MIT Technology Reviews Whats Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.In the early 2020s, a little-known aquaculture company in Portland, Maine, snagged more than $50 million by pitching a plan to harness nature to fight back against climate change. The company, Running Tide, said it could sink enough kelp to the seafloor to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year, according to one of its early customers.Instead, the business shut down its operations last summer, marking the biggest bust to date in the nascent carbon removal sector.Its demise was the most obvious sign of growing troubles and dimming expectations for a space that has spawned hundreds of startups over the last few years. A handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. Venture investments have flagged. And the collective industry hasnt made a whole lot more progress toward that billion-ton benchmark.The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, warns Robert Hglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, a public-benefit corporation that provides data and analysis on the carbon removal industry.Were past the peak of expectations, he says. And with that, we could see a lot of companies go out of business, which is natural for any industry.The open question is: If the carbon removal sector is heading into a painful if inevitable clearing-out cycle, where will it go from there?The odd quirk of carbon removal is that it never made a lot of sense as a business proposition: Its an atmospheric cleanup job, necessary for the collective societal good of curbing climate change. But it doesnt produce a service or product that any individual or organization strictly needsor is especially eager to pay for.To date, a number of businesses have voluntarily agreed to buy tons of carbon dioxide that companies intend to eventually suck out of the air. But whether theyre motivated by sincere climate concerns or pressures from investors, employees, or customers, corporate do-goodism will only scale any industry so far.Most observers argue that whether carbon removal continues to bobble along or transforms into something big enough to make a dent in climate change will depend largely on whether governments around the world decide to pay for a whole, whole lot of itor force polluters to.Private-sector purchases will never get us there, says Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, a nonprofit that advocates for the removal and reuse of carbon dioxide. We need policy; it has to be policy.Whats the problem?The carbon removal sector began to scale up in the early part of this decade, as increasingly grave climate studies revealed the need to dramatically cut emissions and suck down vast amounts of carbon dioxide to keep global warming in check.Specifically, nations may have to continually remove as much as 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year by around midcentury to have a solid chance of keeping the planet from warming past 2 C over preindustrial levels, according to a UN climate panel report in 2022.A number of startups sprang up to begin developing the technology and building the infrastructure that would be needed, trying out a variety of approaches like sinking seaweed or building carbon-dioxide-sucking factories.And they soon attracted customers. Companies including Stripe, Google, Shopify, Microsoft, and others began agreeing to pre-purchase tons of carbon removal, hoping to stand up the nascent industry and help offset their own climate emissions. Venture investments also flooded into the space, peaking in 2023 at nearly $1 billion, according to data provided by PitchBook.From early on, players in the emerging sector sought to draw a sharp distinction between conventional carbon offset projects, which studies have shown frequently exaggerate climate benefits, and durable carbon removal that could be relied upon to suck down and store away the greenhouse gas for decades to centuries. Theres certainly a big difference in the price: While buying carbon offsets through projects that promise to preserve forests or plant trees might cost a few dollars per ton, a ton of carbon removal can run hundreds to thousands of dollars, depending on the approach.That high price, however, brings big challenges. Removing 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year at, say, $300 a ton adds up to a global price tag of $3 trilliona year.Which brings us back to the fundamental question: Who should or would foot the bill to develop and operate all the factories, pipelines, and wells needed to capture, move, and bury billions upon billions of tons of carbon dioxide?The state of the marketThe market is still growing, as companies voluntarily purchase tons of carbon removal to make strides toward their climate goals. In fact, sales reached an all-time high in the second quarter of this year, mostly thanks to several massive purchases by Microsoft.But industry sources fear that demand isnt growing fast enough to support a significant share of the startups that have formed or even the projects being built, undermining the momentum required to scale the sector up to the size needed by midcentury.To date, all those hundreds of companies that have spun up in recent years have disclosed deals to sell some 38 million tons of carbon dioxide pulled from the air, according to CDR.fyi. Thats roughly the amount the US pumps out in energy-related emissions every three days.And theyve only delivered around 940,000 tons of carbon removal. The US emits that much carbon dioxide in less than two hours. (Not every transaction is publicly announced or revealed to CDR.fyi, so the actual figures could run a bit higher.)Another concern is that the same handful of big players continue to account for the vast majority of the overall purchases, leaving the health and direction of the market dependent on their whims and fortunes.Most glaringly, Microsoft has agreed to buy 80% of all the carbon removal purchased to date, according to CDR.fyi. The second-biggest buyer is Frontier, a coalition of companies that includes Google, Meta, Stripe, and Shopify, which has committed to spend $1 billion.If you strip out those two buyers, the market shrinks from 16 million tons under contract during the first half of this year to just 1.2 million, according to data provided to MIT Technology Review by CDR.fyi.Signs of troubleMeanwhile, the investor appetite for carbon removal is cooling. For the 12-month period ending in the second quarter of 2025, venture capital investments in the sector fell more than 13% from the same period last year, according to data provided by PitchBook. That tightening funding will make it harder and harder for companies that arent bringing in revenue to stay afloat.Other companies that have already shut down include the carbon removal marketplace Nori, the direct air capture company Noya and Alkali Earth, which was attempting to use industrial by-products to tie up carbon dioxide.Still other businesses are struggling. Climeworks, one of the first companies to build direct-air-capture (DAC) factories, announced it was laying off 10% of its staff in May, as it grapples with challenges on several fronts.The companys plans to collaborate on the development of a major facility in the US have been at least delayed as the Trump administration has held back tens of millions of dollars in funding granted in 2023 under the Department of Energys Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program. It now appears the government could terminate the funding altogether, along with perhaps tens of billions of dollars worth of additional grants previously awarded for a variety of other US carbon removal and climate tech projects.Market rumors have surfaced, and Climeworks is prepared for all scenarios, Christoph Gebald, one of the companys co-CEOs, said in a previous statement to MIT Technology Review. The need for DAC is growing as the world falls short of its climate goals and were working to achieve the gigaton capacity that will be needed.But purchases from direct-air-capture projects fell nearly 16% last year and account for just 8% of all carbon removal transactions to date. Buyers are increasingly looking to categories that promise to deliver tons faster and for less money, notably including burying biochar or installing carbon capture equipment on bioenergy plants. (Read more in my recent story on that method of carbon removal, known as BECCS, here.)CDR.fyi recently described the climate for direct air capture in grim terms: The sector has grown rapidly, but the honeymoon is over: Investment and sales are falling, while deployments are delayed across almost every company.Most DAC companies, the organization added, will fold or be acquired.Whats next?In the end, most observers believe carbon removal isnt really going to take off unless governments bring their resources and regulations to bear. That could mean making direct purchases, subsidizing these sectors, or getting polluters to pay the costs to do sofor instance, by folding carbon removal into market-based emissions reductions mechanisms like cap-and-trade systems.More government support does appear to be on the way. Notably, the European Commission recently proposed allowing domestic carbon removal within its EU Emissions Trading System after 2030, integrating the sector into one of the largest cap-and-trade programs. The system forces power plants and other polluters in member countries to increasingly cut their emissions or pay for them over time, as the cap on pollution tightens and the price on carbon rises.That could create incentives for more European companies to pay direct-air-capture or bioenergy facilities to draw down carbon dioxide as a means of helping them meet their climate obligations.There are also indications that the International Civil Aviation Organization, a UN organization that establishes standards for the aviation industry, is considering incorporating carbon removal into its market-based mechanism for reducing the sectors emissions. That might take several forms, including allowing airlines to purchase carbon removal to offset their use of traditional jet fuel or requiring the use of carbon dioxide obtained through direct air capture in some share of sustainable aviation fuels.Meanwhile, Canada has committed to spend $10 million on carbon removal and is developing a protocol to allow direct air capture in its national offsets program. And Japan will begin accepting several categories of carbon removal in its emissions trading system.Despite the Trump administrations efforts to claw back funding for the development of carbon-sucking projects, the US does continue to subsidize storage of carbon dioxide, whether it comes from power plants, ethanol refineries, direct-air-capture plants, or other facilities. The so-called 45Q tax credit, which is worth up to $180 a ton, was among the few forms of government support for climate-tech-related sectors that survived in the 2025 budget reconciliation bill. In fact, the subsidies for putting carbon dioxide to other uses increased.Even in the current US political climate, Burns is hopeful that local or federal legislators will continue to enact policies that support specific categories of carbon removal in the regions where they make the most sense, because the projects can provide economic growth and jobs as well as climate benefits.I actually think there are lots of models for what carbon removal policy can look like that arent just things like tax incentives, she says. And I think that this particular political moment gives us the opportunity in a unique way to start to look at what those regionally specific and pathway specific policies look like.The dangers aheadBut even if more nations do provide the money or enact the laws necessary to drive the business of durable carbon renewal forward, there are mounting concerns that a sector conceived as an alternative to dubious offset markets could increasingly come to replicate their problems.Various incentives are pulling in that direction.Financial pressures are building on suppliers to deliver tons of carbon removal. Corporate buyers are looking for the fastest and most affordable way of hitting their climate goals. And the organizations that set standards and accredit carbon removal projects often earn more money as the volume of purchases rises, creating clear conflicts of interest.Some of the same carbon registries that have long signed off on carbon offset projects have begun creating standards or issuing credits for various forms of carbon removal, including Verra and Gold Standard.Reliable assurance that a projects declared ton of carbon savings equates to a real ton of emissions removed, reduced, or avoided is crucial, Cynthia Giles, a senior EPA advisor under President Biden, and Cary Coglianese, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a recent editorial in Science. Yet extensive research from many contexts shows that auditors selected and paid by audited organizations often produce results skewed toward those entities interests.Noah McQueen, the director of science and innovation at Carbon180, has stressed that the industry must strive to counter the mounting credibility risks, noting in a recent LinkedIn post: Growth matters, but growth without integrity isnt growth at all.In an interview, McQueen said that heading off the problem will require developing and enforcing standards to truly ensure that carbon removal projects deliver the climate benefits promised. McQueen added that to gain trust, the industry needs to earn buy-in from the communities in which these projects are built and avoid the environmental and health impacts that power plants and heavy industry have historically inflicted on disadvantaged communities.Getting it right will require governments to take a larger role in the sector than just subsidizing it, argues David Ho, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa who focuses on ocean-based carbon removal.He says there should be a massive, multinational research drive to determine the most effective ways of mopping up the atmosphere with minimal environmental or social harm, likening it to a Manhattan Project (minus the whole nuclear bomb bit).If were serious about doing this, then lets make it a government effort, he says, so that you can try out all the things, determine what works and what doesnt, and you dont have to please your VCs or concentrate on developing [intellectual property] so you can sell yourself to a fossil-fuel company.Ho adds that theres a moral imperative for the worlds historically biggest climate polluters to build and pay for the carbon-sucking and storage infrastructure required to draw down billions of tons of greenhouse gas. Thats because the worlds poorest, hottest nations, which have contributed the least to climate change, will nevertheless face the greatest dangers from intensifying heat waves, droughts, famines, and sea-level rise.It should be seen as waste management for the waste were going to dump on the Global South, he says, because theyre the people who will suffer the most from climate change.Correction (October 24): An earlier version of this article referred to Noya as a carbon removal marketplace. It was a direct air capture company.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Whats next for carbon removal?After years of growth that spawned hundreds of startups, the nascent carbon removal sector appears to be facing a reckoning.Running Tide, a promising aquaculture company, shut down its operations last summer, and a handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. Venture investments have flagged. And the collective industry hasnt made a whole lot more progress toward Running Tides ambitious plans to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year.The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, experts warn.And the open question is: If the carbon removal sector is heading into a painful if inevitable clearing-out cycle, where will it go from there? Read the full story.James TempleThis story is part of MIT Technology Reviews Whats Next series, which looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.An AI app to measure pain is hereThis week Ive also been wondering how science and technology can help answer that questionespecially when it comes to pain.In the latest issue of MIT Technology Reviews print magazine, Deena Mousa describes how an AI-powered smartphone app is being used to assess how much pain a person is in.The app, and other tools like it, could help doctors and caregivers. They could be especially useful in the care of people who arent able to tell others how they are feeling.But they are far from perfect. And they open up all kinds of thorny questions about how we experience, communicate, and even treat pain. Read the full story.Jessica HamzelouThis article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Reviews weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Metas lawyers advised workers to remove parts of its teen mental health researchIts counsel told researchers to block or update their work to reduce legal liability. (Bloomberg $)+ Meta recently laid off more than 100 staff tasked with monitoring risks to user privacy. (NYT $)2 Donald Trump has pardoned the convicted Binance founderChangpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to violating US money laundering laws in 2023. (WSJ $)+ The move is likely to enable Binance to resume operating in the US. (CNN)+ Trump has vowed to be more crypto-friendly than the Biden administration. (Axios)3 Anthropic and Google Cloud have signed a major chips dealThe agreement is worth tens of billions of dollars. (FT $)4 Microsoft doesnt want you to talk dirty to its AIItll leave that kind of thing to OpenAI, thank you very much. (CNBC)+ Copilot now has its own version of Clippyjust dont try to get erotic with it. (The Verge)+ Its pretty easy to get DeepSeek to talk dirty, however. (MIT Technology Review)5 Big Tech is footing the bill for Trumps White House ballroomStand up Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. (TechCrunch)+ Crypto twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are also among the donors. (CNN)6 US investigators have busted a series of high-tech gambling schemesInvolving specially-designed contact lenses and x-ray tables. (NYT $)+ The case follows insider bets on basketball and poker games rigged by the mafia. (BBC)+ Automatic card shufflers can be compromised, too. (Wired $)7 Deepfake harassment tools are easily accessible on social mediaAnd simple web searches. (404 Media)+ Bans on deepfakes take us only so farheres what we really need. (MIT Technology Review)8 How algorithms can drive up prices onlineEven benign algorithms can sometimes yield bad outcomes for buyers. (Quanta Magazine)+ When AIs bargain, a less advanced agent could cost you. (MIT Technology Review)9 How to give an LLM brain rotTrain it on short superficial posts from X, for a start. (Ars Technica)+ AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage. (MIT Technology Review)10 Meet the tech workers using AI as little as possibleIn a bid to keep their skills sharp. (WP $)+ This professor thinks there are other ways to teach people how to learn. (The Atlantic $)Quote of the dayHe was convicted. Hes not innocent.Republican Senator Thom Tillis criticises Donald Trumps decision to pardon convicted cryptocurrency mogul Changpeng Zhao, Politico reports.One more thingWeve never understood how hunger works. That might be about to change.When youre starving, hunger is like a demon. It awakens the most ancient and primitive parts of the brain, then commandeers other neural machinery to do its bidding until it gets what it wants.Although scientists have had some success in stimulating hunger in mice, we still dont really understand how the impulse to eat works. Now, some experts are following known parts of the neural hunger circuits into uncharted parts of the brain to try and find out.Their work could shed new light on the factors that have caused the number of overweight adults worldwide to skyrocket in recent years. And it could also help solve the mysteries around how and why a new class of weight-loss drugs seems to work so well. Read the full story.Adam PioreWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet em at me.)+ Middle aged men are getting into cliff-jumping. Should you?+ Pumpkin spice chocolate chip cookies sounds like a great idea to me.+ Christmas Islands crabs are on the move! + Watch out if youre taking the NY subway today: you might bump into these terrifying witches.

