For decades, lithium-ion batteries have powered our phones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But lithium’s limited supply and volatile price have led the industry to seek more resilient alternatives. A sodium-ion battery works much like a lithium-ion one: It stores and releases energy by shuttling ions between two electrodes. But unlike lithium, a somewhat rare element…
In sprawling stretches of farmland and industrial parks, supersized buildings packed with racks of computers are springing up to fuel the AI race. These engineering marvels are a new species of infrastructure: supercomputers designed to train and run large language models at mind-bending scale, complete with their own specialized chips, cooling systems, and even energy…
Commercial nuclear reactors all work pretty much the same way. Atoms of a radioactive material split, emitting neutrons. Those bump into other atoms, splitting them and causing them to emit more neutrons, which bump into other atoms, continuing the chain reaction. That reaction gives off heat, which can be used directly or help turn water…
How large is a large language model? Think about it this way. In the center of San Francisco there’s a hill called Twin Peaks from which you can view nearly the entire city. Picture all of it—every block and intersection, every neighborhood and park, as far as you can see—covered in sheets of paper. Now…
The billionaire investor Peter Thiel (or maybe his ghostwriter) once said, “We were promised flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” That quip originally appeared in a manifesto for Thiel’s venture fund in 2011. All good investment firms have a manifesto, right? This one argued for making bold bets on risky, world-changing technologies rather than…
Here at MIT Technology Review we’ve been writing about the gene-editing technology CRISPR since 2013, calling it the biggest biotech breakthrough of the century. Yet so far, there’s been only one gene-editing drug approved. It’s been used commercially on only about 40 patients, all with sickle-cell disease. It’s becoming clear that the impact of CRISPR…
The new year has barely begun, but the first days of 2026 have brought big news for health. On Monday, the US’s federal health agency upended its recommendations for routine childhood vaccinations—a move that health associations worry puts children at unnecessary risk of preventable disease. There was more news from the federal government on Wednesday,…
For offshore wind power in the US, the new year is bringing new legal battles. On December 22, the Trump administration announced it would pause the leases of five wind farms currently under construction off the US East Coast. Developers were ordered to stop work immediately. The cited reason? National security, specifically concerns that turbines…
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. I am writing this because one of my editors woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled on a bedside notepad: “What is a…
Nandan Nilekani can’t stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state capacity that started with Aadhaar—the world’s largest digital identity system. Aadhaar means “foundation” in Hindi, and on that bedrock Nilekani and people working with him went on to build a sprawling…