Most recent 40 articles: Technology Review - Climate Change
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Regenerative agriculture is raising a lot of climate hopes - and a lot of concerns | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Jun 03, 2020) |
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Jun 03, 2020 · Even though lots of politicians, environmentalists, and companies are eager to try. Corporations, politicians, and environmentalists have all embraced carbon farming as the feel-good climate solution of the moment. Several leading Democratic presidential contenders highlighted the potential to alter farming practices to suck up more carbon dioxide in their climate plans. And the presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, declared last summer: "Soil is the next frontier for storing carbon." Read more ... |
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The pandemic made life harder for deaf people. The solutions could benefit everyone. | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (May 28, 2020) |
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May 28, 2020 · Captioning and clear masks are a start. About a month after shelter-in-place orders began in her area, Shaylee Mansfield—an 11-year-old deaf actress in Austin, Texas—posted a video on Twitter. "I don't understand my favorite people on Instagram," she signs as she watches various Instagram videos. "Why? No captioning!" Shaylee's video got thousands of likes and retweets, though no official response—yet—from Instagram at the time of publishing. "It's not fair that Shaylee, a deaf sister, and Ivy, a hearing sister, cannot watch together equally," says their mother, Sheena McFeely (who is also deaf, as is their father, Manny Johnson). McFeely says the new reliance on ... Read more ... |
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"The first day was really hard": Life as a contact tracer | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (May 10, 2020) |
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May 10, 2020 · America is hiring an army of people to track down coronavirus cases. What's the job like? How do people respond? And how stressful is it? As American states weigh the possibility of reopening services in the face of the covid-19 pandemic, the demand for contact tracing—helping track down and isolate potential carriers of the virus—will get even larger. We spoke to people working as contact tracers across America to understand what it's like, what they're seeing, and what might be coming next. When San Francisco's Department of Public Health asked if anyone in the library system would want to join the city's contact tracing program, I said yes right away. From the ... Read more ... |
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These pop songs were written by OpenAI's deep-learning algorithm | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (May 01, 2020) |
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May 01, 2020 · The news: In a fresh spin on manufactured pop, OpenAI has released a neural network called Jukebox that can generate catchy songs in a variety of different styles, from teenybop and country to hip-hop and heavy metal. It even sings—sort of. How it works: Give it a genre, an artist, and lyrics, and Jukebox will produce a passable pastiche in the style of well-known performers, such as Katy Perry, Elvis Presley or Nas. You can also give it the first few seconds of a song and it will autocomplete the rest. Old songs, new tricks: Computer-generated music has been a thing for 50 years or more, and AIs already have impressive examples of orchestral classical and ambient ... Read more ... |
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MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 29, 2020) |
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MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 29, 2020) |
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Apr 29, 2020 · It has also open-sourced the AI system to spur further research. For all the progress that chatbots and virtual assistants have made, they're still terrible conversationalists. Most are highly task-oriented: you make a demand and they comply. Some are highly frustrating: they never seem to get what you're looking for. Others are awfully boring: they lack the charm of a human companion. It's fine when you're only looking to set a timer. But as these bots become increasingly popular as interfaces for everything from retail to health care to financial services, the inadequacies only grow more apparent. Blender's ability comes from the immense scale of its training data. It ... Read more ... |
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Remdesivir seems to shorten covid hospital stays and may save lives | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 29, 2020) |
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Apr 29, 2020 · A government trial showed patients got better 30% faster. The good news started trickling out early this morning, first in a vague company press release and then, by midday, from the White House. A drug called remdesivir appears to actually work against the coronavirus that causes covid-19. More on coronavirus The news was delivered to President Donald Trump by Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who said covid-19 patients who received the antiviral drug recovered 31% faster, in 11 days instead of 15, in a placebo-controlled trial carried out by his agency. "Even though it doesn't seem like a ... Read more ... |
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- Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 27, 2020) |
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- Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 27, 2020) |