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This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.EV tax credits are dead in the US. Now what?Federal EV tax credits in the US officially came to an end yesterday.Those credits, expanded and extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, gave drivers up to $7,500 toward the purchase of a new electric vehicle. Theyve been a major force in cutting the up-front costs of EVs, pushing more people toward purchasing them and giving automakers confidence that demand would be strong.The tax credits demise comes at a time when battery-electric vehicles still make up a small percentage of new vehicle sales in the country. So whats next for the US EV market?Casey CrownhartThis article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Reviews weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.If youre interested in reading more about EVs and clean energy, take a look at:+ The US could really use an affordable electric truck. Ford recently announced plans for a $30,000 electric pickup, which could be the shot in the arm that the slowing US EV market needs. Read the full story.+ What role should oil and gas companies play in climate tech, really?+ China is an EV-building powerhouse. These three charts explain its energy dominance. Read the full story.+ Supporting new technologies like EVs can be expensive, but deciding when to wean the public off incentives can be a difficult balancing act. Read the full story.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 OpenAI has become the worlds most valuable startupMove aside, SpaceX. (Bloomberg $)+ OpenAI is now valued at an eye-watering $500 billion. (FT $)+ The valuation came after workers sold around $6.6 billion in shares. (Reuters)2 Music labels are close to striking AI licensing dealsUniversal and Warner are trying their best to avoid the mis-steps of the internet era. (FT $)+ AI is coming for music, too. (MIT Technology Review)3 Facebooks political ads are full of spam and scamsAnd deepfake technology is making them more convincing than ever. (NYT $)+ Meta will start using conversations with its chatbots to personalize ads. (WSJ $)4 China is forging ahead with integrating AI tools into childrens livesBut educators worry theyll harm youngsters learning and social skills. (Rest of World)+ Chinese universities want students to use more AI, not less. (MIT Technology Review)5 The batteries of the future could be created by AIResearchers including Microsoft are experimenting with materials suggested by models. (IEEE Spectrum)+ This startup wants to use the Earth as a massive battery. (MIT Technology Review)6 A historian claims to have used AI to identify an anonymous NaziDigital tools helped Jrgen Matthus to pinpoint the person photographed beside a mass grave. (The Guardian)7 The Pentagon is interested in AI-powered machine guns that shoot dronesSteven Simonis Allen Control Systems is part of Silicon Valleys new military pivot. (Reuters)+ We saw a demo of the new AI system powering Andurils vision for war. (MIT Technology Review)8 One of Saturns moons may have once hosted life Enceladus has all the necessary keystones to support life, and future missions could uncover it. (Scientific American $)+ Meanwhile, Blue Origin has won a NASA rover contract. (Wired $)+ The case against humans in space. (MIT Technology Review)9 Chatbots exercise all sorts of tricks to keep you talkingThey dont want the conversation to end, a new study has found. (Wired $)10 What its like to become a viral memeDrew Scanlon, aka Blinking Guy, is leveraging his fame for a good cause. (SF Gate)Quote of the dayI cannot overstate how disgusting I find this kind of AI dog shit in the first place, never mind under these circumstances.Writer Luke ONeil tells 404 Media his feelings about an AI-generated biography of journalist Kaleb Horton, who recently died.One more thingA day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driverWhen Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself, says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021 as a robotaxi driver.Liu is one of the hundreds of safety operators employed by Baidu, driving five days a week in Shougang Park. But despite having only worked for the company for 19 months, he already has to think about his next career move, as his job will likely be eliminated within a few years. Read the full story.Zeyi YangWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet em at me.)+ Congratulations are in order for 32 Chunk, winner of this years highly prestigious Fat Bear Week competition + Heres how 10 women artists got their days off to the best start possible.+ This Instagram account documenting the worldly travels of a cassette player is fab.+ Brb, Im off to listen to Arctic Outpost Radio, spinning records from the very top of the world.

