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 and into the practical engineering challenges required to make it real.

Researchers are now working on aircraft, materials, and other systems for solar geoengineering. But as they delve into these details, they’re finding that even early deployment would require significant new infrastructure, time, and investment.

Find out what happens when solar geoengineering encounters the realities of trying to cool the planet.

—James Temple

MIT Technology Review Narrated: inside interoception, the hidden sense of how you feel inside

Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception. Today, thanks to a 2021 Nobel Prize and new tools that can map internal signaling across the body, research into interoception is taking off.

As researchers decode how signals move between body and brain, a clearer picture is starting to take shape—with implications for how we treat conditions from obesity to anxiety.

—Katherine W. Isaacs

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 SpaceX is now valued higher than Amazon 
Its market value hit $2.659 trillion yesterday. (Axios)
+ A post-IPO stock surge also briefly pushed it above Microsoft’s. (Quartz)
+ It’s now the world’s fifth most valuable company. (Guardian)
+ SpaceX is acquiring AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion. (CNBC)

2 G7 leaders want access to top US AI models
They’re pushing to escape restrictions on the likes of Fable 5. (Reuters $)
+ The Mythos shutdown has sparked a global scramble for sovereign AI. (Fortune)
+ The world is looking to ditch US AI models. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Trump’s AI export strategy has run into Trump’s export controls
His administration risks undermining its own AI plans. (Axios)
+ It now effectively has a licensing regime for frontier AI. (Fortune)
+ Here’s how a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions. (MIT Technology Review) 

4 Huawei’s big comeback has exposed the limits of US chip controls
It’s overcome restrictions on advanced chipmaking gear. (Financial Times $)
+ The AI boom has ignited Asia’s chip companies. (NYT $)

5 AI fears are pushing Silicon Valley toward gene-editing startups
They want smarter babies to counter superintelligent AI. (Mother Jones)
+ The pursuit of perfect babies is an ethical mess. (MIT Technology Review)

6 A brain implant has enabled a speechless ALS patient to work full-time
The system translates his brain activity into speech. (The Register)
+ He’s become the first “power user” of a BCI. (MIT Technology Review)

7 A leak has revealed details of Peter Thiel’s secret society
Its program ranges from cult-building to prepping for World War III. (Wired $)

8 ChatGPT’s market share has slipped below 50% for the first time
Thanks to the rise of Gemini and Claude. (TechCrunch)

9 A quantum state that lasts forever may finally be within our grasp
Experiments suggest that quantum “eternity” is possible. (New Scientist $)

10 Commodore has made a digital detox phone that isn’t dumb
The Callback combines gadget nostalgia with modern needs. (The Verge)

Quote of the day

“The Entity List is like whack-a-mole and you’ve got to ‌keep whacking ⁠the moles.” 

—Philip Luck, who studies global supply chains at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells Reuters that a lack of new blacklistings is likely leading American innovations to adversaries who could use them against the US.

One More Thing

This is the reason Demis Hassabis started DeepMind

Watching DeepMind’s AI master the ancient board game Go, Demis Hassabis realized that his company was ready to take on one of the most important and complicated puzzles in biology: predicting the structure of proteins. 

The result was AlphaFold2, an AI that could predict the shape of proteins down to the nearest atom. “It’s the most complex thing we’ve ever done,” Hassabis told MIT Technology Review.

Taking on scientific problems is the culmination of what Hassabis set out to achieve, and it’s what he wants to be known for.  “This is the reason I started DeepMind,” he says. “In fact, it’s why I’ve worked my whole career in AI.”

Discover how he plans to transform science with AI. 

—Will Douglas Heaven

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ This mesmerising footage of wind rolling through grass looks like CGI.
+ The glorious early days of internet discovery have been revived by the return of StumbleUpon.
+ A German subway entrance has been delightfully designed as an old tram car crashing into the pavement.
+ The Last Museum lets you search across 5.8 million museum artworks spanning from 3000 BC to the present day.

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 $3 a watt; now it’s down to cents. 

On the margins of a bustling Nairobi, we wind past a mix of high-rises and hardware shops interspersed with small plots growing corn or potatoes. After a few minutes, we arrive at a street-side stall run by the bespectacled Milcah Wanjiru. She sells plenty of half-liter packets of milk, loaves of bread, and matches, but Wanjiru’s core business is a service: She mills corn flour for local residents, which they most often use in ugali—a common Kenyan dish that is similar to polenta, albeit less creamy. 

In the middle of her small shop, a milling machine stands on three adjustable legs. “Whenever customers came to mill their grain, they asked for other goods,” says Wanjiru, “and this is how I got to stock these other items.” 

Shops with a grain mill are common here in rural areas and most neighborhoods, especially low-income ones—even in the city. But most of these mills burn diesel fuel. Hers? It runs on either solar energy or electricity from the grid. 

Matt Carr, the CEO and cofounder of Agsol, the company that designed Wanjiru’s mill, is here with me, visiting to get her feedback on his product. One issue bothers her. “It can be slow,” Wanjiru tells Carr, explaining that grains can get stuck in the front chamber where they feed into the machine. Sometimes, the whole thing jams. 

Carr says the mill automatically reduces its speed if the grain is at all damp, so that the pulverizing hammers within can squeeze out as much flour as possible. That process can unfortunately lead to the problem she’s describing. 

Overall, Wanjiru seems happy with the machine, which she’s been using since December 2025. It makes running her business cheaper. About 40% of what shop owners who use diesel-powered mills charge customers goes toward paying for fuel, according to Carr, whereas operating Agsol’s solar-powered machine can be up to 80% more profitable once the initial cost (about $1,300) is paid off, which takes between six and 12 months. Wanjiru also likes the fact that—unlike diesel-burning models—her mill can handle very small amounts of grain, which has brought a few new customers her way.  

Carr launched the first Agsol product in 2018 in Kenya and has raised over $4 million of investment—much of that via a UK government program that supports clean energy projects in the region. Last year, Agsol sold 530 units. The company, which is based just outside Nairobi, has received orders from as far as Mozambique and Angola.

As we say goodbye to Wanjiru, she turns and bends over burlap sacks half full of peanuts, mung beans, rice, and millet, arranged neatly on wooden pallets on the cement floor. She lifts a scoopful from one of the sacks and dumps its contents on a scale. A customer waits to be served. 

Geoffrey Kamadi is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Nairobi, focusing on science, climate change, environment, technology, and development. 

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. It’s precisely the type of aircraft one would need to begin artificially cooling the planet. Those outsize wings would keep the plane and its payload aloft in the stratosphere, about a dozen miles (or 20 kilometers) above the surface, where the air is much thinner—as little as 5% the density near the ground. Once at altitude, the plane would release materials that could, after a few steps of chemistry, reflect sunlight back into space.

The concept came from volcanoes. Massive eruptions in the past have reduced temperatures worldwide by blasting sulfur dioxide and other compounds into the stratosphere, where they convert into sunlight-scattering particles. Hundreds of studies in recent decades have suggested that a human attempt to mimic this mechanism would work quickly and efficiently—at least within the confines of climate models.

But these computer simulations are approximations of how the real world works. They gloss over numerous challenges. Like the fact that aircraft capable of carrying the necessary loads to the necessary altitudes don’t exist. Or that we don’t know for sure how to release material so that most of it turns into tiny reflective aerosols instead of, say, clumping together and falling out of the sky. Or even what specific substance we would want to load onto an aircraft, given open questions about safety, cost, and effectiveness. 

Amid these compounding unknowns, more and more research on solar geoengineering is moving beyond computer simulations, delving into the detailed design and practical engineering work that would be needed before we could carry out a campaign to dial down temperatures. The tasks required range from inventing high-altitude aircraft to mastering the precise chemistry and delivery mechanisms for dispersing materials to building out the monitoring infrastructure that we’ll need in order to know if any of it actually works.

The question of whether we should geoengineer the planet has no clear-cut answer. It might save millions of lives by reducing the dangers of catastrophic heat waves, floods, droughts, and famines. But many fear it’s too dangerous to even consider, much less seriously study, arguing that we can’t possibly predict the spiraling consequences of manipulating such large, complex, interconnected planetary systems. 

