MIT Technology Review
Extraterrestrial musings: Does Jupiter’s ice-coated moon Europa host life?
Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, Europa, has captivated planetary scientists interested in the geophysics of alien worlds ...
The ‘weird, wild, wonderful, and downright unsettling’ ways researchers are using mini organs
Scientists are using organoids to screen drug candidates, grow viruses, build biocomputers, and much, much more ...
Bacteria that cleans sewage? Microbes have evolved to break down medications that we excrete
Many wastewater treatment plants mix wastewater and air in a tank to form an activated sludge, which helps bacteria break ...
In 2023, humans generated more energy-related emissions than ever before. Here’s why clean energy hydropower was the culprit
Hydropower is a staple of clean energy and it’s one of the world’s largest sources of renewable electricity ...
Finding ‘beating heart cadavers’ — That’s what’s needed to fuel gene-edited organ research
The University of Pennsylvania connected a pig liver to a brain-dead person in an experiment that lasted for three days ...
‘The edge of chaos’: Why switching tasks makes our brains go haywire
Study shows that our brains exist between chaos and stability—a finding that could be used to help tweak them either ...
Here are the most important Artificial Intelligence innovations to track in 2024
AI’s problems will shape the agenda for researchers, regulators, and the public, not just in 2024 but for years to ...
‘When you’re starving, hunger is like a demon’: Scientists finally grasping how hunger commandeers the brain
More than 1.9 billion adults worldwide are overweight and more than 650 million are obese, a condition correlated with a ...
When will needle-free COVID vaccines arrive in the US?
Vaccines delivered through the nose or mouth should help stop infection where it begins. But researchers are still working to ...
Highschoolers used AI to create non-consensual sexually explicit images. Here’s how US lawmakers are responding
Legislators are responding quickly after high school teens used AI to create nonconsensual sexually explicit images ...
Jet lag and night shifts disturb our sleep cycles and molecular clocks. Could a drug one day reduce these effects?
The circadian clock sits in our brains keeps our bodies in rhythm and this helps control when we wake, eat, ...
Viewpoint: I took the exa-cel treatment for sickle cell disease. My symptoms ‘virtually disappeared overnight’
Exa-cel, the first CRISPR-based treatment to win approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, following the UK’s approval ...
How Casgevy came to be: How researchers found gene editing targets for newly-approved sickle cell drug
The world’s first commercial gene-editing treatment is set to start changing the lives of people with sickle-cell disease ...
Is death a singular event or a process?
Dying is in fact a process—one with no clear point demarcating the threshold across which someone cannot come back ...
Radical advances in mind reading technology: How it’s possible to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind
How we think, feel and experience the world is a mystery, but technology may be starting to help us understand ...
A start-up hopes to create carbon-storing ‘super-trees’. Hype or a possible breakthrough to address climate change?
At Living Carbon, [Patrick] Mellor is trying to design trees that grow faster and grab more carbon than their natural ...
Artificial intelligence helps researchers unpack the mystery of how life on Earth began
AI is helping chemists unpick the mysteries around the origins of life and detect signs of it on other worlds ...
Cleaning up the atmosphere: Can seaweed farming help capture carbon dioxide?
Researchers are looking into a wide range of approaches to removing carbon from the atmosphere. Some are straightforwardly technical, like direct ...
Seeking an end to cosmic loneliness: Inside the quest to find out if humans are the only intelligent life in the universe
New tools, including machine learning and AI, could help scientists look past their preconceived notions of what constitutes life ...
In medical first, man paralyzed by Parkinson’s can walk after spinal implant
The implant delivers bursts of electrical signals, stimulating his spinal cord to make his leg muscles move ...
Gene therapy treatment restores hearing to five children in China. Will the results last?
After deafness treatment, Yiyi can hear her mother and dance to the music. But why is it so noisy at ...
Can we cut cost and pain of IVF? Start-up CEO tries out own company’s alternative way to ‘mature’ human eggs in lab dish instead of inside bodies
While life expectancy is getting longer—it has been slowly rising for a hundred years—that’s not true of women’s reproductive life ...
Brain waves can reveal chronic pain patterns, opening doors to personalized treatments
Brain signals can be used to detect how much pain a person is experiencing, which could overhaul how we treat ...
A CRISPR gene-editing tool has been added to three people with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Is it working?
CRISPR is being used in an experimental effort to eliminate the virus that causes AIDS. The result is unknown ...
Meet the Annihilator: Could this technology rid the environment of PFAS ‘forever chemicals’?
PFAS stands for “per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances,” human-made and incredibly durable chemical compounds that have been used for decades ...
AI drug development breakthroughs open up possibility of faster, cheaper pharmaceutical production. Do these medications work?
Today, on average, it takes more than 10 years and billions of dollars to develop a new drug. The vision ...
A gym without trainers? Here’s how AI is already revolutionizing workouts
Wall-to-wall LED screens, algorithms, and motion tracking sensors allow Lumin Fitness to offer supervised workouts with no human interaction ...
With Nobel Prize in hand, mRNA set to revolutionize next generation vaccines and therapeutics
The Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine honored two scientists whose research into messenger RNA (mRNA) technology paved the way ...