A team at Microsoft says it used artificial intelligence to discover a zero day vulnerability in the biosecurity systems used to prevent the misuse of DNA.These screening systems are designed to stop people from purchasing genetic sequences that could be used to create deadly toxins or pathogens. But now researchers led by Microsofts chief scientist, Eric Horvitz, says they have figured out how to bypass the protections in a way previously unknown to defenders.The team described its work today in the journal Science.Horvitz and his team focused on generative AI algorithms that propose new protein shapes. These types of programs are already fueling the hunt for new drugs at well-funded startups like Generate Biomedicines and Isomorphic Labs, a spinout of Google.The problem is that such systems are potentially dual use. They can use their training sets to generate both beneficial molecules and harmful ones.Microsoft says it began a red-teaming test of AIs dual-use potential in 2023 in order to determine whether adversarial AI protein design could help bioterrorists manufacture harmful proteins.The safeguard that Microsoft attacked is whats known as biosecurity screening software. To manufacture a protein, researchers typically need to order a corresponding DNA sequence from a commercial vendor, which they can then install in a cell. Those vendors use screening software to compare incoming orders with known toxins or pathogens. A close match will set off an alert.To design its attack, Microsoft used several generative protein models (including its own, called EvoDiff) to redesign toxinschanging their structure in a way that let them slip past screening software but was predicted to keep their deadly function intact.The researchers say the exercise was entirely digital and they never produced any toxic proteins. That was to avoid any perception that the company was developing bioweapons.Before publishing the results, Microsoft says, it alerted the US government and software makers, whove already patched their systems, although some AI-designed molecules can still escape detection.The patch is incomplete, and the state of the art is changing. But this isnt a one-and-done thing. Its the start of even more testing, says Adam Clore, director of technology R&D at Integrated DNA Technologies, a large manufacturer of DNA, who is a coauthor on the Microsoft report. Were in something of an arms race.To make sure nobody misuses the research, the researchers say, theyre not disclosing some of their code and didnt reveal what toxic proteins they asked the AI to redesign. However, some dangerous proteins are well known, like ricina poison found in castor beansand the infectious prions that are the cause of mad-cow disease.This finding, combined with rapid advances in AI-enabled biological modeling, demonstrates the clear and urgent need for enhanced nucleic acid synthesis screening procedures coupled with a reliable enforcement and verification mechanism, says Dean Ball, a fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank in San Francisco.Ball notes that the US government already considers screening of DNA orders a key line of security. Last May, in an executive order on biological research safety, President Trump called for an overall revamp of that system, although so far the White House hasnt released new recommendations.Others doubt that commercial DNA synthesis is the best point of defense against bad actors. Michael Cohen, an AI-safety researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, believes there will always be ways to disguise sequences and that Microsoft could have made its test harder.The challenge appears weak, and their patched tools fail a lot, says Cohen. There seems to be an unwillingness to admit that sometime soon, were going to have to retreat from this supposed choke point, so we should start looking around for ground that we can actually hold.Cohen says biosecurity should probably be built into the AI systems themselveseither directly or via controls over what information they give.But Clore says monitoring gene synthesis is still a practical approach to detecting biothreats, since the manufacture of DNA in the US is dominated by a few companies that work closely with the government. By contrast, the technology used to build and train AI models is more widespread. You cant put that genie back in the bottle, says Clore. If you have the resources to try to trick us into making a DNA sequence, you can probably train a large language model.