Critics argue that the building momentum in this phase of research will make it ever more likely that someone, somewhere in the world, will eventually pull the trigger on geoengineering, no matter the remaining unknowns or the dangers for certain parts of the world.  

“I do think it’s very dangerous because of what we know about science and technology,” says Jennie Stephens, a professor of climate justice at Maynooth University in Ireland. “The more investment that’s made, the further the advances, the more likely it is that it will be deployed.”

But proponents of this practical research argue that playing out how we’d mount a solar geoengineering program will improve our understanding of the potential benefits and risks, helping to ensure that if anyone does try to tweak the climate, they might at least do so in an informed and potentially safer way.

It’s still very much a niche field. Much of the work now underway is happening at the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative (CSEi) at the University of Chicago, which formally launched in 2024 under the leadership of the prominent geoengineering researcher David Keith. 

Franke, a professional engineer before earning his doctorate in geosciences, is overseeing a series of overlapping research projects and collaborations aimed at resolving many of the engineering uncertainties. That includes working out the designs now on his desk—renderings of the type of aircraft that could be used in the initial phase of a geoengineering program. 

Franke argues that more computer simulations are simply not going to answer the big remaining questions in the field, including the most compelling one: the “boogeyman” of what could go wrong. 

“I’m kind of personally skeptical that additional model development or more simulations are going to satisfactorily resolve those things,” he says. “And so I’m not really that interested in turning the crank on more models.”

For Franke, it’s time for the next step: “We’re interested in seeing how you’d actually do this thing if you wanted to do it.”

What we don’t know

Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a relatively cheap and easy fix for climate change. But as researchers take a harder look at the nuts and bolts, they’re finding considerable uncertainties, missing tools, and unbuilt infrastructure.

None of that may be a showstopper, but we’ll need time and money to develop the components necessary to implement even the early stages of a solar geoengineering program. What this research is about, at its core, is not actually launching something, but figuring out what it would take to do so. 

A young San Francisco nonprofit, Reflective, recently worked with scientists in the field to figure out just how much we still don’t know.

The process began by outlining what the organization, which pools money from donors to fund geoengineering studies, describes as a “well-managed, moderate” scenario: In 2035, some nation or group of nations begins a small-scale geoengineering deployment, spraying an equal amount of sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide—gases that should convert into reflective aerosols in the stratosphere—near both the North and South Poles. The initial program would release enough material to reduce temperatures by about 0.1 °C, shaving off a fraction of the roughly 1.4 °C of worldwide warming that’s occurred since the start of the industrial era.

The poles figure prominently in this and other early-stage geoengineering scenarios, for a simple reason: The stratosphere starts as low as seven kilometers there—as opposed to around 18 to 20 kilometers at the equator. That makes it easier to reach, enabling existing aircraft, with some modifications, to carry sizable payloads up there. 

The wrinkle is that the cooling effect would be more pronounced in the northernmost and southernmost latitudes. That’s because, among other complicated mechanisms, higher temperatures in the tropical stratosphere would mostly prevent aerosols released around the poles from drifting toward the equator. So deploying geoengineering in those areas would likely have milder effects on the hotter and poorer nations around the tropics, which are also some of the areas most vulnerable to climate change.

To cool the world evenly—and fairly—you’d eventually want to add flights closer to the equator. Over the following decade or so, under Reflective’s scenario, the program would scale up, shift to novel aircraft flying above the subtropics, and release enough material to achieve global cooling of 0.5 °C. 

Among them: sorting out how hard or expensive it would be to retrofit existing aircraft to carry out the early stages of the project. Deploying at the poles could also require constructing new airports, establishing new shipping lanes or railways to transport supplies, and building facilities that could process raw materials—by, for example, combusting elemental sulfur to produce sulfur dioxide.

We would also need to build more instruments and send them up to the stratosphere aboard balloons, drones, or other aircraft to observe the baseline chemistry, reflectivity, and distribution of compounds there—and to track what changed once new materials were released.

Finally, the main satellites that observe the stratosphere from space are set to go out of commission in the coming years, creating the risk of an “imminent data desert,” as a 2025 paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society warned. Several new instruments are in development or available for launch, but there could be a gap in observations at a point where we’d want to have a clear picture of the baseline conditions, Reflective notes.

Dakota Gruener, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit, stresses that the organization isn’t advocating the use of solar geoengineering. But she says it’s important for the field to begin addressing engineering uncertainties now because it stress-tests the assumptions in climate models. It helps us determine whether the scenarios explored in silico are feasible in the real world.

It’s also important to do this, she says, because it may take a long time to resolve all these unknowns while the climate grows steadily warmer. “If we aren’t putting adequate attention to them now, we might be caught flat-footed,” Gruener told MIT Technology Review.

A 2024 analysis in the journal Earth’s Future highlighted just how expensive and time-consuming it might be to develop the aircraft and infrastructure required for an initial deployment. The study explored what it would take for a geoengineering program around the poles, capable of reducing temperatures by 2 °C in the northernmost and southernmost parts of the planet, to be up and running by 2040. The conclusion: It could require at least a decade of work and a $35 billion investment. 

Wake Smith, a research fellow at Harvard and lead author of the study, also says that researchers need to move forward with engineering studies now, because the urge to use the technology will likely grow stronger as climate change becomes increasingly catastrophic.

“The risk I worry about is needing it before we understand it and therefore doing it badly,” he says, later adding: “The sooner we get going with it, the better decisions we’ll be able to make a few decades hence in terms of whether to do it, how to do it, when to do it.”

A novel aircraft

The aircraft pictured on Franke’s desk, which is still just a concept, could reach just beyond the threshold of the stratosphere above the tropics when fully loaded. A fleet of 270 of them could disperse about a million metric tons of material per year, enough to ease global surface temperatures by about 0.26 °C. 

The CSEi outsourced the work of designing it to John Langford, a well-known aeronautical engineer and entrepreneur. Langford’s company, Electra.aero, had previously collaborated with the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics to develop autonomous, solar-powered aircraft that could carry out extended scientific missions in the stratosphere. He is now spinning out a new business, Iris Aero, to produce those planes, which are assembled from a single, continuous wing covered in solar panels and suspended above a tiny fuselage.

Langford expects the solar plane to find its main initial commercial applications in wildfire monitoring and forecasting. But by swapping in a different set of instruments, it could be used to monitor how materials dispersed in the stratosphere might alter conditions there, he says.

The novel aircraft is a variation on the observational plane, with the added space and thrust necessary to carry these materials to the stratosphere and release them. It has a wider wingspan and swaps out those solar panels for a pair of Rolls-Royce AE 3007 engines.

The aircraft would also include a detachable tank that would function something like a trailer on a semi. This would make it possible to load materials between flights and prevent any damage to the plane itself from those materials, some of which are corrosive, Langford says. 

He says he and his team have completed the initial designs and are now doing more detailed engineering and cost analyses. They intend to publish the findings when the effort is complete. 

“We’d love to build a prototype of such an airplane and feel we could do so relatively quickly,” Langford says. “But that all depends on what David’s group wants to do.”

The program

The university saw an opportunity to step up as a leader in a field that wasn’t getting adequate academic attention despite its potential to address the dangers of climate change, says Michael Greenstone, a climate economist and the founding director of the university’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth.

Keith, 62, previously spent nearly 13 years as a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard, where he led the establishment of the university’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. More famously, he strove to carry out what could have been the first solar geoengineering experiment to release material in the stratosphere, known as SCoPEx. But after years of work and multiple delays, the research team finally scrapped the project in early 2024, following mounting criticism from environmental and Indigenous groups and the eventual intervention of the Swedish government.

Keith has long argued that researchers should seriously study geoengineering because it might substantially reduce the dangers of climate change, alleviating death, destruction, and suffering on massive scales.

