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. Mars may be a hellhole, but the moon is not far behind The US and China are racing to build bases on the moon, with NASA hoping to establish a small…

12 October 2026

Welcome to the second space race. You can be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu. Last time, it was the Soviet Union and the United States vying to be the first to plant some flags. Now it’s a sprint to the lunar surface between America and China—alongside a host of varyingly friendly and rival nations—plus a…

12 October 2026

In a research station in central Panama, you can walk through a century of forest time, watching scrubby plots of adolescent trees give way to cathedral-­like canopies of mature growth. Forest ecologist Daisy Dent, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich, oversees this sequence of plots across the Barro Colorado Nature Monument, some of which date…

12 October 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. We’re putting too much faith in AI’s ability to say no Today’s AI models are trained to refuse a vast number of prompts. If you ask your chatbot how to poison…

9 October 2026

This week my colleague Antonio Regalado had an interesting update on GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. According to research presented at an aging meeting in Boston, these drugs seem to affect at least some measures of biological age. Overweight and diabetic people who take GLP-1s have a biological age around two to three years younger than similar…

9 October 2026

The moment Trevor Wischnewsky heard that drones were delivering pizza and sushi around his Texas neighborhood, his mind was made up. “It was super fascinating,” he says. “I just immediately wanted to be a part of it.” Wischnewsky is now an RPIC, or “remote pilot in command,” at a company called FlyTrex. An RPIC is…

9 October 2026

Ever since people first seriously contemplated giving machines an intelligence modeled on our own, there has never been any question that they would, like us, be able to say no. The sci-fi canon is full of stories of robotic disobedience. Most of these capers are, of course, cautionary.  But recently, the idea that AI shouldn’t…

9 October 2026

Friday, October 16, 2026 Can AI design new life forms? In 2025, Stanford University PhD student Samuel King came up with a preliminary answer when he used a generative AI model to propose genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses. It isn’t yet an example of AI-generated life, but that could be next. Join senior AI reporter…

9 October 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. AI breakthroughs in robotics won’t change your life any time soon The hype around humanoid robots is reaching fever pitch. Much of it comes from the idea that the same AI…

8 October 2026

This week, we released our 2026 version of our Climate Tech Companies to Watch list. It’s an annual project that the MIT Technology Review team puts together. Our goal is to highlight some of the promising, interesting advances and firms we think are worth paying attention to in the world of climate and energy technology. …

8 October 2026