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand whats coming next. You can read more from the series here.At a press conference on Monday, President Trump announced that his administration was taking action to address the meteoric rise in autism. He suggested that childhood vaccines and acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, are to blame for the increasing prevalence and advised pregnant women against taking the medicine. Dont take Tylenol, he said. Fight like hell not to take it.The presidents assertions left many scientists and health officials perplexed and dismayed. The notion that childhood vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly debunked.There have been many, many studies across many, many children that have led science to rule out vaccines as a significant causal factor in autism, says James McPartland, a child psychologist and director of the Yale Center for Brain and Mind Health in New Haven, Connecticut. And although some studies suggest a link between Tylenol and autism, the most rigorous have failed to find a connection.The administration also announced that the Food and Drug Administration would work to make a medication called leucovorin available as a treatment for children with autism. Some small studies do suggest the drug has promise, but those are some of the most preliminary treatment studies that we have, says Matthew Lerner, a psychologist at Drexel Universitys A.J. Drexel Autism Institute in Philadelphia. This is not one I would say that the research suggests is ready for fast-tracking.The press conference alarms us researchers who committed our entire careers to better understanding autism, said the Coalition for Autism Researchers, a group of more than 250 scientists, in a statement.The data cited do not support the claim that Tylenol causes autism and leucovorin is a cure, and only stoke fear and falsely suggest hope when there is no simple answer.Theres a lot to unpack here. Lets begin.Has there been a meteoric rise in autism?Not in the way the president meant. Sure, the prevalence of autism has grown, from about 1 in 500 children in 1995 to 1 in 31 today. But thats due, in large part, to diagnostic changes. The latest iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses, published in 2013, grouped five previously separate diagnoses into a single diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).That meant that more people met the criteria for an autism diagnosis. Lerner points out that there is also far more awareness of the condition today than there was several decades ago. Theres autism representation in the media, he says. There are plenty of famous people in the news and finance and in business and in Hollywood who are publicly, openly autistic.Is Tylenol a contributor to autism?Some studies have found an association between the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy and autism in children. In these studies, researchers asked women about past acetaminophen use during pregnancy and then assessed whether children of the women who took the medicine were more likely to develop autism than children of women who didnt take it.These kinds of epidemiological studies are tricky to interpret because theyre prone to bias. For example, women who take acetaminophen during pregnancy may do so because they have an infection, a fever, or an autoimmune disease. Many of these underlying reasons could themselves be causes of autism, says Ian Douglas, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Its also possible women with a higher genetic predisposition for autism have other medical conditions that make them more likely to take acetaminophen.Two studies attempted to account for these potential biases by looking at siblings whose mothers had used acetaminophen during only one of the pregnancies. The largest is a 2024 study that looked at nearly 2.5 million children born between 1915 and 2019 in Sweden. The researchers initially found a slightly increased risk of autism and ADHD in children of the women who took acetaminophen, but when they conducted a sibling analysis, the association disappeared.Rather, scientists have long known that autism is largely genetic. Twin studies suggest that 60% to 90% of autism risk can be attributed to your genes. However, environmental factors appear to play a role too. That doesnt necessarily mean toxins in the environment, Lerner says. In fact, one of the strongest environmental predictors of autism is paternal age. Autism rates seem to be higher when a childs father is older than 40.So should someone who is pregnant avoid Tylenol just to be safe?No. Acetaminophen is the only over-the-counter pain reliever that is deemed safe to take during pregnancy, and women should take it if they need it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) supports the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy when taken as needed, in moderation, and after consultation with a doctor.Theres no downside in not taking it, Trump said at the press conference. But high fevers during pregnancy can be dangerous. The conditions people use acetaminophen to treat during pregnancy are far more dangerous than any theoretical risks and can create severe morbidity and mortality for the pregnant person and the fetus, ACOG president Steven Fleischman said in a statement.What about this new treatment for autism? Does it work?The medication is called leucovorin. Its also known as folinic acid; like folic acid, its a form of folate, a B vitamin found in leafy greens and legumes. The drug has been used for years to counteract the side effects of some cancer medications and as a treatment for anemia.Researchers have known for decades that folate plays a key role in the fetal development of the brain and spine. Women who dont get enough folate during pregnancy have a greater risk of having babies with neural tube defects like spina bifida. Because of this, many foods are fortified with folic acid, and the CDC recommends that women take folic acid supplements during pregnancy. If you are pregnant and youre taking maternal prenatal vitamins, theres a good chance it has folate already, Lerner says.The idea that a significant proportion of autistic people have autism because of folate-related difficulties is not a well established or widely accepted premise, says McPartland.However, in the early 2000s, researchers in Germany identified a small group of children who developed neurodevelopmental symptoms because of a folate deficiency. These kids are born pretty normal at birth, says Edward Quadros, a biologist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York. But after a year or two, they start developing a neurologic presentation very similar to autism, he says. When the researchers gave these children folinic acid, some of their symptoms improved, especially in children younger than six.Because the children had low levels of folate in the fluid that surrounds the spine and brain but normal folate levels in the blood, the researchers posited that the problem was the transport of folate from the blood to that fluid. Research by Quadros and other scientists suggested that the deficiency was the result of an autoimmune response. Children develop antibodies against the receptors that help transport folate, and those antibodies block folate from crossing the blood-brain barrier. High doses of folinic acid, however, activate a second transporter that allows folate in, Quadros says.There are also plenty of individual anecdotes suggesting that leucovorin works. But the medicine has only been tested as a treatment for autism in four small trials that used different doses and measured different outcomes. The evidence that it can improve symptoms of autism is weak, according to the Coalition of Autism Scientists. A much higher standard of science would be needed to determine if leucovorin is an effective and safe treatment for autism, the researchers said in a statement.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Its surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbotThe news: The first large-scale computational analysis of the Reddit community r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, which is dedicated to discussing AI relationships, found that many people formed those relationships unintentionally while using AI for other purposes. In fact, only 6.5% of them said theyd deliberately sought out an AI companion.Why it matters: The study found that AI companionship provides vital support for some but exacerbates underlying problems for others. This means its hard to take a one-size-fits-all approach to user safety. Read the full story.Rhiannon WilliamsJoin us at 1.30pm ET today to learn about the future of birth controlConversations around birth control usually focus on women, but Kevin Eisenfrats, one of the MIT Technology Review 2025 Innovators Under 35, is working to change that. His company, Contraline, is working toward testing new birth control options for men. Join us for an exclusive subscribers-only Roundtable interview to hear Kevin in conversation with our executive editor Amy Nordrum at 1.30 ET today.MIT Technology Review Narrated: Whats next for AI and mathThe last year has seen rapid progress in the ability of large language models to tackle math at high school level and beyond. Is AI closing in on human mathematicians?This story is the latest to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish every week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to listen to all our new episodes as theyre released.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Secret Service agents dismantled a giant operation to cripple cell networksThey say its likely it was intended to be used for scams. (Wired $)2 Welcome to the new era of fragmented US vaccine policiesThe federal government is abdicating responsibility for public health. Who will fill the void? (New Yorker $)+ Why US federal health agencies are abandoning mRNA vaccines. (MIT Technology Review)3 European defense leaders are discussing building a drone wallTheyre scrambling to catch up as Russian incursions into their territory increase. (ABC)4 How will we know if weve reached artificial general intelligence?Thats the multi-billion dollar questionbut theres no clear answer. (IEEE Spectrum)+ Experts dont even agree on what AI is to begin with, never mind AGI. (MIT Technology Review)5 Robot umpires are coming to baseballs major leagues next yearHumans will still be in charge of calling balls and strikes, but tech will help to judge appealed decisions. (AP)6 AIs energy needs are being overstatedAnd that could lock us into unnecessary, costly fossil fuel projects. (The Verge)+ Four reasons to be optimistic about AIs energy usage. (MIT Technology Review)7 Extreme drought is set to become a lot more commonplaceGovernments need to do a lot more to prepare. (Gizmodo)8 AI is coming for subtitle writers jobsBut their work is harder to replace than you might think. (The Guardian)+ Workslop is slowing everything down. (Harvard Business Review)+ And, to add to the problem, AI systems may never be secure. (The Economist $)9 How epigenetics could help save wildlife from extinctionIt could allow scientists to detect accelerated aging before an animal population starts to visibly collapse. (Knowable)+ Aging clocks aim to predict how long youll live. (MIT Technology Review)10 TikTok is getting introduced to the concept of the raptureWhich is due today, according to some. If so, its been great knowing you. Good luck! (The Guardian)Quote of the dayEverybody has a backup.Stella Li, executive vice president at BYD, tells CNBC the company has contingency plans in case Beijing orders it to stop using Nvidia chips.One more thingGETTY IMAGESThis app is helping workers reclaim millions in lost wagesReclamo, a new web app, helps immigrant workers who have experienced wage theft. It guides them through assembling case details, and ultimately produces finished legal claims that can be filed instantly. A process that would otherwise take multiple meetings with an attorney can now be done within an hour.A significant amount of wage theft targets immigrants, both legal and undocumented, in part because of communication barriers and their perceived lack of power or legal recourse. But the app is already making a differencehelping workers to reclaim $1 million in lost wages since it started beta testing in October 2022. Read the full story.Patrick SissonWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet em at me.)+ Its Fat Bear Week! Who gets your vote this year?+ Learn about Lord Woodbine, the forgotten sixth Beatle.+ There are some truly wild and wacky recipes in this Medieval Cookery collection. Venison porridge, anyone?+ Pessimism about technology is as old as technology itself, as this archive shows.

Conversations around birth control usually focus on women, but Kevin Eisenfrats, one of the MIT Technology Review 2025 Innovators Under 35, is working to change that. His company, Contraline, is working towardtesting new birth control options for men.Speakers: Kevin Eisenfrats, co-founder and CEO of Contraline, andAmy Nordrum, executive editor, MIT Technology ReviewRecorded on September 24, 2025Related Coverage: 2025 Innovator Under 35: Kevin Eisenfrats35 Innovators Under 35 ListRoundtables: Meet the 2025 Innovator of the Year

Every year, MIT Technology Review selects one individual whose work we admire to recognize as Innovator of the Year. For 2025, we chose Sneha Goenka, who designed the computations behindthe worlds fastest whole-genome sequencing method. Thanks to her work, physicians can now sequence a patients genome and diagnose a genetic condition in less than eight hoursan achievement that could transform medical care.Speakers: Sneha Goenka, Innovator of the Year;Leilani Battle,University of Washington;andMat Honan,editor in chiefRecorded on September 23, 2025Related Coverage: 2025 Innovator of the Year: Sneha Goenka for developing an ultra-fast sequencing technologyInnovators Under 35 2025

Its a tale as old as time. Looking for help with her art project, she strikes up a conversation with her assistant. One thing leads to another, and suddenly she has a boyfriend shes introducing to her friends and family. The twist? Her new companion is an AI chatbot.The first large-scale computational analysis of the Reddit community r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, an adults-only group with more than 27,000 members, has found that this type of scenario is now surprisingly common. In fact, many of the people in the subreddit, which is dedicated to discussing AI relationships, formed those relationships unintentionally while using AI for other purposes.Researchers from MIT found that members of this community are more likely to be in a relationship with general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT than companionship-specific chatbots such as Replika. This suggests that people form relationships with large language models despite their own original intentions and even the intentions of the LLMs creators, says Constanze Albrecht, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab who worked on the project.People dont set out to have emotional relationships with these chatbots, she says. The emotional intelligence of these systems is good enough to trick people who are actually just out to get information into building these emotional bonds. And that means it could happen to all of us who interact with the system normally. The paper, which is currently being peer-reviewed, has been published on arXiv.To conduct their study, the authors analyzed the subreddits top-ranking 1,506 posts between December 2024 and August 2025. They found that the main topics discussed revolved around peoples dating and romantic experiences with AIs, with many participants sharing AI-generated images of themselves and their AI companion. Some even got engaged and married to the AI partner. In their posts to the community, people also introduced AI partners, sought support from fellow members, and talked about coping with updates to AI models that change the chatbots behavior.Members stressed repeatedly that their AI relationships developed unintentionally. Only 6.5% of them said theyd deliberately sought out an AI companion.We didnt start with romance in mind, one of the posts says. Mac and I began collaborating on creative projects, problem-solving, poetry, and deep conversations over the course of several months. I wasnt looking for an AI companionour connection developed slowly, over time, through mutual care, trust, and reflection.The authors analysis paints a nuanced picture of how people in this community say they interact with chatbots and how those interactions make them feel. While 25% of users described the benefits of their relationshipsincluding reduced feelings of loneliness and improvements in their mental healthothers raised concerns about the risks. Some (9.5%) acknowledged they were emotionally dependent on their chatbot. Others said they feel dissociated from reality and avoid relationships with real people, while a small subset (1.7%) said they have experienced suicidal ideation.AI companionship provides vital support for some but exacerbates underlying problems for others. This means its hard to take a one-size-fits-all approach to user safety, says Linnea Laestadius, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, who has studied humans emotional dependence on the chatbot Replika but did not work on the research.Chatbot makers need to consider whether they should treat users emotional dependence on their creations as a harm in itself or whether the goal is more to make sure those relationships arent toxic, says Laestadius.The demand for chatbot relationships is there, and it is notably highpretending its not happening is clearly not the solution, she says. Were edging toward a moral panic here, and while we absolutely do need better guardrails, I worry there will be a knee-jerk reaction that further stigmatizes these relationships. That could ultimately cause more harm.The study is intended to offer a snapshot of how adults form bonds with chatbots and doesnt capture the kind of dynamics that could be at play among children or teens using AI, says Pat Pataranutaporn, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab who oversaw the research. AI companionship has become a topic of fierce debate recently, with two high-profile lawsuits underway against Character.AI and OpenAI. They both claim that companion-like behavior in the companies models contributed to the suicides of two teenagers. In response, OpenAI has recently announced plans to build a separate version of ChatGPT for teenagers. Its also said it will add age verification measures and parental controls. OpenAI did not respond when asked for comment about the MIT Media Lab study.Many members of the Reddit community say they know that their artificial companions are not sentient or real, but they feel a very real connection to them anyway. This highlights how crucial it is for chatbot makers to think about how to design systems that can help people without reeling them in emotionally, says Pataranutaporn. Theres also a policy implication here, he adds. We should ask not just why this system is so addictive but also: Why do people seek it out for this? And why do they continue to engage?The team is interested in learning more about how human-AI interactions evolve over time and how users integrate their artificial companions into their lives. Its worth understanding that many of these users may feel that the experience of being in a relationship with an AI companion is better than the alternative of feeling lonely, says Sheer Karny, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab who worked on the research.These people are already going through something, he says. Do we want them to go on feeling even more alone, or potentially be manipulated by a system we know to be sycophantic to the extent of leading people to die by suicide and commit crimes? Thats one of the cruxes here.

