MIT Technology Review evaluates the realistic timelines for six major tech breakthroughs, from decoding animal speech to Mars travel, to separate genuine progress from hype.
AI-generated summary. Check the original reporting for context and accuracy.
This is the available feed excerpt, which may be shortened or in the publisher’s original language.
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. Are we there yet? A reality check on six big tech promises Some seemingly impossible feats are too good to give up on. Decoding a pet’s yowls and yips? Absolutely. Scrubbing the world of forever chemicals? Yes, please. Rocketing to Mars in a fraction of the time? Sounds great, but how close are we, really? In the new Impossible issue of MIT Technology Review, we ran progress reports on six potentially transformative technologies and ideas that have been “just around the corner” for years, or even decades. From exercise in a pill to nuclear-powered spaceships, we asked experts what’s holding them back and how far they’ve come. Check out our stories on how they all stacked up. Over the coming days, we’ll unpack each of the six technologies in The Download. So stay tuned! In the biotech world, you can’t see everything —Jessica Hamzelou Earlier this week, I attended a screening of You Can See Everything, the buzzy new documentary about the disgraced former biotech CEO Elizabeth Holmes. Like many others, I came away feeling unsettled. But not just about Holmes’s fraud and the disturbing interactions between the subjects. The film reignited a concern I’ve had about covering science for most of my career: Despite our best efforts, we never can actually see everything.The film is a stark reminder of how easy it can be to fall for an appealing narrative. This is why it left me questioning how we cover science. This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday. Help choose our next Roundtables topic Our subscriber-only Roundtables bring you into conversation with MIT Technology Review editors and reporters. Now, we want your help choosing our next topic: how to keep your mind going for longer, or what it would take to put a city on the moon. Which do you most want
An automated sorting aid based on source trust, keywords, and entities, on a scale of 1–12. High: 9–12; medium: 6–8; low: 1–5. It does not measure urgency, verify reporting, or indicate editorial endorsement.
Netflix’s leadership changes and layoffs fail to reverse its declining subscriber growth, signaling deep structural problems that mere executive turnover cannot solve.
Brick Night uses location-based automation to block phone use in bed, addressing the specific problem of nighttime doomscrolling.
IT workers are overwhelmed by the urgent, relentless effort to patch PHP systems against a critical cyber-security threat.