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Apr 27, 2020 · The covid-19 pandemic is stretching hospital resources to the breaking point in many countries in the world. It is no surprise that many people hope AI could speed up patient screening and ease the strain on clinical staff. But a study from Google Health—the first to look at the impact of a deep-learning tool in real clinical settings—reveals that even the most accurate AIs can actually make things worse if not tailored to the clinical environments in which they will work. Existing rules for deploying AI in clinical settings, such as the standards for FDA clearance in the US or a CE mark in Europe, focus primarily on accuracy. There are no explicit requirements that an AI ... Read more ... |
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MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 27, 2020) |
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MIT - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 27, 2020) |
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Apr 27, 2020 · If AI is really going to make a difference to patients we need to know how it works when real humans get their hands on it, in real situations. The covid-19 pandemic is stretching hospital resources to the breaking point in many countries in the world. It is no surprise that many people hope AI could speed up patient screening and ease the strain on clinical staff. But a study from Google Health—the first to look at the impact of a deep-learning tool in real clinical settings—reveals that even the most accurate AIs can actually make things worse if not tailored to the clinical environments in which they will work. Existing rules for deploying AI in clinical settings, ... Read more ... |
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Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 25, 2020) |
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Apr 25, 2020 · The pandemic shows that the US is no longer much good at coming up with technologies relevant to our most basic needs. The frustration in Marc Andreessen's post on our failure to prepare and respond competently to the coronavirus pandemic is palpable, and his diagnosis is adamant: "a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to 'build.'" Why don't we have vaccines and medicines, or even masks and ventilators? He writes: "We could have these things but we chose not to—specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to 'build.'" More on coronavirus Forgetting for a moment that this is ... Read more ... |
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Antigen testing could be a faster, cheaper way to diagnose covid-19 | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 24, 2020) |
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Apr 24, 2020 · Current coronavirus testing is plagued by a lack of resources. An antigen test could be a useful alternative that bypasses supply-chain bottlenecks. Coronavirus testing in the US is nowhere near where it should be. A recent road map suggested we need to test upwards of 20 million people every day in order to safely reopen the economy (we're currently running around 150,000 a day). To scale up, we need to move beyond conventional methods—and that might require an entirely different type of test. The gold standard for covid-19 testing is the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. In a PCR test, genetic material collected in a nasal swab is copied millions or billions of ... Read more ... |
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Israel is using AI to flag high-risk covid-19 patients | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 24, 2020) |
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Apr 24, 2020 · But the approach, which works best with access to lots of patient data, probably won't be as effective in the US. One of Israel's largest health maintenance organizations is using artificial intelligence to help identify which of the 2.4 million people it covers are most at risk of severe covid-19 complications. Maccabi Healthcare Services says the system—which it developed with AI company Medial EarlySign—has already flagged 2% of its members, amounting to around 40,000 people. Once identified, individuals are put on a fast track for testing. More on coronavirus The AI was adapted from an existing system trained to identify people most at risk from the flu, using ... Read more ... |
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Bluetooth contact tracing needs bigger, better data | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 22, 2020) |
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Apr 22, 2020 · Using Bluetooth signals to tell you if you've been put at risk of covid-19 is the cornerstone of contact tracing apps. But doing it well is a complex and challenging task—even for the experts. You might know Bluetooth best for helping you pair your headphones and smartphone, but the 21-year-old wireless technology is getting a new wave of attention now that it's at the heart of contact-tracing apps designed to show whether you might have been exposed to the novel coronavirus. Google and Apple, for example, are building a system to track contact between people who might spread the disease. The idea is simple: since Bluetooth is constantly scanning for other devices, your ... Read more ... |
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California is racing to boost coronavirus testing and contact tracing efforts | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 22, 2020) |
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Apr 22, 2020 · And it's striving to build a 10,000-person "army" of contact tracers. California plans to significantly ramp up its coronavirus testing and tracing efforts, as the state strives to reach a point where it could relax stay-at-home rules implemented to contain the outbreak. During a press conference on Wednesday, Governor Gavin Newsom said the state intends to increase testing capacity from about 16,000 per day to 25,000 by April 30, and reach between 60,000 and 80,000 in the weeks after. As part of that effort, California will open 86 new testing sites around the state through partnerships with Verily and OptumServe, with a focus on filling in "testing deserts" in rural areas. Read more ... |