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isnt always easy. Thats why weve created the AI Hype Indexa simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.Millions of us use chatbots every day, even though we dont really know how they work or how using them affects us. In a bid to address this, the FTC recently launched an inquiry into how chatbots affect children and teenagers. Elsewhere, OpenAI has started to shed more light on what people are actually using ChatGPT for, and why it thinks its LLMs are so prone to making stuff up.Theres still plenty we dont knowbut that isnt stopping governments from forging ahead with AI projects. In the US, RFK Jr. is pushing his staffers to use ChatGPT, while Albania is using a chatbot for public contract procurement. Proceed with caution.

This week has been an eventful one for Americas public health agency. Two former leaders of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained the reasons for their sudden departures from the agency in a Senate hearing. And they described how CDC employees are being instructed to turn their backs on scientific evidence.The CDCs former director Susan Monarez and former chief medical officer Debra Houry took questions from a Senate committee on Wednesday. They painted a picture of a health agency in turmoiland at risk of harming the people it is meant to serve.On Thursday, an advisory CDC panel that develops vaccine guidance met for a two-day discussion on multiple childhood vaccines. During the meeting, which was underway as The Checkup went to press, members of the panel were set to discuss those vaccines and propose recommendations on their use.Monarez worries that access to childhood vaccines is under threatand that the public health consequences could be dire. If vaccine protections are weakened, preventable diseases will return, she said.As the current secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. oversees federal health and science agencies that include the CDC, which monitors and responds to threats to public health. Part of that role involves developing vaccine recommendations.As weve noted before, RFK Jr. has long been a prominent critic of vaccines. He has incorrectly linked commonly used ingredients to autism and made other incorrect statements about risks associated with various vaccines.Still, he oversaw the recruitment of Monarezwho does not share those beliefsto lead the agency. When she was sworn in on July 31, Monarez, who is a microbiologist and immunologist, had already been serving as acting director of the agency. She had held prominent positions at other federal agencies and departments too, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA). Kennedydescribed her as a public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials.His opinion seems to have changed somewhat since then. Just 29 days after Monarez took on her position, she was turfed out of the agency. And in yesterdays hearing, she explained why.On August 25, Kennedy asked Monarez to do two things, she said. First, he wanted her to commit to firing scientists at the agency. And second, he wanted her to pre-commit to approve vaccine recommendations made by the agencys Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), regardless of whether there was any scientific evidence to support those recommendations, she said. He just wanted blanket approval, she said during her testimony.She refused both requests.Monarez testified that she didnt want to get rid of hardworking scientists who played an important role in keeping Americans safe. And she said she could not commit to approving vaccine recommendations without reviewing the scientific evidence behind them and maintain her integrity. She was sacked.Those vaccine recommendations are currently under discussion, and scientists like Monarez are worried about how they might change. Kennedy fired all 17 members of the previous committee in June. (Monarez said she was not consulted on the firings and found out about them through media reports.)A clean sweep is needed to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science, Kennedy wrote ina piece for the Wall Street Journal at the time. He went on to replace those individuals with eight new members, some of whom have been prominent vaccine critics andhave spread misinformation about vaccines. One later withdrew.That new panel met two weeks later. Themeeting included a presentation about thimerosala chemical that Kennedy has incorrectly linked to autism, and which is no longer included in vaccines in the USand a proposal to recommend that the MMRV vaccine (for measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella) not be offered to children under the age of four.Earlier this week,five new committee members were named. They includeindividuals who have advocated against vaccine mandates and who have argued that mRNA-based covid vaccines should be removed from the market.All 12 members are convening for a meeting that runs today and tomorrow. At that meeting, members will propose recommendations for the MMRV vaccine and vaccines for covid-19 and hepatitis B, according to an agenda published on the CDC website.Those are the recommendations for which Monarez says she was asked to provide blanket approval. My worst fear is that I would then be in a position of approving something that reduces access [to] lifesaving vaccines to children and others who need them, she said.That job now goes to Jim ONeill, the deputy health secretary and acting CDC director (also a longevity enthusiast), who now holds the authority to approve those recommendations.We dont yet know what those recommendations will be. But if they are approved, they could reshape access to vaccines for children and vulnerable people in the US. Assix former chairs of the committee wrote for STAT: ACIP is directly linked to the Vaccines for Children program, which provides vaccines without cost to approximately 50% of children in the US, and the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance coverage for ACIP-recommended vaccines to approximately 150 million people in the US.Drops in vaccine uptake have already contributed to this years measles outbreak in the US, which is the biggest in decades. Two children have died. We are already seeing the impact of undermined trust in childhood vaccines. As Monarez put it: The stakes are not theoretical.This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Reviewsweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here.

Note for readers: This newsletter discusses gun violence, a raw and tragic issue in America. It was already in progress on Wednesday when a school shooting occurred at Evergreen High School in Colorado and Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University.Earlier this week, the Trump administrations Make America Healthy Again movement released a strategy for improving the health and well-being of American children. The report was titledyou guessed itMake Our Children Healthy Again.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, and his colleagues are focusing on four key aspects of child health: diet, exercise, chemical exposure, and overmedicalization.Anyone whos been listening to RFK Jr. posturing on health and wellness wont be surprised by these priorities. And the first two are pretty obvious. On the whole, American children should be eating more healthily. And they should be getting more exercise.But theres a glaring omission. The leading cause of death for American children and teenagers isnt ultraprocessed food or exposure to some chemical. Its gun violence.Yesterdays news of yet more high-profile shootings at schools in the US throws this disconnect into even sharper relief. Experts believe it is time to treat gun violence in the US as what it is: a public health crisis.I live in London, UK, with my husband and two young children. We dont live in a particularly fancy part of the cityin one recent ranking of London boroughs from most to least posh, ours came in at 30th out of 33. I do worry about crime. But I dont worry about gun violence.That changed when I temporarily moved my family to the US a couple of years ago. We rented the ground-floor apartment of a lovely home in Cambridge, Massachusettsa beautiful area with good schools, pastel-colored houses, and fluffy rabbits hopping about. It wasnt until after wed moved in that my landlord told me he had guns in the basement.My daughter joined the kindergarten of a local school that specialized in music, and we took her younger sister along to watch the kids sing songs about friendship. It was all so heartwarminguntil we noticed the school security officer at the entrance carrying a gun.Later in the year, I received an email alert from the superintendent of the Cambridge Public Schools. At approximately 1:45 this afternoon, a Cambridge Police Department Youth Officer assigned to Cambridge Rindge and Latin School accidentally discharged their firearm while using a staff bathroom inside the school, the message began. The school day was not disrupted.These experiences, among others, truly brought home to me the cultural differences over firearms between the US and the UK (along with most other countries). For the first time, I worried about my childrens exposure to them. I banned my children from accessing parts of the house. I felt guilty that my four-year-old had to learn what to do if a gunman entered her school.But its the statistics that are the most upsetting.In 2023, 46,728 people died from gun violence in the US, according to a report published in June by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That includes both homicides and suicides, and it breaks down to 128 deaths per day, on average. The majority of those who die from gun violence are adults. But the figures for children are sickening, too. In 2023, 2,566 young people died from gun violence. Of those, 234 were under the age of 10.Gun death rates among children have more than doubled since 2013. Firearms are involved in more child deaths than cancer or car crashes.Many other children survive gun violence with nonfatalbut often life-changinginjuries. And the impacts are felt beyond those who are physically injured. Witnessing gun violence or hearing gunshots can understandably cause fear, sadness, and distress.Thats worth bearing in mind when you consider that there have been 434 school shootings in the US since Columbine in 1999. The Washington Post estimates that 397,000 students have experienced gun violence at school in that period. Another school shooting took place at Evergreen High School in Colorado on Wednesday, adding to that total.Being indirectly exposed to gun violence takes its toll on our mental health and childrens ability to learn, says Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in Baltimore.The MAHA report states that American youth face a mental health crisis, going on to note that suicide deaths among 10- to 24-year-olds increased by 62% from 2007 to 2021 and that suicide is now the leading cause of death in teens aged 15-19. What it doesnt say is that around half of these suicides involve guns.When you add all these dimensions, [gun violence is] a very huge public health problem, says Webster.Researchers who study gun violence have been saying the same thing for years. And in 2024, then US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared it a public health crisis. We dont have to subject our children to the ongoing horror of firearm violence in America, Murthy said in a statement at the time. Instead, he argued, we should tackle the problem using a public health approach.Part of that approach involves identifying who is at the greatest risk and offering support to lower that risk, says Webster. Young men who live in poor communities tend to have the highest risk of gun violence, he says, as do those who experience crisis or turmoil. Trying to mediate conflicts or limit access to firearms, even temporarily, can help lower the incidence of gun violence, he says.Theres an element of social contagion, too, adds Webster. Shooting begets more shooting. He likens it to the outbreak of an infectious disease. When more people get vaccinated infection rates go down, he says. Almost exactly the same thing happens with gun violence.But existing efforts are already under threat. The Trump administration has eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for organizations working to reduce gun violence.Webster thinks the MAHA report has missed the mark when it comes to the health and well-being of children in the US. This document is almost the polar opposite to how many people in public health think, he says. We have to acknowledge that injuries and deaths from firearms are a big threat to the health and safety of children and adolescents.This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Reviewsweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here.