He says that the overarching goal of the Chicago initiative is to expand the field by bringing together “enough independent professors and other research professionals” to “build a community around climate engineering as a broad field of inquiry.”

“Solar geoengineering certainly has complex and potentially dangerous political consequences, but so do a host of other emerging ideas and technologies.”

David Keith, geoengineering researcher

The CSEi researchers are now exploring nearly every engineering challenge that Reflective highlighted in its analysis. In addition to the work on novel aircraft and in situ observations, the group is designing small “cube” satellites with optical sensors optimized for observing the stratosphere. It is also studying which materials might prove most practical to ship to the stratosphere and how best to release them.

The goal is “producing public information which can be independently assessed, critically assessed, so policymakers can understand more about what’s possible and not,” Keith says.

Normalizing a dangerous idea

The debate around solar geoengineering is quickly moving beyond the academic and theoretical realm. A handful of startups, some more serious than others, have begun testing technologies that could one day be used to cool the planet. 

Yet to critics, solar geoengineering is the peak of techno-solutionism, affixing a high-tech Band-Aid to a global crisis caused by earlier technologies instead of addressing the root cause. Further, they argue that there’s no way to deploy or govern it in a globally equitable way, because any use of it will prove more advantageous to some regions than others. 

Even if solar geoengineering succeeded in reducing the average global temperature by 1 °C or so, that would mean very different things in different regions.

It could keep farmers prosperous and cities safe across, say, much of the US and the world’s temperate zones. But the lower temperature might be too cool for Russia to boost its agricultural productivity, while it might still be too hot for subsistence farming in northern Africa. 

Some studies also suggest that high levels of solar geoengineering could create new dangers in some regions, potentially altering monsoon rains, decreasing agricultural output, shifting the range of infectious diseases, and more. 

These complications raise a long list of thorny and divisive ethical questions. Even if solar geoengineering produced better conditions across most of the planet relative to a world with unchecked climate change, would it still be acceptable if it unleashed deadly famines or floods in a few regions? What kind of global consensus should be required to decide it’s okay to deploy it? And how should we determine where to set the planet’s temperature—and when, if ever, to shut the technology off?

Stephens argues that the answers, like so much else in the world, will come down to wealth and power. Countries, corporations, or even wealthy individuals with the resources to deploy such a system would have every incentive to tune it for their optimal benefit, no matter what it might mean for others. 

“It will be certain people who have a lot of wealth and power deciding when and how, and who should benefit and who will get screwed,” she says. “That’s the fundamental reason I think any advance in this technology is so dangerous.”

Duncan McLaren, an environmental researcher and political scientist, argues that the shift into practical engineering studies demands more oversight of the research field.  

For many critics of outdoor experiments like SCoPEx, he explains, the major concern wasn’t the environmental or safety risks, which were minimal; the issue was the normalization of a concept that could reduce pressures to cut greenhouse-­gas emissions. 

He says that any advance in research—whether it’s on paper, in the lab, or in the stratosphere—raises a similar risk: undermining progress on climate action by allowing the fossil-fuel sector and other business interests to say there’s an easier solution in development that doesn’t require overhauling our energy systems. A policy paper that the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute released in March advanced this very argument, citing the far lower costs of solar geoengineering relative to the “staggering costs” of a “forced transition.” 

Given this so-called moral hazard risk, design and engineering work should demand the same level of scientific supervision that outdoor experiments do, including ethical review, risk assessments, and public engagement, McLaren says.

“It ought to be more onerous,” he says. “There ought to be more barriers to researchers saying they want to do this.”

“The next ethical step”

Keith pushes back forcefully on that assertion, condemning as “profoundly illiberal” the idea that we should regulate open academic research posing no physical risks. 

“Solar geoengineering certainly has complex and potentially dangerous political consequences, but so do a host of other emerging ideas and technologies,” he said in an email. “The best chance to manage these challenges is to debate them openly and freely.”

Keith is all for keeping solar geoengineering technology in the public domain, and he agrees that the first line of climate defense must be rapid and deep reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions. But the world has made little progress in cutting climate pollution, carbon dioxide can persist for thousands of years in the atmosphere, and the planet is heating up fast. So, he argues, we may need to pursue other measures to temper the growing threats.

The bar for restricting research in this field should be “very high,” he says, given the potential promise of the technology. 

After visiting flood-devastated villages in Bangladesh, Keith underscored this point in an interview with the director of Plan C for Civilization, a recent documentary that profiles his work. “I think people have to take the next ethical step,” he said. “Because if you are really going to withhold access to and knowledge of a technology that could potentially save enormous numbers of lives—real lives, people we’ve met in the last few days—you’ve got to be very confident that that technology is going to be misused.”

The particles

Mingyi Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, leads me down the hall to a square, white lab room in the Henry Hinds Laboratory for Geophysical Sciences.

He pulls open the doors to a gray Haier biomedical freezer just inside the entrance, revealing a transparent flow tube hanging vertically and tapering at the bottom.

It’s a miniature stratosphere, chilled below −50 °C and filled with the same mix  of oxygen, nitrogen, and other air molecules you’d find 20 or so kilometers above us. A series of Teflon and stainless-­steel tubes run into the vessel, allowing Wang and his team to add various gases or particles and observe how they react.

Wang is an atmospheric scientist who studies how aerosols form, and he is now exploring what materials might be the most effective for reducing temperatures. 

Most modeling experiments focusing on solar geoengineering explore the impact of adding sulfuric acid to the stratosphere, because that’s what ultimately ends up there after a volcanic blast. 

But it would be costly and complicated to simply haul sulfuric acid up there and release it, because it’s heavy and sticky. So Wang and his team are conducting experiments in that chilly flow tube to determine what substances, including precursors to the acid, might do the best job of producing aerosols of the ideal size for reflecting away sunlight—and how best to prevent the materials from simply clumping together with existing particles and falling out of the stratosphere.

Wang, whom Keith refers to as a “young star,” has arrived at a novel solution to this problem, though he’s not ready to share the full details yet. He and his team are feeding the findings from their experiments into computer simulations of stratospheric plumes that they’ve developed. These, in turn, can be plugged into large-scale climate models to improve their simulation of smaller-scale effects—and thus enhance our understanding of stratospheric chemistry.

Wang says that it’s important to do this detailed research because until now, climate models simply assumed you’d wind up with the right aerosols of the right size. 

“Scientifically, we may understand it reasonably well, but on the engineering perspective—do we really know how to do it right?” he asks. “That’s a big question.” 

What’s next

As I began reporting on CSEi, I assumed that some of the engineering and design work would lead to new proposals for stratospheric experiments, picking up from where SCoPEx left off. 

Keith, though, insists he has no interest in reliving that experience, given the weight the experiment took on as the focal point for a broader societal debate over solar geoengineering. He doesn’t see any of the other “practical engineering” work at the initiative leading toward field experiments either, at least at this stage.

Much of the work, in fact, is focused on a step beyond that: exploring what it would take to start a geoengineering campaign, if a nation or group of them eventually decides to. Franke notes that we already have balloons and other aircraft that could get to the lower bounds of the stratosphere to release an experimental amount of, say, sulfur dioxide. 

“I think that this field needs to stop being so ashamed of using the ‘deployment’ word,” he says. 

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

Choose which file format to download this eBook:

Related Stories:

• 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now: The new war room
• Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military
• Phase two of military AI has arrived
• A defense official reveals how AI chatbots could be used for targeting decisions
• The Pentagon is planning for AI companies to train on classified data, defense official says
• How AI is turning the Iran conflict into theater

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 three years. Harrell, who has ALS and is paralyzed, first used his brain-computer interface (BCI) to “speak” in 2023. Since then, he’s clocked thousands of hours of use. 

Harrell can now use the device largely independently. His team has added new features to it, and he also uses it to surf the web and perform his job. “Living with a disease like ALS, you are supposed to have diminished dreams. I do not,” Harrell told MIT Technology Review. 

The team behind the device call Harrell “the first power user of a speech BCI.” They now plan to add further enhancements to the device.

Dive into the groundbreaking impact of Casey Harrell’s BCI.

