A nonprofit organization called the Fermi Explorer Mission announced today that it intends to launch a spacecraft to our nearest star system by the end of 2029.  It’s a hugely ambitious mission—if all goes well, the spacecraft could take up to 80,000 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri, which is 4.4 light-years away. And the…

1 September 2026

For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes…

1 September 2026

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. How engineered microbes could help feed the world’s crops Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions.…

1 September 2026

Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help. A growing body of research shows that seeding the soil around a crop’s roots with beneficial microbes can help feed the plant, providing crucial nitrogen to help…

1 September 2026

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. By now you’ve probably heard about last month’s major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on…

31 August 2026

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. A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young —Antonio Regalado I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” when a company called Generation Lab offered me the…

28 August 2026

MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such…

28 August 2026

I knew I’d officially become a “longevity influencer” this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about—and even receive—their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1 Generation. This wasn’t just any antiaging treatment, either. A company fact sheet says that…

27 August 2026

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. The inside story on why OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with…

27 August 2026

EVs account for under 10% of total new-vehicle sales in the US, and the numbers are declining. From a climate perspective, that’s pretty dismal, especially because the transportation sector is the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions in the country.  One thing that could help turn that around? Slate Auto’s new truck—a vehicle that seems…

27 August 2026