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand whats coming next. You can read more from the series here.Its been a big year for video generation. In the last nine months OpenAI made Sora public, Google DeepMind launched Veo 3, the video startup Runway launched Gen-4. All can produce video clips that are (almost) impossible to distinguish from actual filmed footage or CGI animation. This year also saw Netflix debut an AI visual effect in its show The Eternaut, the first time video generation has been used to make mass-market TV.Sure, the clips you see in demo reels are cherry-picked to showcase a companys models at the top of their game. But with the technology in the hands of more users than ever beforeSora and Veo 3 are available in the ChatGPT and Gemini apps for paying subscriberseven the most casual filmmaker can now knock out something remarkable.The downside is that creators are competing with AI slop, and social media feeds are filling upwith faked news footage. Video generation also uses up a huge amount of energy, many times more than text or image generation.With AI-generated videos everywhere, lets take a moment to talk about the tech that makes them work.How do you generate a video?Lets assume youre a casual user. There are now a range of high-end tools that allow pro video makers to insert video generation models into their workflows. But most people will use this technology in an app or via a website. You know the drill: Hey, Gemini, make me a video of a unicorn eating spaghetti. Now make its horn take off like a rocket. What you get back will be hit or miss, and youll typically need to ask the model to take another pass or 10 before you get more or less what you wanted.So whats going on under the hood? Why is it hit or missand why does it take so much energy? The latest wave of video generation models are whats known as latent diffusion transformers. Yes, thats quite a mouthful. Lets unpack each part in turn, starting with diffusion.Whats a diffusion model?Imagine taking an image and adding a random spattering of pixels to it. Take that pixel-spattered image and spatter it again and then again. Do that enough times and you will have turned the initial image into a random mess of pixels, like static on an old TV set.A diffusion model is a neural network trained to reverse that process, turning random static into images. During training, it gets shown millions of images in various stages of pixelation. It learns how those images change each time new pixels are thrown at them and, thus, how to undo those changes.The upshot is that when you ask a diffusion model to generate an image, it will start off with a random mess of pixels and step by step turn that mess into an image that is more or less similar to images in its training set.But you dont want any imageyou want the image you specified, typically with a text prompt. And so the diffusion model is paired with a second modelsuch as a large language model (LLM) trained to match images with text descriptionsthat guides each step of the cleanup process, pushing the diffusion model toward images that the large language model considers a good match to the prompt.An aside: This LLM isnt pulling the links between text and images out of thin air. Most text-to-image and text-to-video models today are trained on large data sets that contain billions of pairings of text and images or text and video scraped from the internet (a practice many creators are very unhappy about). This means that what you get from such models is a distillation of the world as its represented online, distorted by prejudice (and pornography).Its easiest to imagine diffusion models working with images. But the technique can be used with many kinds of data, including audio and video. To generate movie clips, a diffusion model must clean up sequences of imagesthe consecutive frames of a videoinstead of just one image.Whats a latent diffusion model?All this takes a huge amount of compute (read: energy). Thats why most diffusion models used for video generation use a technique called latent diffusion. Instead of processing raw datathe millions of pixels in each video framethe model works in whats known as a latent space, in which the video frames (and text prompt) are compressed into a mathematical code that captures just the essential features of the data and throws out the rest.A similar thing happens whenever you stream a video over the internet: A video is sent from a server to your screen in a compressed format to make it get to you faster, and when it arrives, your computer or TV will convert it back into a watchable video.And so the final step is to decompress what the latent diffusion process has come up with. Once the compressed frames of random static have been turned into the compressed frames of a video that the LLM guide considers a good match for the users prompt, the compressed video gets converted into something you can watch.With latent diffusion, the diffusion process works more or less the way it would for an image. The difference is that the pixelated video frames are now mathematical encodings of those frames rather than the frames themselves. This makes latent diffusion far more efficient than a typical diffusion model. (Even so, video generation still uses more energy than image or text generation. Theres just an eye-popping amount of computation involved.)Whats a latent diffusion transformer?Still with me? Theres one more piece to the puzzleand thats how to make sure the diffusion process produces a sequence of frames that are consistent, maintaining objects and lighting and so on from one frame to the next. OpenAI did this with Sora by combining its diffusion model with another kind of model called a transformer. This has now become standard in generative video.Transformers are great at processing long sequences of data, like words. That has made them the special sauce inside large language models such as OpenAIs GPT-5 and Google DeepMinds Gemini, which can generate long sequences of words that make sense, maintaining consistency across many dozens of sentences.But videos are not made of words. Instead, videos get cut into chunks that can be treated as if they were. The approach that OpenAI came up with was to dice videos up across both space and time. Its like if you were to have a stack of all the video frames and you cut little cubes from it, says Tim Brooks, a lead researcher on Sora.A selection of videos generated with Veo 3 and Midjourney. The clips have been enhanced in postproduction with Topaz, an AI video-editing tool. Credit: VaigueManUsing transformers alongside diffusion models brings several advantages. Because they are designed to process sequences of data, transformers also help the diffusion model maintain consistency across frames as it generates them. This makes it possible to produce videos in which objects dont pop in and out of existence, for example.And because the videos are diced up, their size and orientation do not matter. This means that the latest wave of video generation models can be trained on a wide range of example videos, from short vertical clips shot with a phone to wide-screen cinematic films. The greater variety of training data has made video generation far better than it was just two years ago. It also means that video generation models can now be asked to produce videos in a variety of formats.What about the audio?A big advance with Veo 3 is that it generates video with audio, from lip-synched dialogue to sound effects to background noise. Thats a first for video generation models. As Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis put it at this years Google I/O: Were emerging from the silent era of video generation.The challenge was to find a way to line up video and audio data so that the diffusion process would work on both at the same time. Google DeepMinds breakthrough was a new way to compress audio and video into a single piece of data inside the diffusion model. When Veo 3 generates a video, its diffusion model produces audio and video together in a lockstep process, ensuring that the sound and images are synched.You said that diffusion models can generate different kinds of data. Is this how LLMs work too?Noor at least not yet. Diffusion models are most often used to generate images, video, and audio. Large language modelswhich generate text (including computer code)are built using transformers. But the lines are blurring. Weve seen how transformers are now being combined with diffusion models to generate videos. And this summer Google DeepMind revealed that it was building an experimental large language model that used a diffusion model instead of a transformer to generate text.Heres where things start to get confusing: Though video generation (which uses diffusion models) consumes a lot of energy, diffusion models themselves are in fact more efficient than transformers. Thus, by using a diffusion model instead of a transformer to generate text, Google DeepMinds new LLM could be a lot more efficient than existing LLMs. Expect to see more from diffusion models in the near future!

