This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people. Websites have long allowed bots to perform automated tasks, like capturing the content of web pages, but rules…

19 October 2026

“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well as cautious (and not-so-cautious) celebration. Cammarata’s claim is…

19 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. Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbon —James Temple In July 2021, a wildfire burned through a forest on the University of Alaska, Fairbanks campus,…

19 October 2026

In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.  The blaze, possibly sparked by lightning, burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the…

19 October 2026

What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play. Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone. The agents—copies of Claude Opus 4.7 nicknamed Eko—were able to…

19 October 2026

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s…

19 October 2026

Listen to the session or watch below 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. Watch…

16 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. Kids are outsmarting social media bans. That’s not a problem we need to solve.   —Michal Luria, Aliya Bhatia, and Danah Boyd Social media bans are stacking up. In July, France joined…

16 October 2026

I. Meet cute Barnabas and Mainspring grew up near at hand, about an hour apart with good traffic, but for a long time they weren’t close. They traded glimpses and occasional hellos and then went about their business. Both of them carried on livelier conversations with farther-flung neighbors, who were richer and had more to…

16 October 2026

More than 5 million people around the world have an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) called geographic atrophy, in which cells in the retinas die off. And until now, no treatment could restore their vision. The PRIMA system, which was approved in Europe in July and is awaiting FDA clearance in the US,…

16 October 2026