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Many covid-19 survivors will be left traumatized by their ICU experience | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 22, 2020) |
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Apr 22, 2020 · People who survive intensive care and the process of being put on a ventilator often suffer depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. There's a phrase to describe what we're experiencing: collective trauma. We are all grieving—whether it's for the deaths of loved ones, the loss of our way of life, or the knowledge that things will never quite be the same again. Most of us are experiencing some level of anxiety. The loss of control over major aspects of our lives and lack of a clear end point to the crisis are both partly to blame. For some, stress will spiral into a diagnosable mental health problem. But we're not all going through the same thing. ... Read more ... |
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Radio Corona, Apr 23: would you volunteer to get the coronavirus? | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 22, 2020) |
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Apr 22, 2020 · In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, will discuss volunteer initiatives that might accelerate the development of a coronavirus vaccine. Joining him will be Josh Morrison, executive director at Waitlist Zero and part of the team at 1 Day Sooner. Both organizations recruit volunteers to take part in the covid-19 vaccine trials, some of which—"challenge trials"—will involve deliberately being exposed to the virus to test if the vaccine has worked. Also joining is Ian Haydon, a volunteer currently taking part in Moderna's vaccine trial (though not a challenge trial). He explained his decision for us a couple of weeks ago. ... Read more ... |
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Facebook has released a map of coronavirus symptoms crowdsourced from its users | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 21, 2020) |
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Apr 21, 2020 · How it could be used: Knowing who is experiencing symptoms and where could help health officials and governments to prepare for surges of hospital cases and decide where to allocate resources like ventilators, face masks, and personal protective equipment. Given the shortage of tests, and long delays for results, this map could be useful in helping to predict where covid-19 hot spots are forming across the US. Limitations: Obviously, the map is only as good as the data that's used to create it, and as you can see for yourself, vast swaths of the map don't have enough participants to yield reliable data. The map is part of Facebook's work with CMU and the CDC to predict the ... Read more ... |
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The US needs to do 20 million tests a day to reopen safely, according to a new plan | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 20, 2020) |
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Apr 20, 2020 · The news: A group of experts has produced a plan for the US to reopen its economy safely this summer. However, it's contingent on doing at least 20 million tests every day, scaling up contact tracing, and ensuring that those who need to isolate can be properly supported. The report, produced by 45 cross-disciplinary experts assembled by Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, says we need to be doing 5 million tests a day by early June in order to start reopening the country, increasing to 20 million by midsummer to fully end the shutdown. From the start, the World Health Organization has said the only way to beat the virus is to "test, test, test." That ... Read more ... |
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Facebook is stepping up its efforts to debunk coronavirus falsehoods | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 17, 2020) |
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Apr 17, 2020 · The context: There are a lot of harmful myths and hoaxes about covid-19 being promulgated on social media, most notably the idea that there's a link with new 5G networks, which has spread across Europe and led to attacks on phone towers in the UK. People are also sharing dangerous falsehoods about cures and claims that the virus is some sort of man-made weapon. Human rights group Avaaz released a report this week that examined 100 pieces of misinformation on Facebook and found the posts had been shared over 1.7 million times and seen approximately 117 million times. Social-media companies have promised to take a more proactive approach to taking down misinformation about ... Read more ... |
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Machine learning could check if you're social distancing properly at work | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 17, 2020) |
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Apr 17, 2020 · Andrew Ng's startup Landing AI has created a new workplace monitoring tool that issues an alert when anyone is less than the desired distance from a colleague. Six feet apart: On Thursday, the startup released a blog post with a new demo video showing off a new social distancing detector. On the left is a feed of people walking around on the street. On the right, a bird's-eye diagram represents each one as a dot and turns them bright red when they move too close to someone else. The company says the tool is meant to be used in work settings like factory floors and was developed in response to the request of its customers (which include Foxconn). It also says the tool can ... Read more ... |
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NASA sets a date for SpaceX's first ever crewed mission | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 17, 2020) |