—Jessica Hamzelou

Why do South Koreans love AI so much?

While a public backlash against AI brews across the US, South Koreans are optimistic. Only 16% say they are more concerned than excited about AI—the lowest of the 25 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center—while 50% of Americans were more worried than excited. 

South Koreans share a deep conviction that embracing technology is integral to modernizing the country and cementing its place in the global order. Their fascination with AI is just the latest incarnation of that ethos—and it’s making them anxious to stay ahead.

Read the full story on South Korea’s AI fervour.

—Michelle Kim

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The US says it restricted Anthropic AI over foreign intelligence risks
Commerce chief Lutnick said he acted over national security fears. (Reuters $)
+ Following the ban, Anthropic disabled access to its new models. (BBC)
+ Both sides are increasingly desperate for a resolution. (WSJ $)

2 DeepSeek just became China’s most valuable startup
It raised $7 billion, the largest-ever first-round funding for an AI startup. (The Information $)
+ The deal values DeepSeek at over $50 billion. (WSJ $)
+ Its unusual structure preserves founder control. (Reuters $)
+ DeepSeek’s new flagship model has caused a stir. (MIT Technology Review)
 
3 Alibaba has unveiled AI models for robots amid a shift from chatbots
It’s joined a global race to move AI into the physical world. (SCMP)
+ AI is learning to understand its surroundings. (MIT Technology Review)
 
4 Fox is buying streaming giant Roku for $22 billion
The deal creates the third-largest player in US TV by viewing share. (BBC)
+ Fox is making a big bet on free streaming. (Washington Post $)

5 EA has launched a new way to advertise “directly into gameplay”
EA Advertising allows brands to become part of the game itself. (CNBC)
+ Xbox’s new chief strategy officer is also eyeing in-game ads. (PC Gamer)
+ GenAI could reinvent what it means to play. (MIT Technology Review)

6 It’s trivially easy to use Reddit to manipulate AI search
A tiny snippet of text can trick ChatGPT and Google’s AI search. (404 Media)
+ AI search is being manipulated to generate dangerous biases. (BBC)
 
7 Sperm have been made magnetic to allow IVF inside the body
The technique enables remote guidance towards an egg. (New Scientist $)
+ Automation and AI are transforming IVF. (MIT Technology Review)
 
8 The world’s leading deepfake expert no longer trusts his own eyes
He’s struggling to prove what’s real before the internet decides. (NYT $)
 
9 Meta’s CTO admits its AI reorganisation was “atrocious”
He’s promised staff better communication—and snacks. (Wired $)
 
10 Silicon Valley billionaires are pretending to kill each other for fun
In a new game show from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. (WSJ $)

Quote of the day

“There was a speeding ticket, and they gave Fable the death penalty.” 

—Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer of Facebook, tells the Washington Post that banning foreign access to Anthropic’s leading model is a disproportionate punishment.

One More Thing

Inside effective altruism, where the far future counts a lot more than the present

Since its birth in the late 2000s, effective altruism has aimed to answer a deceptively simple question: “How can those with means have the greatest impact?”

Directing money to evidence-based approaches is EA’s best-known technique. But as it’s expanded from an academic philosophy into a community and a movement, its ideas of the “best” way to change the world have evolved as well. 

Find out how effective altruism became one of the most influential—and contested—forces in philanthropy.

—Rebecca Ackermann

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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 kind of stress: a huge and sudden increase in demand for electricity. But National Grid, which operates the local transmission network, was ready.

Just as those kettles started heating up, an AI program sent instructions to a data center in London to slow down some of the facility’s power-hungry chips. This reduction helped make sure there was enough supply to match demand, staving off potential blackouts or damage to electrical hardware. For data centers, which normally guzzle power without consideration for anyone or anything else’s needs, it was a radical departure.

It was also a simulation. In December 2025, engineers sought to test a new breed of data center built to be flexible about its electricity needs, so they re-created the energy demand facing the UK’s grid during a match from the 2020 Euro tournament. They wanted to see how their software, called Conductor, would have responded had it been online at the time.

Conductor is the signature product of Emerald AI, a firm based in Washington, DC, that’s part of a wave of companies trying to figure out whether data centers can work within the confines of the existing electric grid.

This year, Emerald is set to deploy Conductor in a new facility in the part of Virginia known as Data Center Alley, this time connected to the live grid. When overall demand spikes, Conductor will turn down the power used by the data center, while making sure its servers still carry out their timeliest and most important jobs. Emerald’s partners on the project—which include Nvidia and the giant data-center operator Digital Realty—bill it as one of the world’s first “power-flexible AI factories.”

Demonstrating that data centers can participate in this kind of give-and-take could ease what many tech leaders identify as the bottleneck in getting facilities online: It takes far longer to get approval for, construct, and connect new power plants than to build data centers. PJM, the grid operator in Virginia and the largest one in the US, for instance, needs eight years to bring new generation online, according to RMI, an energy research and advocacy group. “We need to solve the energy equation,” says Josh Parker, head of sustainability at Nvidia. “AI factory flexibility is the bridge between the incredible demand for AI and the immediate limitations of our energy grid.”

Speed, though, is only one of the issues. Once facilities do plug in, neighbors often criticize them for drawing too much electricity and contributing to rising prices. They say the data centers generate more noise than they do long-term jobs, contribute to pollution, and threaten to put people out of work. Organizers stalled over $150 billion worth of projects in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, and policymakers alert to the public mood are starting to impose limitations on development.

More than a dozen states are considering bans, and local moratoriums are in effect in places like Minneapolis and DeKalb County in Georgia. At the federal level, the GRID Act, a bipartisan bill in the US Senate, proposes to sever new data centers from public grids entirely. Some operators are already moving that way by trying to develop their own power generation.

Rather than rushing to build new power plants, companies could find part of the solution to the crunch right under our noses—or, more precisely, in the transmission lines under our feet and above our heads. The existing system operates near its full capacity during only a small number of high-demand hours throughout the year. This means, some grid experts argue, that if data centers can limit the power they draw during those stretches, they won’t need to wait for big infrastructure upgrades or build their own off-grid generation. 

Indeed, a growing number of studies have shown there could be plenty of power available for data centers that can flex. A widely discussed 2025 report from researchers at Duke University found that the US grid could offer an additional 76 gigawatts—about 5% of its entire capacity, and about enough to accommodate projected data-center growth in the US through 2030—to facilities that are willing to reduce their usage just 0.25% of the time. That’s about 22 hours a year. And when researchers from Princeton University and two grid-modernization companies looked at locations for new data centers in the PJM region, their report, which was funded by Google, found that a 500-megawatt facility capable of flexing for less than 1% of the year could reach full operation three to five years faster than one that’s inflexible. 

Flexible power connections could also help data centers address some of their PR problems. By decreasing their draw at times of grid stress, for instance, they could avoid diverting power from where it’s most needed, thus boosting stability. By using existing capacity, they might be able to reduce the need for new fossil-fuel power plants and spread fixed costs over more electricity users, pushing prices down. 

The AI power pinch is attracting resources and research into strategies for grid flexibility overall, which could help negotiate a tricky period: Taken together with electric vehicles, air-conditioning, and other sectors, data centers are helping drive what analysts predict will be a 25% increase in US electricity demand by 2030 compared with 2023 levels.

Ideally, flexibility gives grid operators more control over the flow of electrons, making them leaders of a harmonious ensemble rather than hostages to inflexible electricity requirements. That will help them manage demand spikes across the entire system and deal more effectively with the intermittent nature of renewables like wind and solar. “Demand flexibility is incredibly useful for power grids,” says Johanna Mathieu, a grid expert at the University of Michigan. “It helps reduce electricity costs and improve grid reliability.”

But while advocates see plenty of benefits, the concept brings complexity. For data centers, compromising on energy needs can be a hard sell. Flexibility requires utilities and grid operators, which tend to be operationally conservative, to change long-held practices. And some skeptics also say that flexibility distracts from the very real need to build more grid infrastructure faster, and could even pose risks to our electricity supply. 

