Category Archives: Technology

The Download: China’s manufacturers’ viral moment, and how AI is changing creativity

The Download: China’s manufacturers’ viral moment, and how AI is changing creativity

Since the video was posted earlier this month, millions of TikTok users have watched as a young Chinese man in a blue T-shirt sits beside a traditional tea set and speaks directly to the camera in accented English: “Let’s expose luxury’s biggest secret.”  He stands and lifts what looks like an Hermès Birkin bag, one […]

The Download: How Trump’s tariffs will affect US manufacturing, and AI architecture

The Download: How Trump’s tariffs will affect US manufacturing, and AI architecture

The quest to figure out farming on Mars Once upon a time, water flowed across the surface of Mars. Waves lapped against shorelines, strong winds gusted and howled, and driving rain fell from thick, cloudy skies. It wasn’t really so different from our own planet 4 billion years ago, except for one crucial detail—its size. […]

Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound

The Download: How Trump’s tariffs will affect US manufacturing, and AI architecture

The US was great at inventing new stuff, it turns out, but lousy at making it. The hope is that this situation is changing as the country builds up its manufacturing muscles. The stakes are particularly high. The value of producing strategic goods and their supply chains domestically—biomedicine, critical minerals, advanced semiconductors—is becoming obvious to […]

Driving business value by optimizing the cloud

Driving business value by optimizing the cloud

At the same time, hosted services like generative AI and tailored industry solutions can help companies quickly launch applications and grow the business. To get the most out of these services, companies are turning to cloud optimization—the process of selecting and allocating cloud resources to reduce costs while maximizing performance. But despite all the interest […]

The Download: Apple’s eucalyptus carbon bet, and climate tech’s bad vibes

The Download: Apple’s eucalyptus carbon bet, and climate tech’s bad vibes

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 controversial tree farms powering Apple’s carbon neutral goal “We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge […]

Roundtables: Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product

Roundtables: Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product

Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by MIT Technology Review‘s readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist paralyzed people. Hear from MIT Technology Review editor at large David Rotman and […]

AI is pushing the limits of the physical world

AI is pushing the limits of the physical world

Technology has long enabled architecture to push the limits of form and function. As early as 1963, Sketchpad, one of the first architectural software programs, allowed architects and designers to move and change objects on screen. Rapidly, traditional hand drawing gave way to an ever-expanding suite of programs—­Revit, SketchUp, and BIM, among many others—that helped […]

The world’s biggest space-based radar will measure Earth’s forests from orbit

The world’s biggest space-based radar will measure Earth’s forests from orbit

These indirect systems rely on a combination of field sampling—foresters roaming among the trees to measure their height and diameter—and remote sensing technologies like lidar scanners, which can be flown over the forests on airplanes or drones and used to measure treetop height along lines of flight. This approach has worked well in North America […]