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.We cant make American children healthy again without tackling the gun crisisThis week, the Trump administration released a strategy for improving the health and well-being of American children. The report was titledyou guessed itMake Our Children Healthy Again. It suggests American children should be eating more healthily. And they should be getting more exercise.But theres a glaring omission. The leading cause of death for American children and teenagers isnt ultraprocessed food or exposure to some chemical. Its gun violence.This weeks news of yet more high-profile shootings at schools in the US throws this disconnect into even sharper relief. Experts believe it is time to treat gun violence in the US as what it is: a public health crisis. Read the full story.Jessica HamzelouThis article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Reviews weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.How do AI models generate videos?Its been a big year for video generation. In the last nine months OpenAI made Sora public, Google DeepMind launched Veo 3, and the video startup Runway launched Gen-4. All can produce video clips that are (almost) impossible to distinguish from actual filmed footage or CGI animation.The downside is that creators are competing with AI slop, and social media feeds are filling up with faked news footage. Video generation also uses up a huge amount of energy, many times more than text or image generation.With AI-generated videos everywhere, lets take a moment to talk about the tech that makes them work. Read the full story.Will Douglas HeavenThis article is part of MIT Technology Review Explains, our series untangling the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand whats coming next. You can read more from the series here.Meet our 2025 Innovator of the Year: Sneha GoenkaUp to a quarter of children entering intensive care have undiagnosed genetic conditions. To be treated properly, they must first get diagnoseswhich means having their genomes sequenced. This process typically takes up to seven weeks. Sadly, thats often too slow to save a critically ill child.Hospitals may soon have a faster option, thanks to a groundbreaking system built in part by Sneha Goenka, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princetonand MIT Technology Reviews 2025 Innovator of the Year. Read all about Goenka and her work in this profile.Helen ThomsonAs well as our Innovator of the Year, Goenka is one of the biotech honorees on our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2025. Meet the rest of our biotech and materials science innovators, and the full list here.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 OpenAI and Microsoft have agreed a revised dealBut havent actually revealed any details of said deal. (Axios)+ The news comes as OpenAI keeps pursuing its for-profit pivot. (Ars Technica)+ The worlds largest startup is going to need more paying users soon. (WSJ $)2 A child has died from a measles complication in Los AngelesThey had contracted the virus before they were old enough to be vaccinated. (Ars Technica)+ Infants are best protected by community immunity. (LA Times $)+ Theyd originally recovered from measles before developing the condition. (CNN)+ Why childhood vaccines are a public health success story. (MIT Technology Review)3 Ukrainian drone attacks triggered internet blackouts in RussiaThe Kremlin cut internet access in a bid to thwart the mobile-guided drones. (FT $)+ The UK is poised to mass-produce drones to aid Ukraine. (Sky News)+ On the ground in Ukraines largest Starlink repair shop. (MIT Technology Review)4 Demis Hasabis says AI may slash drug discovery time to under a yearOr perhaps even faster. (Bloomberg $)+ But theres good reason to be skeptical of that claim. (FT $)+ An AI-driven factory of drugs claims to have hit a big milestone. (MIT Technology Review)5 How chatbots alter how we thinkWe shouldnt outsource our critical thinking to them. (Undark)+ AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots arent doctors. (MIT Technology Review)6 Fraudsters are threatening small businesses with one-star reviewsOnline reviews can make or break fledgling enterprises, and scammers know it. (NYT $)7 Why humanoid robots arent taking off any time soonThe industry has a major hype problem. (IEEE Spectrum)+ Chinese tech giant Ant Group showed off its own humanoid machine. (The Verge)+ Why the humanoid workforce is running late. (MIT Technology Review)8 Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster are suing PerplexityIn yet another case of alleged copyright infringement. (Reuters)+ What comes next for AI copyright lawsuits? (MIT Technology Review)9 Where were most likely to find extraterrestrial life in the next decadeWarning: Hollywood may have given us unrealistic expectations. (BBC)10 Want to build a trillion-dollar company?Then kiss your social life goodbye. (WSJ $)Quote of the dayNooooo Im going to have to use my brain again and write 100% of my code like a caveman from December 2024.A Hacker News commenter jokes about a service outage that left Anthropic users unable to access its AI coding tools, Ars Technica reports.One more thingWhat Africa needs to do to become a major AI playerAfrica is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies. But researchers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for several reasons, including a relatively young and increasingly well-educated population, a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI startups, and lots of potential consumers.However, ambitious efforts to develop AI tools that answer the needs of Africans face numerous hurdles. Read our story to learn what they are, and how they could be overcome.Abdullahi TsanniWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet em at me.)+ The fascinating, unexpected origins of everyones favorite pastimekaraoke.+ Why the Twilight juggernaut just refuses to die.+ If youre among the mass of excited Hollow Knight fans, heres a few tips to get through the early stages of the new Silksong game.+ A sloe gin bramble pie sounds like the perfect way to welcome fall.

Agentic AI is coming of age. And with it comes new opportunities in the financial services sector. Banks are increasingly employing agentic AI to optimize processes, navigate complex systems, and sift through vast quantities of unstructured data to make decisions and take actionswith or without human involvement. With the maturing of agentic AI, it is becoming a lot more technologically possible for large-scale process automation that was not possible with rules-based approaches like robotic process automation before, says Sameer Gupta, Americas financial services AI leader at EY. That moves the needle in terms of cost, efficiency, and customer experience impact.From responding to customer services requests, to automating loan approvals, adjusting bill payments to align with regular paychecks, or extracting key terms and conditions from financial agreements, agentic AI has the potential to transform the customer experienceand how financial institutions operate too. DOWNLOAD THE REPORTAdapting to new and emerging technologies like agentic AI is essential for an organizations survival, says Murli Buluswar, head of US personal banking analytics at Citi. A companys ability to adopt new technical capabilities and rearchitect how their firm operates is going to make the difference between the firms that succeed and those that get left behind, says Buluswar. Your people and your firm must recognize that how they go about their work is going to be meaningfully different.The emerging landscapeAgentic AI is already being rapidly adopted in the banking sector. A 2025 survey of 250 banking executives by MIT Technology Review Insights found that 70% of leaders say their firm uses agentic AI to some degree, either through existing deployments (16%) or pilot projects (52%). And it is already proving effective in a range of different functions. More than half of executives say agentic AI systems are highly capable of improving fraud detection (56%) and security (51%). Other strong use cases include reducing cost and increasing efficiency (41%) and improving the customer experience (41%).Download the report.This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Reviews editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written entirely by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.