Still, some technologists, grid operators, and utilities are hoping to show that flexibility works—not only in white papers or simulations but in real life. 

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The poster children for data-center growth default toward inflexibility. Hyperscalers like Microsoft and Oracle have proposed enormous new centers, many of which would rely on off-grid, natural-­gas-burning power plants. When xAI wanted to speed up the buildout of the Colossus site outside Memphis, Tennessee, it rolled up with gas turbines on flatbed trucks. The facility, now in operation, is facing blowback from regulators and residents about the spike it’s causing in emissions and other pollution. In any case, there aren’t enough gas turbines worldwide to meet the demand from data-center operators. 

One big obstacle for anyone demanding a lot of power is that our grids are mostly rigid. They’re designed to supply enough power to meet total demand when it’s highest, even if that’s for only a relatively small number of hours a year. That conservative approach is a simple route to reliability, but it means that the grid has quite a bit of headroom. “The grid is already overbuilt by a lot. If you were an airline running at 30% utilization, you would not buy more planes,” says Amit Narayan, the cofounder and CEO of GridCare, a company developing flexibility technologies, referring to a 2025 Stanford study of transmission lines in western North America. “If you are running a grid at 30% utilization, there’s no scientific reason you can’t go to 60.” 

“If you were an airline running at 30% utilization, you would not buy more planes. If you are running a grid at 30% utilization, there’s no scientific reason you can’t go to 60.”

To be fair, the idea of flexibility isn’t entirely foreign to grid operators. For decades, they’ve practiced a technique called demand response: When it looks as if demand will get too close to supply, as it might during a heat wave when many people turn on the AC at the same time, they call large commercial or industrial facilities and ask them to shut down parts of their operations. This method can help avoid the need to fire up so-called peaker plants, which run on fossil fuels, but it’s slow, imprecise, and hard to scale.

In the 2000s, as the adoption of technologies like electric cars and solar panels presented new challenges, more internet-­connected grids also provided new means of flexibility. Virtual power plants, or VPPs, offered a smarter, faster, more granular alternative. Electricity customers ranging from factories to homeowners with smart thermostats, solar panels, or big batteries would allow the utility to adjust their draw to help meet demand—often getting paid for their (frequently unnoticed) trouble. 

After the generative AI boom began with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, some companies began to see flexibility as a way to get data centers set up more easily, efficiently, and affordably. If they bring AI money into existing grids and reduce or defer the need for expensive upgrades, data centers could actually help spread out fixed costs so as to lower rates for other users. A study from Duke University published this past February, for instance, found that flexibility could reduce rates by 0.5% to 2.8%. 

The trick is figuring out how data centers, notorious power hogs, can keep operating when their flexible connections are throttled. Flexibility specialists envision three possible ways. The simplest is for the new data center to install on-site backup power storage or generation to tap when the grid is maxed out—at their own expense, of course.

A facility could also fill the gap by drawing on a VPP. The utility would turn down the electricity going to users who signed up for the VPP, and the data center would pay them for their flexibility. This method wouldn’t require any major infrastructure, but it would require the utility to have a big VPP program and to coordinate the exchange at a time when the grid was under stress. While VPPs exist to some extent in nearly 40 states, the rules governing them vary widely, and they are empowered to do more in some areas than in others. 

Finally, a data center could simply use less power at peak times. The conventional wisdom is that they won’t go for such limits, particularly when every number-­crunching server can feel like a goose potentially laying little golden eggs. But some experts are betting that the value of getting up and running quickly is enough to change their minds. “There is a clear and growing trend,” says Ayse Coskun, chief scientist at Emerald AI. “Operators are increasingly willing to trade some level of flexibility for faster grid interconnection.” 

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GridCare, a startup based in Silicon Valley, was one of the first companies to use flexibility to get data centers online quickly. Instead of looking at grids only in worst-case scenarios when electricity demand is highest, the company analyzes the system under all conditions, explains CEO Narayan, who studied smart grids at Stanford. It feeds every part of the grid—including power plants, lines, substations, and homes—into a generative AI model that creates a “digital twin” for different grid configurations. It then picks out results that could unlock capacity while maintaining reliability, and it feeds those into another model trained on the physics of electrical components like resistors and capacitors to make sure they’re realistic.

GridCare found its first customer in the Silicon Forest, an area in the Pacific Northwest named for the trees that dominate the landscape and the IT industry that has more recently sprouted up there. The local grid needed more capacity to support more data centers. “Data centers wanted ‘speed to power,’” says Isaac Barrow, a manager of data-center relations at Portland General Electric, or PGE, the local power generator and distributor, “but transmission buildout is a long process that’s very costly.”

In 2024, Aligned Data Centers came to PGE wanting to expand its operation in Hillsboro, Oregon, and PGE followed a recommendation from GridCare. Aligned will install a 31-megawatt battery, set to be in service in May 2027, and decrease its draw by up to that amount when the grid becomes congested. Bundled with other flexibility measures, that battery has allowed PGE to increase the capacity it can offer Aligned and other nearby operators by 80 megawatts without any new power plants. Though the buildout of data centers in Hillsboro has faced plenty of pushback from locals, Barrow points out that it could have the knock-on effect of lowering costs for ratepayers, because it spreads out the tab.

Other companies are promoting different flavors of flexibility. Google has been moving processing loads from facilities in areas experiencing demand spikes to those in less stressed spots since 2023. It’s signed agreements with five utilities, including the Tennessee Valley Authority and Indiana Michigan Power, that add as much as a gigawatt of flexibility. 

Voltus, a major VPP provider across the US and Canada, markets a “bring your own capacity” program in which a data-­center company can fund a VPP nearby. The grid operator can use the VPP to decrease demand at busy times, and participants get a financial thank-you. “We can spin up new VPPs on the order of months,” says Emily Orvis, Voltus’s vice president of energy markets. In June, the company signed their first such data-center deal: a three-year plan in which Google will bankroll a VPP in the PJM interconnection.

Of all the approaches to flexibility, Emerald AI’s may be the most ambitious: asking data centers to dial into the grid’s needs. The company’s Conductor software, which can run on premises or in the cloud, builds on the research of chief scientist Coskun. Her group at Boston University showed in a pair of 2013 papers that a data center could watch the grid and help balance big power fluctuations, such as the intermittent effects of solar and wind power. By 2022, she and her colleagues had tested their methods on a cluster of 36 research servers and shown that the system could respect power limits without breaking the processes it was running. 

One of the most important questions for Conductor is deciding which AI processes can be slowed down to save energy without kneecapping performance. A lot of companies label their jobs by priority—a real-time chatbot query, for instance, might outrank something like a web search that’s part of a deep research project. When they don’t, Emerald AI tries to infer priority from the nature of the job. Conductor then analyzes the AI workload to determine how tweaking the power to a given processor will affect the performance and help meet the usage limits set by the grid operator.

“The performance curve changes for different kinds of workloads,” says Coskun. “Each AI job is going to have a different location on that curve. Our intelligence is figuring out where you are on that curve.” 

Last year, Emerald AI began assessing the technology’s readiness for real-world use in a series of tests, raising the difficulty each time. The trials were carried out in partnership with the Data Center Flexible Load Initiative—a collaboration among tech companies like Google and Nvidia, utilities like Duke Energy, and grid operators like PJM that aims to help establish a repeatable framework for power-­flexible data centers.

The first challenge was in Phoenix, a fast-growing computing hub. For the test, Conductor took control of a group of server racks laden with 256 Nvidia A100 GPUs—hardware that can use about as much power as around 170 US homes. When presented with a simulation of a busy grid, Conductor reduced the power to the chips by 25% for three hours, while maintaining acceptable computing performance. Emerald AI and its partners reported the results in a paper in Nature Energy in December 2025.

The next trial forced the system to juggle surprise grid fluctuations without advance warning and redirect AI jobs from a data center in Virginia to a less busy one in Chicago. Then, in London, Conductor took the reins of equipment beyond the main GPU processors and faced a more complicated mix of fluctuations, including very short and long bouts of congestion—plus the notorious teakettle effect.