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Apr 17, 2020 · SpaceX's Crew Dragon is slated to travel to the International Space Station on May 27, carrying two astronauts. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced plans to launch a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 27. If the launch takes place, it will be the first time an American rocket will carry passengers to orbit since the final space shuttle launch on July 8, 2011. The covid-19 pandemic looms over the mission, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The state is under a stay-at-home order currently due to expire on April 30, with exemptions for essential activities. The federal ... Read more ... |
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Up to 4% of Silicon Valley is already infected with coronavirus | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 17, 2020) |
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Apr 17, 2020 · A study from a noted pandemic skeptic suggests the virus is more widespread but less deadly than people think. Results from surveys tracking the true spread of the coronavirus are all over the map—but one done in the heart of the technology sector says the germ is more widespread, and less deadly, than widely believed. The new survey looked for antibodies to covid-19 in the blood of 3,300 residents of Santa Clara County, which is home to Palo Alto, top venture capital firms, and the headquarters of tech giants Intel and Nvidia. According to the study's authors, which include data skeptic John Ioannidis of Stanford University, actual infections in the region vastly ... Read more ... |
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Facebook's digital currency project just got a lot less audacious | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 16, 2020) |
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Apr 16, 2020 · Here are the most substantial edits: A whole new plan for the currency. The original vision was for Libra to be a stablecoin backed by a reserve of cash and low-risk government securities denominated in a mixture of selected fiat currencies: US dollars, euros, British pounds, Japanese yen, and Singapore dollars. The new Libra is … not that. A key piece of feedback from regulators was "the potential for a multi-currency Libra coin to interfere with monetary sovereignty," according to the updated Libra white paper. So there's a new strategy: The Libra Association, the nonprofit that Facebook has stood up to manage the currency, will issue multiple stablecoins denominated ... Read more ... |
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How to test everyone for the coronavirus | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 16, 2020) |
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Apr 16, 2020 · Entrepreneurs and academic gene jockeys are hatching schemes for population-level coronavirus testing. "It's my first global pandemic. How about you?" Jonathan Rothberg wanted to know. Rothberg is a high-energy biotech entrepreneur who has been trapped in quarantine on his super-yacht, the Gene Machine, since mid-March, when we first reached him by phone. The creator of a fast DNA sequencing machine and, more recently, a revolutionary cheap ultrasound wand, Rothberg had been cruising in the Caribbean when the pandemic hit. "I was on vacation and suddenly the world blew up," he says. It didn't take long for him to come up with a plan. He was walking by the small ... Read more ... |
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Facebook is using bots to simulate what its users might do | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · The context: Like any software company, the tech giant needs to test its product any time it pushes updates. But the sorts of debugging methods that normal-size companies use aren't really enough when you've got 2.5 billion users. Such methods usually focus on checking how a single user might experience the platform and whether the software responds to those individual users' actions as expected. In contrast, as many as 25% of Facebook's major issues emerge only when users begin interacting with one another. It can be difficult to see how the introduction of a feature or updates to a privacy setting might play out across billions of user interactions. Automatic design: While ... Read more ... |
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Finding focus | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · People can increase their attention by controlling certain brain waves. "There's a lot of interest in using neurofeedback to try to help people with various brain disorders and behavioral problems," says Robert Desimone, director of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, who led the study. "It's a completely noninvasive way of controlling and testing the role of different types of brain activity." Subjects were asked to use mental effort to increase the contrast in a grating pattern at the center of a screen while being scanned with magnetoencephalography (MEG), which reveals brain activity with millisecond precision. The greater the asymmetry between alpha levels ... Read more ... |
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How the US might reopen the economy and what we can learn from China | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · We talked to a professor on Chinese economics about how truly interdependent the global economy is. Note: This episode has ended. More on coronavirus In this episode of Radio Corona, Gideon Lichfield, editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, spoke with Nelson Mark, economics professor at the University of Notre Dame, about the economic impact of covid-19, how we should think about pandemics as economic risks, and how the US should be thinking about its economy as it compares to China's. Mark is an expert in the macroeconomics of China, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and the North American editor of the Pacific ... Read more ... |
