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 search for dark matter has been blown wide open For decades, physicists have hunted for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading candidate for dark matter. But their search has…

18 June 2026

Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of Pull in case of climate emergency to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet. But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicated, entirely unsolved puzzle. Some…

18 June 2026

Underneath an Apennine massif, below the Jinping Mountains of Sichuan, and at the bottom of a South Dakota mine, there is a cosmic hunt afoot. Isolated deep beneath these rocky shields, massive detectors filled with liquid xenon aim to make the first direct detections of dark matter, the long-sought invisible substance whose gravity has sculpted…

18 June 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. Hacking the atmosphere: geoengineering gets a reality check Solar geoengineering, the controversial idea that we could deliberately intervene in the climate system to counteract global warming, is moving beyond computer simulations…

17 June 2026

Jim Franke pulls away the cover page of a presentation on the wraparound desk in his office, revealing an illustration of an odd-­looking aircraft with massive wings stretching out from a stubby fuselage. The uncrewed plane is soaring thousands of meters higher than commercial jets fly—so high you can see the curvature of the Earth.…

17 June 2026

Most of Kenya’s power grid runs on renewables. But with 25% of communities lacking centralized electricity, the nation is looking to off-grid solar to hit its goal of delivering universal electricity access by 2030 without driving up emissions. The ever-­improving economics of solar technology have helped. A couple of years ago, a panel cost about…

17 June 2026

A collection of stories about how militaries are using AI models to make decisions. This subscriber-only eBook is a package of six stories that were originally published in MIT Technology Review between April 11, 2025, and April 21, 2026, and have been updated to reflect recent developments. Stories written by James O’Donnel by James O’Donnell…

16 June 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. This man with ALS is the first “power user” of a brain implant that lets him speak Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for almost…

16 June 2026

At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however, caused a different…

16 June 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. When I landed in Seoul after a grueling 12-hour flight from San Francisco, I walked through an unmanned immigration checkpoint, where a machine scanned my face and passport. On the subway home,…

15 June 2026