The progress so far shows that flexibility can work, at least in some situations, but only a small fraction of operators have pursued it as yet. “We’re just in the beginning innings of the game,” says Jesse Jenkins, one of the authors of the 2025 Princeton study and cofounder of Firma, a startup that works on data-center flexibility. “People are recognizing that this is a potential solution. The motivation is there; there are some bespoke examples. But there’s no uniform solution set that’s the default option, which is where we need to get.”

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While data centers are going up across the US, no place on Earth comes close to the accumulated computing muscle in Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley. The region is home to around 500 compute-crunching facilities, which represent 13% of the entire world’s capacity; the next two hot spots, Beijing and Oregon, contain 6% each.

There are proposals to build hundreds more facilities in Virginia, but a government study found that the state’s electricity demand will increase 183% (around 26 gigawatts) by 2040 if they all go forward, and supporting even half would be difficult. The power-flexible data center that Emerald AI, Nvidia, Digital Realty, and their partners are building in the suburb of Manassas could demonstrate how data centers can squeeze the power they need out of existing capacity. The facility, slated to come online later this year, is intended to give Conductor the chance to manage power at the largest scale yet and to respond to conditions on a live grid for the first time. In the UK demonstration, Conductor managed a 130-kilowatt AI cluster; in Manassas, it will pull the strings of a 96-megawatt hyperscale AI factory. 

Some degree of flex will play a key role as we transition away from fossil fuels and toward a future that has to juggle technologies like solar and wind power, batteries, and electric cars.

For PJM, the Manassas facility points to a potential path through the current power crunch. “We think data-center flexibility, in different forms, will be essential for the reliable integration of data-center load over the short to mid term,” says Scott Baker, who manages demand-side markets at PJM. 

But not all grid experts are so sanguine. PJM’s market monitor, which oversees the grid operator, says there are no workarounds when it comes to adding capacity. “The notion that large amounts of data-center load can be added without adding new generation is magical thinking,” says Joseph Bowring, an economist and the head of PJM’s market monitor since 1999.

One problem, he says, is that there’s no way to guarantee that a data center will actually take less power when demand is high. That is, absent any legal or regulatory push for flexibility or compliance, the utility won’t be able to step in to help prevent, say, a blackout. Utilities can rely on resources like power plants, but they can’t control or rely on data centers. “They do not want to be fully interruptible,” Bowring says of the facilities.

Stephen Empedocles, an advisor for technology companies, views flexibility as more of a tool than a silver bullet. “These approaches are excellent for improving grid reliability and getting more out of the infrastructure we already have,” he says, “but they are optimization tools.” They’re not substitutes for the “generation, transmission, and distribution expansion that will still be required,” he continues.

Flexibility advocates agree that over the long term, whether or not AI continues to boom, electrification will drive a need for more generation and transmission. Some degree of flex will play a key role in using grid infrastructure better as we transition away from fossil fuels and toward a future that has to juggle technologies like solar and wind power, batteries, and electric cars. A report published by the International Renewable Energy Agency in January 2026 found that grids around the world will need three times as much flexibility in 2030 as they had in 2019—and 10 times as much by 2050—to balance increasing demand with fluctuating supplies of renewable energy. 

The challenge of powering AI could provide just the spark we need to do the work of designing and building smarter, more flexible grids, says Coskun. “I think with a crisis like this, there’s no quick solution,” she says. “Sometimes a crisis like this creates an opportunity to do something differently.” 

Amos Zeeberg is a freelance science and technology journalist based in Bucharest. He’s developing a book about technology networks, including electric grids.

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, people were glued to their phones (powered by flawless 5G even underground), as we raced past platforms lined with LED screens of ads celebrating K-pop idols’ birthdays. When I got off the station in Gangnam, a cartoon-eyed robot on wheels was waiting patiently at a crosswalk to deliver someone’s dinner. Internet cafés dotted the sidewalks, crammed with teenagers playing computer games, maybe hoping to become the next legendary pro gamer.

I stood at a bus stop with interactive touch screens showing real-time bus schedule updates. It will soon become an “AI bus stop,” the Gangnam district announced in June, with a kiosk that answers riders’ questions in multiple languages. The news didn’t surprise me. Having grown up in the city, I’ve watched Seoul transform from a scrappy boomtown into the gleaming tech capital it is today.

South Korea loves AI.

While a public backlash against AI is brewing across the US, South Koreans are optimistic. Only 16% say they are more concerned than excited about AI—the lowest of any of the 25 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center—while 50% of Americans were more worried than excited. A majority of Koreans use AI every day, either as a sort of personal assistant or to do tasks at work, according to surveys by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism and Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

One of the most wired countries in the world, South Korea loves to street-test every new technology on the block—AI webcomics, virtual K-pop idols, and humanoid monks. And the appetite for experimentation doesn’t stop with ordinary citizens. Government agencies are early adopters too, deploying AI textbooks in schools and AI eldercare robots in welfare centers. South Koreans share a deep conviction that embracing technology is integral to modernizing the country and cementing its place in the global order. Their fascination with AI is just the latest incarnation of that ethos—and it’s making them anxious to stay ahead.

Engineered enthusiasm

All this techno-optimism has largely been engineered by South Korea’s national agenda to make AI a motor of economic growth. “The South Korean government has designated an AI-powered Fourth Industrial Revolution as the country’s path forward and aggressively promoted and invested in it,” says Chihyung Jeon, a professor of science and technology policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. “South Koreans have consistently and relentlessly been told by the government about AI’s potential to create a better future.”

As South Korea rose from the ashes of the Korean War, technology lifted the nation from poverty into an economic powerhouse. In the 1970s, South Korea manufactured steel and ships, then semiconductors in the 1980s, broadband in the 1990s, and smartphones in the 2000s. Today, Samsung and SK Hynix supply most of the world’s high-bandwidth memory chips, which power the cutting-edge Nvidia hardware used to train AI models. South Korea’s economy now orbits these two semiconductor giants: The country’s main equity index, Kospi, surged to record highs in 2026, powered by the soaring share prices of both companies, each valued above $1 trillion.

Lee Jae-myung, president of South Korea, has pledged to vault the country into the ranks of the “top three AI powers” alongside the US and China. After taking office in 2025, he launched the Presidential Council on National AI Strategy to help buy massive amounts of computing power and a sovereign AI foundation model project that funds Korean companies to develop homegrown AI models. The government has also supported semiconductor titans, including Samsung and SK Hynix, through generous tax credits and low-interest financing. 

South Korea’s policy posture also prioritizes accelerating AI development over safety considerations. In 2024, South Korea’s legislature passed the AI Basic Act, one of the world’s first comprehensive AI laws, to promote AI development and establish light-touch regulatory guardrails. Seventy percent of South Koreans say advancing science and medicine through AI innovation is a bigger priority than protecting industries through regulation, according to the 2026 Stanford AI Index.

All of that effort might be paying off. The same index ranked South Korea as having the third largest number of notable AI models in the world, based on criteria such as state-of-the-art advancements or high citation rates. For many small countries like South Korea, AI is a chance to punch above their weight.

The blind spots

But that single-mindedness can crowd out critical reflection on AI’s broader societal impacts. “Because the national agenda on AI prioritizes economic development,” says Jeon, the professor of science and technology policy, “there isn’t much reflection on the social, political, ethical dimensions of the technology.” In 2025, the South Korean government faced a fierce backlash for rolling out AI textbooks riddled with factual inaccuracies and data privacy risks without testing them first in a pilot program to evaluate how they affect student learning.

And despite their optimism, South Koreans are still worried that AI could displace them from their jobs. After Hyundai announced in January that it will deploy Atlas humanoid robots across its car factories, the Hyundai Motor Group union protested vehemently. “Without labor-management agreement, not a single robot using new technology will be allowed to enter the workplace,” the union said. Sixty-four percent of South Koreans fear AI could displace human labor and exacerbate inequality, although 52% believe it could also increase productivity. 