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Repurposing drugs might help fight this pandemic | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · And they could even help with the next one. In mid-February, a California woman with chronic health problems tested positive for coronavirus. She hadn't traveled overseas, nor had she come into contact with anyone who had it. When Nevan Krogan caught wind of the case, he was immediately concerned. It was the first known case of community spread in the US. "I realized at that point, this is going to be everywhere. This is everywhere," says Krogan. This story was part of our May 2020 issue As a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, Krogan runs a lab that studies how genes of diseases interact with proteins in the human body. At the ... Read more ... |
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Social distancing until 2022?! Hopefully not. | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · A new study makes a grim forecast for how much longer we might be cooped up. But there are reasons to be less pessimistic. A new paper by researchers from Harvard's school of public health modeling the spread of covid-19 in the United States says that "prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022." The emphasis in many news reports about the paper is on the date, which is startling. Most of us are hoping for some relief far sooner than that. But if modeling results during this pandemic have taught us anything, it's that we shouldn't fixate on a number that makes for an arresting headline. Instead, we should focus on the may. The paper, published ... Read more ... |
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The scientists and technologists who dropped everything to fight covid-19 | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · Grassroots groups of researchers are taking matters into their own hands. But volunteering doesn't always go smoothly. It began as a project Ben Vigoda developed to convince his parents. Covid-19 was just beginning to hit the US, and they—like so many other Americans—continued going about their daily lives: they took walks, they went to the grocery store, they hung out with friends. But Vigoda, the CEO and founder of machine-learning startup Gamalon, knew it was only a matter of time before the situation got a lot worse. A Chinese-speaking coworker had been tracking the outbreak since late December, and by mid-January, Vigoda had instructed all his employees to stock up ... Read more ... |
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The WHO isn't perfect, but it needs more money and power, not less | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · US President Donald Trump's threats against the WHO are dangerously misguided. President Donald Trump has announced that he is halting US payments to the World Health Organization (WHO). It's unclear whether he in fact has legal authority to do so. Leaving that aside, though, as Bill Gates and a variety of world leaders have pointed out, it's a ridiculous decision. The pandemic would have been much worse if not for the actions the WHO has taken in recent months. The WHO started issuing daily "situation reports" on covid-19 on January 21, when there were only 282 confirmed cases worldwide. By that point, it had already created interim guidelines for laboratory diagnosis, ... Read more ... |
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Trump's decision to freeze WHO funding has been condemned | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · Criticism of the move was as sharp as it was swift. The news: President Trump's decision to freeze US funding for the World Health Organization has been met with condemnation by political and scientific leaders around the world. Yesterday Trump announced that US funding to the WHO would be suspended for 60 to 90 days pending a review to assess the organization's "role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus." The US is the single biggest contributor to the WHO, paying it about $500 million last year, of an overall budget of around $6 billion. The response: Criticism of the move was as sharp as it was swift. These were just some of the comments: Read more ... |
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What past disasters can teach us about how to deal with covid-19 | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 15, 2020) |
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Apr 15, 2020 · Technology historian Mar Hicks reflects on how catastrophes often reveal long-running structural inequalities and force those in power to fix them. Disasters tend to make structural failures and long-running structural inequalities glaringly obvious. They force them to a crisis point. And ideally these terrible events then force people to reckon with ongoing problems that have been ignored by those in power. A useful disaster in some way produces regulatory or legislative change. But it should never come off as glib when we're talking about a disaster somehow beinguseful. We always have to be attentive to the fact that in almost all cases people died and lives were ... Read more ... |
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The coronavirus may cut climate emissions more than any war or recession did. | MIT Technology Review - Technology Review - Climate Change  (Apr 10, 2020) |
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Apr 10, 2020 · And they'll likely rebound as the coronavirus outbreak recedes. The global effort to halt the spread of the deadly coronavirus has stalled much the global economy, setting up an unintended experiment on the impact on carbon emissions. China's GDP may have plummeted by 40% during the first three months of the year (on a seasonally adjusted annualized basis). The US's GDP could drop anywhere from 30% to 50% by summer. And Britain's economic output could shrink by 25% this quarter. The ardent hope is that economies will bounce back later in the year as the pandemic recedes, but annual output is still likely to decline in many nations. US GPD, for instance, may fall about ... Read more ... |
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