MIT Technology Review · 实时热榜

This week, I covered a fascinating effort to preserve organs outside the body. There’s a huge shortage of donor organs, and one of the main reasons is time—they survive only a matter of hours outside the body, even when they’re kept on ice. Doctors dream of organ banks—stores of human organs that can be preserved…

Outside the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, a wealth of uranium is locked away in thousands of storage cylinders filled with waste material from a now-closed nuclear enrichment facility. Lasers could help get it out. A company called Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is looking to reprocess this old material with a new technology called laser…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Supercooled kidneys have been transplanted into pigs in a “landmark achievement” When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been removed from a donor’s…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How lasers could help provide fuel for nuclear reactors Nuclear power provides about 9% of global electricity today, and that fraction could tick up as countries look to build new reactors.…

Imagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy. Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives. Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate…

When it comes to organ donation, time is everything. As soon as an organ has been carefully removed from a donor’s body, it starts to deteriorate. Surgeons have a matter of hours to get it into a recipient. Leave it too long and the organ will become unusable. In most cases, organs will be kept…

Drug discovery is a high-cost, high-risk endeavor that is under growing pressure from a market increasingly defined by first-mover advantage. Since the 1950s, the cost of developing new pharmaceuticals has roughly doubled every nine years—a phenomenon known as Eroom’s Law. Today, bringing a new drug to market takes an average of 10-15 years and costs…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The power line that could reshape New York’s grid is hitting snags During a heat wave on July 3, New York State’s grid imported enough electricity from Canada to meet about…

Designing and developing a new medicine is an expensive, failure-prone scientific challenge. A new drug can take many years to develop, at the cost of a significant investment. And even then, most possible candidates never reach the patient. For biologic medicines, therapies made from engineered proteins rather than synthetic chemistry (which are often used to…

For the enterprise, the promise of agentic AI is much more than just a better chatbot. It is software agents that execute business tasks end-to-end across people, business workflows, data, and systems. The platform best-suited to run agents is built with proper CPU capacity, resilient data access, policy-aware tool use, observability, memory management, and the…

On July 3, as a heat wave swept the region, New York State’s grid imported 52 gigawatt-hours of electricity from Canada—enough to meet about 9% of its total electricity demand that day. Some of that power shuttled in on a 339-mile power line stretching from Quebec to Queens called the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE).…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA’s new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will…

When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. The telescope will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography. It will allow astronomers…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. China’s AI models have Trump’s AI world at war with itself Last weekend, several current and former advisers to President Donald Trump on AI publicly lobbed insults at the country’s leading…

The conversation about AI often centers on algorithms, computing power, or huge investments in new semiconductor fabrication plants and hyperscale data centers. But beneath each of these advances is another layer of innovation that makes them possible: advanced materials. Every new generation of AI technology demands more processing power, more memory, greater energy efficiency, and…