The American Society of Magazine Editors has named MIT Technology Review as a finalist for a 2026 National Magazine Award in the reporting category. The shortlisted story—“We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard”—is part of the publication’s Power Hungry package on AI’s energy burden. AI is often described…
University of Washington researchers built a smartphone app that tracks fetal heart rate as accurately as clinic tools using only the phone’s speaker and mic, though it’s not ready for release yet.
The post This app turns your smartphone into a fetal h…
Burrowed in the alleys of Hongik-dong, a hushed residential neighborhood in eastern Seoul, is a faded stone-tiled building stamped “Korea Baduk Association,” the governing body for professional Go. The game is an ancient one, with sacred stature in South Korea. But inside the building, rooms once filled with the soft clatter of hands dipping into…
When a company claims to have created what’s essentially the holy grail of batteries, there are bound to be some questions. Interest has been swirling since Donut Lab, a Finnish company, announced last month that it had a new solid-state battery technology, one that was ready for large-scale production. The company said its batteries can…
To most people, rocks are just rocks. To geologists, they are much, much more: crystal-filled time capsules with the power to reveal the state of the planet at the very moment they were forged. For decades, NASA had been on a time capsule hunt like none other—one across Mars. Its rovers have journeyed around a…
Eons ago, in 2012, I had a weird experience. My iPhone suddenly shut down. When I restarted it, I found it was totally reset—clean, like a new device. This was the early days of iOS, so I wasn’t too concerned until I went to connect it to my computer to restore it from a backup.…
The only reality show that matters The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is one of the best shows on television right now. Not one of the best reality TV shows, but one of the best TV shows, period. Chronicling a shifting group of wealthy women in and around Salt Lake, the show has featured…
The boom of a calving glacier. The crackling rumble of a wildfire. The roar of a surging storm front. They’re the noises of the living Earth, music of this one particular sphere and clues to the true nature of these dramatic events. But as loud as all these things are, they emit even more acoustic…
Every year, poachers shoot hundreds of rhinos, fishing crews haul millions of sharks out of protected seas, and smugglers carry countless animals and plants across borders. This illegal activity is incredibly hard to disrupt, since it’s backed by sophisticated criminal networks and the perpetrators know that their chances of being caught are slim. With an…
Earth’s a medium-size rock with some water on top, enveloped by gases that keep everything that lives here alive. Just at the edge of that envelope begins a thin but dense layer of human-built, high-tech stuff. People started putting gear up there in 1957, and now it’s a real habit. Telescopes look up and out…