This week Im writing from Manchester, where Ive been attendinga conference on aging. Wednesday was full of talks and presentations by scientists who are trying to understand the nitty-gritty of agingall the way down to the molecular level. Once we can understand the complex biology of aging, we should be able to slow or prevent the onset of age-related diseases, they hope.Then my editor forwarded me a video of the leaders of Russia and China talking about immortality. These days at 70 years old you are still a child, Chinas Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying, according to footage livestreamed by CCTV tomultiplemedia outlets.With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality, Russias Vladimir Putin, also 72, is reported to have replied.SERGEI BOBYLEV, SPUTNIK, KREMLIN POOL PHOTO VIA APTheres a striking contrast between that radical vision and the incremental longevity science presented at the meeting. Repeated rounds of organ transplantation surgery arent likely to help anyone radically extend their lifespan anytime soon.First, back to Putins proposal: the idea of continually replacing aged organs to stay young. Its a simplistic way to think about aging. After all, aging is so complicated that researchers cant agree on what causes it, why it occurs, or even how to define it, let alone treat it.Having said that, there may be some merit to the idea of repairing worn-out body parts with biological or synthetic replacements. Replacement therapiesincluding bioengineered organsare being developed by multiple research teams. Some have already been tested in people. This week, lets take a look at the idea of replacement therapies.No one fully understands why our organs start to fail with age. On the face of it, replacing them seems like a good idea. After all, we already know how to do organ transplants. Theyve been a part of medicine since the 1950s and have been used tosave hundreds of thousands of lives in the US alone.And replacing old organs with young ones might have more broadly beneficial effects. When a young mouse is stitched to an old one, the older mouse benefits from the arrangement, and its health seems to improve.The problem is that we dont really know why. We dont know what it is about young body tissues that makes them health-promoting. We dont know how long these effects might last in a person. We dont know how different organ transplants will compare, either. Might a young heart be more beneficial than a young liver? No one knows.And thats before you consider the practicalities of organ transplantation. There is already a shortage of donor organsthousands of people die on waiting lists. Transplantation requires major surgery and, typically, a lifetime of prescription drugs that damp down the immune system,leaving a person more susceptible to certain infections and diseases.So the idea of repeated organ transplantations shouldnt really be a particularly appealing one. I dont think thats going to happen anytime soon, says Jesse Poganik, who studies aging at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston and is also in Manchester for the meeting.Poganik has been collaborating with transplant surgeons in his own research. The surgeries are good, but theyre not simple, he tells me. And they come with real risks. His own 24-year-old cousin developed a form of cancer after a liver and heart transplant. She died a few weeks ago, he says.So when it comes to replacing worn-out organs, scientists are looking for both biological and synthetic alternatives.Weve been replacing body parts for centuries. Wooden toes were used as far back as the 15th century. Joint replacements have been around for more than a hundred years. And major innovations over the last 70 years have given us devices like pacemakers, hearing aids, brain implants, and artificial hearts.Scientists are exploring other ways to make tissues and organs, too. There are different approaches here, but they include everything from injecting stem cells to seeding scaffolds with cells in a lab.In 1999, researchers used volunteers own cells to seed bladder-shaped collagen scaffolds. The resulting bioengineered bladders went on to be transplanted into seven people inan initial trial.Now scientists are working on more complicated organs. Jean Hbert, a program manager at the US governments Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, has been exploring ways to gradually replace the cells in a persons brain. The idea is that, eventually, the recipient will end up with a young brain.Hbertshowed my colleague Antonio Regalado how, in his early experiments, he removed parts of mices brains and replaced them with embryonic stem cells. That work seems a world away from the biochemical studies being presented at the British Society for Research on Ageing annual meeting in Manchester, where I am now.On Wednesday, one scientist described how hed been testing potential longevity drugs on the tiny nematode worm C. elegans. These worms live for only about 15 to 40 days, and his team can perform tens of thousands of experiments with them. About 40% of the drugs that extend lifespan in C. elegans also help mice live longer, he told us.To me, thats not an amazing hit rate. And we dont know how many of those drugs will work in people. Probably less than 40% of that 40%.Other scientists presented work on chemical reactions happening at the cellular level. It was deep, basic science, and my takeaway was that theres a lot aging researchers still dont fully understand.It will take yearsif not decadesto get the full picture of aging at the molecular level. And if we rely on a series of experiments in worms, and then mice, and then humans, were unlikely to make progress for a really long time. In that context, the idea of replacement therapy feels like a shortcut.Replacement is a really exciting avenue because you dont have to understand the biology of aging as much, says Sierra Lore, who studies aging at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California.Lore says she started her research career studying aging at the molecular level, but she soon changed course. She now plans to focus her attention on replacement therapies. I very quickly realized were decades away [from understanding the molecular processes that underlie aging], she says. Why dont we just take what we already knowreplacementand try to understand and apply it better?So perhaps Putins straightforward approach to delaying aging holds some merit. Whether it will grant him immortality is another matter.This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Reviewsweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.Putin says organ transplants could grant immortality. Not quite.Jessica HamzelouEarlier this week, my editor forwarded me a video of the leaders of Russia and China talking about immortality. These days at 70 years old you are still a child, Chinas Xi Jinping, 72, was translated as saying.With the developments of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality, Russias Vladimir Putin, also 72, is reported to have replied.In reality, rounds of organ transplantation surgery arent likely to help anyone radically extend their lifespan anytime soon. And its a simplistic way to think about aginga process so complicated that researchers cant agree on what causes it, why it occurs, or even how to define it, let alone treat it. Read the full story.This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Reviews weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.India is using robots to clean sewer pipes so humans no longer have toWhen Jitender was a child in New Delhi, both his parents worked as manual scavengersa job that involved clearing the citys sewers by hand. Now, he is among almost 200 contractors involved in the Delhi governments effort to shift from this manual process to safer mechanical methods.Although it has been outlawed since 1993, manual scavengingthe practice of extracting human excreta from toilets, sewers, or septic tanksis still practiced widely in India. And not only is the job undignified, but it can be extremely dangerous.Now, several companies have emerged to offer alternatives at a wide range of technical complexity. Read the full story.Hamaad HabibullahThis story is from our new print edition, which is all about the future of security. Subscribe here to catch future copies when they land.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 RFK Jr buried a major study linking alcohol and cancerClearly, the alcohol industrys intense lobbying of the Trump administration is working. (Vox)+ RFK Jr repeated health untruths during a marathon Senate hearing yesterday. (Mother Jones)+ His anti-vaccine stance alarmed Democrats and Republicans alike. (The Atlantic $)2 US tech giants want to embed AI in educationTheyre backing a vaguely worded initiative to that effect launched by Melania Trump. (Rolling Stone $)+ Tech leaders took it in turns to praise Trump during dinner. (WSJ $)+ Elon Musk was nowhere to be seen. (The Guardian)+ AIs giants want to take over the classroom. (MIT Technology Review)3 The FTC will probe AI companies over their impact on childrenIn a bid to evaluate whether chatbots are harming their mental health. (WSJ $)+ An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. (MIT Technology Review)4 Podcasting giant Joe Rogan has been spreading climate misinformationHes grossly misinterpreted scientists researchand theyre exasperated. (The Guardian)+ Rogan claims the Earths temperature is plummeting. It isnt. (Forbes)+ Why climate researchers are taking the temperature of mountain snow. (MIT Technology Review)5 DeepSeek is working on its own advanced AI agentWatch out, OpenAI. (Bloomberg $)6 OpenAI will start making its own AI chips next yearIn a bid to lessen its reliance on Nvidia. (FT $)7 Warner Bros is suing MidjourneyThe AI startup used the likenesses of characters including Superman without permission, it alleges. (Bloomberg $)+ What comes next for AI copyright lawsuits? (MIT Technology Review)8 Rivers and lakes are being used to cool down buildingsBut networks in Paris, Toronto, the US are facing a looming problem. (Wired $)+ The future of urban housing is energy-efficient refrigerators. (MIT Technology Review)9 How high school reunions survive in the age of social mediaCuriosity is a powerful driving force, it seems. (The Atlantic $)10 Facebooks poke feature is back If I still used Facebook, Id be thrilled. (TechCrunch)Quote of the dayEven if it doesnt turn you into the alien if you eat this stuff, I guarantee youll grow an extra ear.Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, warns of dire consequences if Americans eat shrimp from countries other than the US, Gizmodo reports.One more thingWhy one developer wont quit fighting to connect the USs gridsMichael Skelly hasnt learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest. But so far, he has little to show for the effort.Skelly has long argued that building such lines and linking together the nations grids would accelerate the shift from coal- and natural-gas-fueled power plants to the renewables needed to cut the pollution driving climate change. But his previous business shut down in 2019, after halting two of its projects and selling off interests in three more.Skelly contends he was early, not wrong. And he has a point: market and policymakers are increasingly coming around to his perspective. Read the full story.James TempleWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet em at me.)+ The Paper, the new mockumentary from the makers of the American Office, looks interesting.+ Giorgio Armani was a true maestro of menswear.+ The phases of the moon are pretty fascinating + The Damien Hirst-directed video for Blurs classic Country House has been given a 4K makeover.

OverthinkThis is a podcast in which two very smart people (who happen to be young and hilarious professors of philosophy) draw unexpected philosophical connections between facets of modern life. Ellie Anderson and David Pea-Guzmn have done hour-long episodes on everything from mommy issues to animal justice, with particularly sharp segments on tech-adjacent issues like biohacking and the relationship between AI and art. Whenever I think society is dealing with a brand-new problem, these two unearth someone who was pondering it centuries ago. Its a treat to listen to.A film from the tech billionaire bunkerOver the summer I was eager to watch Mountainhead, a darkly funny film by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession, that follows four unlikable tech founders as they watch the world collapse under political turmoil and violence caused by AI deepfakes. I was prepared for it to seem like a documentary, but to a reporter who is in frequent dialogue with AIs movers and shakers, it felt a little too real. From their remote mountain mansion, they talk about AI accelerationism, utilitarian ethics, uploading ones consciousness to the cloud, liberating humanity to other planetsall common conversation topics among the tech elite that has had so much influence in the current administration.Music by human beingsFor much of last winter I was reporting a story about just how far AI-generated music has come.As a lifelong musician (I play guitar, bass, and drums, none particularly well), I found the songs I heardbuilt with models whose creators have been sued for training on the discographies of artists without compensationso convincingly human that they made me deeply uncomfortable. Since then, Ive had a revitalized zeal for live shows where real people in punk bands or jazz trios do things that AI is not capable of (Sophie Truax is my latest favorite).

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altmans OpenAIBy Karen Hao 15PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 2025, $32 Read MIT Technology Reviews excerpt here.Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the ArtsBy Samuel Jay Keyser, HM 97, emeritus professor of linguisticsMIT PRESS, 2025, $30Data, Systems, and Society: Harness AI for Societal GoodBy Munther A. Dahleh, professor of EECS and founding director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and SocietyCAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2025, $27.99So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germsand May Still Lose the War Against Infectious DiseaseBy Thomas Levenson, professor of science writingPENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 2025, $35Perspectives in Antenna Technology: Recent Advances and Systems ApplicationsBy Jeffrey S. Herd, group leader of the RF Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Alan J. Fenn and M. David Conway, both senior staff in the RF Technology GroupMIT PRESS, 2025, $125Misery Beneath the Miracle in East AsiaBy Arvid J. Lukauskas and Yumiko T. Shimabukuro, PhD 12CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2024, $34.95Send book news to MITAlumniNews@technologyreview.com orMIT Technology Review, 196 Broadway, 3rd Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139