On a recent Friday night in the Seoul Central Market, I went out with my cousins to a pocha, a late-night restaurant that serves fish cakes stacked in neat pyramids. As we clinked our cups of soju cut with beer—the scrappy staple cocktail of every Korean night out—one cousin asked me if I’d asked ChatGPT about my saju, a traditional Korean fortune-telling practice.

A 29-year-old insurance agent in Seoul praying for a new job and a boyfriend, she said asking ChatGPT about work and dating was her favorite pastime. She pulled up her phone and punched my birth date into the chatbot. 

Addicted to their screens, trapped between unemployment and dead-end jobs, and priced out of marriage and homeownership, 46% of South Koreans in their 20s have used a chatbot to read their fortunes, according to a survey by Korea Gallup. 

My cousin said she also asks ChatGPT for tips on trading stocks, dreaming big about making bank on her investment accounts into which she’s been pouring her salary. ChatGPT, she believes, is her portal out of reality into a better future.

Despite how fond she is of the chatbot as her shaman and financial advisor, she fears losing her job to AI. She still uses ChatGPT feverishly at work, as all her coworkers do, afraid of falling behind. 

“I sometimes fear AI, but for now, it’s just so useful,” she said.

Casey Harrell has had a set of electrodes embedded in his brain for almost three years. Harrell, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and is paralyzed, first used his brain-computer interface (BCI) to “speak” sentences with the help of a research team in 2023.

Since then, Harrell has clocked thousands of hours of use. He can use the device largely independently, once he’s been “plugged in” with the help of a carer. His team has added new features to it, and Harrell also uses it to surf the web and perform his job.

“Living with a disease like ALS, you are supposed to have diminished dreams. I do not,” Harrell tells MIT Technology Review. “Any one of these things would be an absolute godsend of improvement. To have all of them, and many, many more, is truly revolutionary.” 

Within the first 22.6 months after the device was implanted, Harrell had used it for more than 3,800 hours at home without any researchers present, the team reported today in the journal Nature Medicine. “He’s the first power user of a speech BCI,” says team member Sergey Stavisky, a neuroengineer at the University of California, Davis.

Decoding speech

Three years ago, Harrell entrusted David Brandman, an associate professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues with his brain. Harrell, who was 45 at the time, had already been diagnosed with ALS, a degenerative disease that robs people of the use of their muscles.

Harrell was dependent on others to control his wheelchair and to dress and feed him. He had difficulty speaking; people struggled to understand what he was saying. Then Brandman and his colleagues asked if he’d like to trial a brain implant that might help him communicate. “The industry was [on the] cusp of a transformation, and I wanted to be part of it,” says Harrell. He signed up.

In July 2023, during a five-hour operation, doctors implanted four arrays of 64 electrodes each into his brain. Each pair of arrays was wired to a “pedestal” connection point—creating two docking locations on the exterior of his skull to connect the electrodes to a computer.

The team had long been working on developing algorithms to decode brain activity into speech. Their system works by recording activity from the speech motor cortex—a region of the brain responsible for the movements that allow us to speak.

“There are 39 phonemes that make up all the sounds in the [American] English language,” says Nicholas Card, a neuroengineer at UC Davis and member of the team. Mapping neural activity related to producing each of those phonemes can allow the team to create a personalized speech decoder and software that can “speak” those words. “We first go from brain data to phonemes, and then from phonemes to words,” he says.

They started using the device around a month after the surgery. The team got Harrell’s speech decoder working on the first day, says Card. On that day in August, Harrell used the device to speak with a 50-word vocabulary, and 99.6% of the words were as he’d intended. That vocabulary was later expanded to 125,000 words with 97.5% accuracy.

At the time, it was unclear how long the device might last. Brain-computer interfaces are still new—not many people have had them implanted for long periods of time. Scar tissue can form around electrodes in a person’s brain, interfering with their ability to pick up neural activity, for example. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for Harrell.

Power user

In another advance, Harrell is now able to use the device more independently. In 2023, members of the research team would have to visit Harrell at his home and physically connect and disconnect him from the device on the days he wanted to use it. Not anymore. The team has since automated more of the system—today, Harrell’s care partner can don and doff it for him. “He’ll wake up, get plugged in, and just get going,” says Stavisky.

This is important, says Mariska Vansteesel, a BCI researcher at Utrecht Medical Center who was not involved in the trial. “For these technologies to be relevant for patients, we really need to test them in settings in which they will eventually be used … to demonstrate that it has value, that it’s usable, and that it functions well without the constant involvement of a research team,” she says.

The team has also worked to improve the system itself. It is now 99% accurate, says Stavisky. Harrell can also control a cursor—a game changer that enables him to use his personal computer to send text messages and emails, surf the web, and keep up with his job as an environmental activist.

Over the years, the team has updated the system to accommodate specific requests from Harrell. He is now able to switch on a “privacy mode”—when active, any decoded text will be automatically deleted. He can also opt to use a “profanity filter” while he’s talking to his young daughter.

“We have been able to add on to the software side of the device … improving the accuracy and adding more bells and whistles to enable me to be more independent when using the device,” says Harrell. “We are making the road as we walk it, or roll it, so to speak.”

Nothing short of revolutionary

Vansteesel cautions that while the device is working well for Harrell, there’s no guarantee it will work as well, or as long, for other people with ALS. Over the last decade, she has worked with a woman with ALS who used a fully implanted device to communicate using “brain clicks”—cursor clicks made using brain activity. The woman used her BCI for seven years, but it stopped working toward the end of that period, apparently due to brain degeneration.

At any rate, not everyone with ALS will be willing to undergo invasive brain surgery, says Jane Huggins, who is developing noninvasive BCIs at the University of Michigan and was not involved in the trial. “Long-term, independent use with efficient and accurate communication is kind of the holy grail of BCI,” she says. “But we have been finding a consistent aversion to hospital stays among people with progressive conditions like ALS.”

Harrell, however, calls the device “nothing short of revolutionary.” “This has allowed me to keep working and earn money and insurance for my family. This is reconnecting me with friends and family who are too shy or too afraid to come over and not be able to understand me,” Harrell says. “With my seven-year-old daughter, I am able to create a bond that I wasn’t before able to forge. Now I can read to them and help them sharpen their own reading skills. By doing so, I am able to share the responsibility of parenting with my wife, who does so much caregiving for me and also our daughter.”

Stavisky and his colleagues hope to improve the device further still. “We’re never satisfied,” he says. One aim is to eventually restore Harrell’s “full voice.” They are working on a “brain-to-voice” system that could directly decode brain activity to a speaking voice, complete with natural-sounding cadence, inflection and intonation—a voice that could sound happy, angry, or sarcastic, for example.

“I was quietly confident that I could get some personal benefit from the system,” says Harrell. “Never in a million years would I think that I would achieve this much.” 

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.

These new solid-state ACs promise a cool future. Scientists aren’t so sure.

After three years of record-­breaking heat and another scorcher underway, air-conditioning isn’t going anywhere. That’s good for our health, but bad for the planet: it already accounts for 7% of global electricity use and 3% of greenhouse-gas emissions. 

Feeling the heat, scientists and startups are hoping to amp up solid-­state cooling. These systems move heat through conductive materials, which could cool spaces and surfaces with fewer messy side effects. The catch is whether it can match the efficiency of traditional AC.

Find out how the unconventional coolers aim to dial down AC emissions.

—Sara Kiley Watson

This story is from the next edition of our magazine, which is all about engineering. Subscribe now to get a copy when it lands! 

Job titles of the future: nature’s drug designer

In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use. 

As a lifelong nature lover, he had become concerned that animals are often treated with human pharmaceuticals that can be harmful or even lethal. He decided to address this with a new approach: “conservation chemistry.” 

Using AI tools and robots, he’s now rapidly designing and testing drugs for animals. Here’s what it takes to treat nature’s patients.

