The Boox Palma 2 Pro features a color display, enhanced hardware, and a stylus in a smartphone-sized package. [...]

Copper atoms trapped in MXene nanochannels remove 94.9% of bisphenol A in 5 minutes by concentrating reactants and lowering the energy needed for breakdown. [...]

A huge bar of iron has been discovered lurking inside the iconic Ring Nebula. The structure is enormous, spanning hundreds of times the size of Pluto’s orbit and containing a Mars-sized amount of iron. It was detected using a new instrument that allowed astronomers to map the nebula in far [...]

When scientists sent bacteria-infecting viruses to the International Space Station, the microbes did not behave the same way they do on Earth. In microgravity, infections still occurred, but both viruses and bacteria evolved differently over time. Genetic changes emerged that altered how viruses attach to bacteria and how bacteria defend [...]

Getting a smart thermostat can bring down your utility bill, but following these steps can save you even more money. [...]

Windows 11 Pro gives you greater control over settings, but is it worth the extra cost? I break down the differences between the two systems. [...]

A scalable method creates ultraclean twisted 2D superlattices, enabling high resolution X-ray imaging of backfolded bands linked to exotic quantum effects. [...]

Engineers have created a device that generates incredibly tiny, earthquake-like vibrations on a microchip—and it could transform future electronics. Using a new kind of “phonon laser,” the team can produce ultra-fast surface waves that already play a hidden role in smartphones, GPS systems, and wireless tech. Unlike today’s bulky setups, [...]

Flipping ferroelectric polarization reverses bimeron topology in a two-dimensional magnet, allowing voltage pulses alone to write, erase, and invert nanoscale spin structures without current flow. [...]

Researchers have turned artificial intelligence into a powerful new lens for understanding why cancer survival rates differ so dramatically around the world. By analyzing cancer data and health system information from 185 countries, the AI model highlights which factors, such as access to radiotherapy, universal health coverage, and economic strength, [...]

Windows 11 has a built-in report that provides insight into your laptop's battery status, including whether a replacement is actually needed. [...]

Researchers studied a potassium cobalt arsenate honeycomb, uncovering magnetic behaviors that may lead to quantum spin liquids and advanced quantum technologies. [...]

Humans pay enormous attention to lips during conversation, and robots have struggled badly to keep up. A new robot developed at Columbia Engineering learned realistic lip movements by watching its own reflection and studying human videos online. This allowed it to speak and sing with synchronized facial motion, without being [...]

The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a research unit in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, brings together researchers from across MIT who combine their diverse expertise to understand intelligence through tightly coupled scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. These researchers engage in collaborative efforts spanning science, engineering, the [...]

Generative artificial intelligence models have left such an indelible impact on digital content creation that it’s getting harder to recall what the internet was like before it. You can call on these AI tools for clever projects such as videos and photos — but their flair for the creative hasn’t [...]

A generative AI system can now analyze blood cells with greater accuracy and confidence than human experts, detecting subtle signs of diseases like leukemia. It not only spots rare abnormalities but also recognizes its own uncertainty, making it a powerful support tool for clinicians. [...]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I decided to go to CES kind of at the last minute. Over the holiday break, contacts from China kept messaging me about their travel plans. After the [...]

Generative AI’s ability to write software code has quickly created one of the technology’s first real use cases for business. Professional software engineers and novices alike are using AI coding assistants to produce, test, edit, and debug code, reducing the amount of time it takes to complete the often tedious steps [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]