe
  
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• The Download: a biological de-aging contest and why LLMs don’t reason

  02-10-2026 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.A new contest pits competitors against each other in a race to biological youth—Jessica HamzelouThis week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger.I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused
  
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• A new contest pits competitors against each other in a race to biological youth

  02-10-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  This week, I officially signed up for an unusual competition. One that rewards competitors for getting younger.I recently turned 40, and I don’t need reminding that both time and my chronological age only tick forward. But this game is focused on competitors’ biological ages—figures that are meant to provide a better way to measure the age-related health of our organs and bodies.Over a six-month period, around 500 of us will try to reverse our biological age as measured in a b
  
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• OpenAI fires workers for 'mishandling sensitive information'

  02-10-2026 10:20 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The former employees were investigated for sharing data with an outside AI evaluation group.
  
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• Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason

  02-10-2026 10:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent. Move 37 in game two of the five-game match looked so absurd that some commentators thought it was a programming glitch. It wasn’t. AlphaGo won the game, ultimately triumphing 4-1 over Lee Sedol, one of the greatest professional Go players of all time. “I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and that it
  
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• Crypto thieves attack man in home and threaten to kill pregnant wife's baby in 'horrific' robbery

  02-10-2026 01:45 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The man was beaten with hammers until he transferred hundreds of thousands of pounds of cryptocurrency.
  
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• The Download: AI “mind-reading” and creative uses for small batteries

  01-10-2026 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.An AI “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at based on a brain scanA new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at just by analyzing your brain scans—and recreate that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way too, and predict a person’s brain activity based on what they’re l
  
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• Trump's AI rebrand causes 'unprecedented' demand for Slovenian website names

  01-10-2026 13:37 via bbc.co.uk
  
  The president wants AI to be called super intelligence - or SI - the same initials used by Slovenian domains.
  
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• An AI “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at from a brain scan

  01-10-2026 12:32 via technologyreview.com
  
  A new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at just by analyzing your brain scans—and re-create that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way too, and predict a person’s brain activity based on what they’re looking at. In the image above, for example, the left-hand image of each pair is what the user actually saw—and its right-hand counterpart is what the model reconstructed based on the brain scan.  Michal Irani, who developed the to
  
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• An AI “mind-reading” tool can reconstruct what you’re looking at based on a brain scan

  01-10-2026 12:32 via technologyreview.com
  
  A new AI tool can guess what you’re looking at just by analyzing your brain scans—and recreate that image with remarkable precision. It can go the other way too, and predict a person’s brain activity based on what they’re looking at. In the image above, for example, the left-hand image of each pair is what the user actually saw—and its right-hand counterpart is what the model recreated based on the brain scan.  Michal Irani, who developed the tool wi
  
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• AI boom could trigger market shocks, Bank of England boss warns

  01-10-2026 12:05 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Andrew Bailey says the central bank is watching the waves of cash being invested in artificial intelligence "very carefully".
  
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• How smaller, distributed batteries could help the grid

  01-10-2026 12:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  If you want to install a big battery in New York City, you have to cut through a notoriously tough tangle of regulations. That’s made it difficult to get large energy storage projects on the grid.Faced with those obstacles, some startups are getting creative, finding ways to use relatively small batteries in unexpected places, from induction stovetops to food carts. By deploying these more consumer-focused batteries, the companies are helping people directly, cutting pollution or power bil
  
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• Tiny image sparks big backlash in Nikon photo contest

  01-10-2026 01:10 via bbc.co.uk
  
  Dr Ning Xu denies he broke the rules of Nikon's annual Small World In Motion contest.
  
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