You might be surprised to learn how many 'vampire devices' could be in your home, silently draining power. [...]

The NextSense Smartbuds, new sleep earbuds I saw at CES, use EEG to deliver more restorative sleep. [...]

A gelatin memristor with 16 stable conductance states mimics biological pain perception, rating intensity, sensitizing after injury, and self-healing while directly controlling mouse muscle response. [...]

Researchers have created a new two-layer membrane filtration system that can significantly reduce the amount of micro and nanoplastics that leak from landfills into local water basins. [...]

This year is shaping up to be an exciting one for PCs: Dell is reviving the XPS, while MSI has just announced a new series of ultra-thin laptops. [...]

With the Las Vegas trade show coming to a close, here are the products that impressed me the most - enough to make me reach for my wallet. [...]

A bladeless turbine design converts the static electricity naturally generated by dust particles in compressed air into usable power while neutralizing the hazardous charges. [...]

Scientists in South Korea have discovered a way to make all-solid-state batteries safer and more powerful using inexpensive materials. Instead of adding costly metals, they redesigned the battery’s internal structure to help lithium ions move faster. This simple structural tweak boosted performance by up to four times. The work points [...]

Scientists developed a reconfigurable topological photonic system that steers light in real time using optical pumping, enabling ultrafast adaptive control. [...]

Stanford researchers have developed an AI that can predict future disease risk using data from just one night of sleep. The system analyzes detailed physiological signals, looking for hidden patterns across the brain, heart, and breathing. It successfully forecast risks for conditions like cancer, dementia, and heart disease. The results [...]

Artificial intelligence has captured headlines recently for its rapidly growing energy demands, and particularly the surging electricity usage of data centers that enable the training and deployment of the latest generative AI models. But it’s not all bad news — some AI tools have the potential to reduce some forms of energy [...]

Every autumn, as the Northern Hemisphere moves toward winter, Judah Cohen starts to piece together a complex atmospheric puzzle. Cohen, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), has spent decades studying how conditions in the Arctic set the course for winter weather throughout Europe, Asia, [...]

Nearly everything in the universe is made of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, yet we can’t see either of them directly. Scientists are developing detectors so sensitive they can spot particle interactions that might occur once in years or even decades. These experiments aim to uncover what shapes galaxies [...]

Einstein’s claim that the speed of light is constant has survived more than a century of scrutiny—but scientists are still daring to test it. Some theories of quantum gravity suggest light might behave slightly differently at extreme energies. By tracking ultra-powerful gamma rays from distant cosmic sources, researchers searched for [...]

Researchers have built a new platform that produces ultrashort UV-C laser pulses and detects them at room temperature using atom-thin materials. The light flashes last just femtoseconds and can be used to send encoded messages through open space. The system relies on efficient laser generation and highly responsive sensors that [...]

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work officially launched on Nov. 3, 2025, bringing together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore critical questions about economic opportunity, technology, and democracy.Co-directed by MIT professors Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, the new Stone Center analyzes the forces [...]

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 [...]

Scientists are learning to engineer light in rich, multidimensional ways that dramatically increase how much information a single photon can carry. This leap could make quantum communication more secure, quantum computers more efficient, and sensors far more sensitive. Recent advances have turned what was once an experimental curiosity into compact, [...]

Researchers have created microscopic robots so small they’re barely visible, yet smart enough to sense, decide, and move completely on their own. Powered by light and equipped with tiny computers, the robots swim by manipulating electric fields rather than using moving parts. They can detect temperature changes, follow programmed paths, [...]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Sometimes AI feels like a niche topic to write about, but then the holidays happen, and I hear relatives of all ages talking about cases of chatbot-induced psychosis, [...]

What is patient privacy for? The Hippocratic Oath, thought to be one of the earliest and most widely known medical ethics texts in the world, reads: “Whatever I see or hear in the lives of my patients, whether in connection with my professional practice or not, which ought not to [...]

MIT Technology Review’s What’s 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 an industry in constant flux, sticking your neck out to predict what’s coming next may seem reckless. (AI bubble? What AI [...]

New research shows that AI doesn’t need endless training data to start acting more like a human brain. When researchers redesigned AI systems to better resemble biological brains, some models produced brain-like activity without any training at all. This challenges today’s data-hungry approach to AI development. The work suggests smarter [...]

We’re in the midst of a global mental-­health crisis. More than a billion people worldwide suffer from a mental-health condition, according to the World Health Organization. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is growing in many demographics, particularly young people, and suicide is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives globally [...]

A biologically grounded computational model built to mimic real neural circuits, not trained on animal data, learned a visual categorization task just as actual lab animals do, matching their accuracy, variability, and underlying neural rhythms. By integrating fine-scale synaptic rules with large-scale architecture across cortex, striatum, brainstem, and acetylcholine-modulated systems, [...]

A new theoretical framework argues that the long-standing split between computational functionalism and biological naturalism misses how real brains actually compute. The authors propose “biological computationalism,” the idea that neural computation is inseparable from the brain’s physical, hybrid, and energy-constrained dynamics rather than an abstract algorithm running on hardware. In [...]