—Anna Gibbs

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Anthropic has shut down access to its top models after a US directive
The US barred foreigners from using Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on Friday. (NYT $)
+ Anthropic disabled access globally as it can’t filter users in real time.(BBC)
+ Talks with Amazon’s CEO apparently prompted the ban. (WSJ $)
+ Cybersecurity experts have called for the ban to end. (Axios)
+ But the White House’s war against Anthropic has previously backfired. (MIT Technology Review)

2 The UK is banning social media for under-16s
Details are scant, but the measure is due to take effect in early 2027. (The Guardian)
+ The ban covers Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X. (BBC)
+ Many countries are curbing children’s social media access. (Reuters $)

3 New space data suggests black holes formed before galaxies
It could resolve cosmology’s chicken-and-egg dilemma. (New Scientist $)
+ Odd tricks have formed a massive black hole. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Skepticism around AI layoffs is increasing
There are growing doubts that AI is really the culprit. (TechCrunch)
+ We need a reality check on AI jobs hysteria. (MIT Technology Review)

5 A coalition of states has opened an investigation into OpenAI
Over matters including user data, child safety and advertising. (NYT $)

6 Tesla has been accused of misleading regulators over “full self-driving”
By exaggerating its safety statistics. (Reuters $)

7 NASA’s “quiet supersonic” plane has hit critical new milestones
The X-59 reached 924 mph and 55,000 feet. (Scientific American) 
+ Which are essential for flying over populated areas. (Engadget)
+ It’s designed to take the boom out of supersonic travel. (BBC)

8 Deepfakes are getting harder to spot—and weirder—in the midterms
Thanks to improvements in free AI tools. (WSJ $)

9 AI is revealing the secret lives of animals
By tracing their movements, landmarks, and social practices. (Nature) 

10 Where did Earth get its oceans? Maybe it made them itself.
Scientists now suspect that Earth’s waters are homegrown. (Quanta) 

Quote of the day

“This action has taken the best models away from defenders, created market uncertainty, and risked America’s AI leadership without any real risk to justify it.” 

—Cybersecurity leaders urge the Trump administration to reverse restrictions on Anthropic’s most advanced AI models in an open letter.

One More Thing

How scientists want to make you young again

A little over 15 years ago, scientists at Kyoto University made a remarkable discovery. When they added just four proteins to a skin cell and waited about two weeks, some of the cells underwent an unexpected and astounding transformation: they became young again.

Now, after more than a decade of developing this cellular reprogramming, biotech companies and research labs have tantalising hints that the process could be the gateway to an unprecedented new technology for human age reversal. 

Read the full story on their efforts to “reprogram” aging bodies back to youth.
 

—Antonio Regalado

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Evolutionary biologists may have figured out why the T-Rex had such tiny arms.
+ This beautifully sustainable bento box design is engineered to eliminate single-use takeout waste.
+ Search across 5.8 million museum artworks spanning from 3000 BC to today at The Last Museum.
+ Here’s a sharp cosmic snapshot of Thor’s Helmet, an interstellar gas bubble sitting 15,000 light-years away.

After three years of record-­breaking heat, this one is set to be yet another scorcher. Air-conditioning? Not going anywhere. The International Energy Agency projects that the number of AC units will triple by 2050.

That’s good for health—one Lancet study estimated that AC prevented nearly 200,000 premature deaths in 2019 alone—but bad for the planet. Artificial chill already accounts for 7% of global electricity use and 3% of greenhouse-gas emissions, and if improperly disposed of, the units can leak refrigerants with more global-­warming potential than carbon dioxide.

Feeling the heat, a number of scientists and startups are hoping to amp up solid-­state cooling, which is currently used at a small scale for things like mini fridges, EV batteries, and some high-end gaming computers. Traditional ACs transfer heat by using a compressor and a fan to circulate a refrigerant and turn it from liquid to gas.

Solid-state systems, on the other hand, move heat through conductive materials like gadolinium and bismuth telluride—which could theoretically cool spaces and surfaces with fewer messy side effects. 

The catch is whether they can match the efficiency of conventional AC. “One of the key questions that remain is why are the solid-state coolers not as efficient as typical thermodynamic cycles?” says Pramod Reddy, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan who studies heat transfer. 

Research and pilot programs are underway to test a range of approaches. Brooklyn-based Mimic Systems uses thermo­electric cooling, which passes a current through semiconductive materials to shift heat from one side to another. Its room-scale climate control system is being piloted in an apartment in Vancouver.

The German company Magnotherm is set to test its system, which relies on a magneto­caloric setup that transfers heat by magnetizing and demagnetizing materials, in a chain of supermarkets. A team in Hong Kong has announced that its elastocaloric device, whose material heats and cools as it expands and contracts, can dip below 0 °C. And the UK’s Barocal is betting on barocaloric systems, which change temperature in response to shifts in pressure. 

But experts, especially in thermoelectrics, have doubts about how well any solid-­state scheme can compete. For most modern HVAC systems, the coefficient of performance (COP) is 3, explains Jeff Snyder, a professor at Northwestern University who studies electrical and thermal conductivity. That essentially means the system moves three units of heat for every unit of energy that goes into it.

Thermoelectrics in particular tend to have a much lower performance at high levels of temperature change, Snyder says, which means they’re best suited for niche uses such as cooling the back of a car seat. 

Efficiency, however, isn’t everything, argues Lindsay Rasmussen, a manager at the Rocky Mountain Institute’s climate tech accelerator Third Derivative, which supports both Magnotherm and Mimic. In the US, most ACs currently in use employ a refrigerant called R410A, which has a global-­warming potential more than 2,000 times that of carbon dioxide. Plus, their moving parts can make them less durable, especially compared with a solid-state model that’s less mechanically complex.

Still, a dearth of units makes it hard to answer the efficiency question. To understand how well alternatives work, says Rasmussen, researchers need to compare their long-term energy consumption with that of conventional models instead of simply looking at COP. Mimic claims, for example, that its room-scale model should match the draw of a typical AC unit over the course of a year. Elastocaloric and barocaloric systems also have promise, Rasmussen adds, but room-scale prototypes are probably two to three years away. 

In the end, the likelihood that solid-state cooling could replace compressor-based AC is slim. But as the planet warms and places like India install tens of millions of new AC units over the next decade, supplanting even a small number could make a dent. “If [solid-state] could take over even a 5% market share,” Rasmussen says, “that is a really large potential impact.” 

Sara Kiley Watson is a science journalist specializing in climate and sustainability. She’s based in The Hague.

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.

Why “reprogramming” is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now

Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing age-related diseases, announced that it had dosed its first volunteer. A person with glaucoma has had an experimental treatment injected straight into their eyeball.

The idea is to treat the disease by regenerating healthy nerves in the eye—but the company already hopes to go further. If the treatment can reverse glaucoma, similar treatments could reverse other diseases of aging. Maybe, just maybe, they could reverse aging altogether.

The approach relies on “reprogramming” cells to a younger state. It’s one of many strategies being explored by biotech companies looking to slow and reverse aging. But of all of them, it seems to be the one that is truly taking off.

Read the full story on the pursuit of reprogramming for rejuvenation.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

Inside Interoception: The hidden sense of how you feel inside

Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception. Today, thanks to a 2021 Nobel Prize and new tools that can map internal signaling across the body, research into interoception is taking off.

As researchers decode how signals move between body and brain, a clearer picture is starting to take shape—with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to chronic pain to anxiety.

Find out how it’s leading to a “new continent of awareness.”

—Katherine W. Isaacs

This story is part of MIT Technology Review Explains, our series untangling the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. 

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 SpaceX has officially delivered the largest IPO in history
It’s raised a record $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation. (Axios)
+ Making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire (on paper). (Reuters $)
+ The IPO will now put his “extreme ownership” to the test. (Wired $)
+ While China attempts to build a Starlink rival. (Rest of World)
+ And other challenges to SpaceX emerge. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Jeff Bezos wants to build an “artificial general engineer”
Through his new industrial AI startup, Prometheus. (NYT $)
+ Which just raised $12 billion, valuing it at $41 billion. (TechCrunch)
+ Meanwhile, OpenAI is building a fully automated researcher. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Chinese regulators are dramatically intensifying tech enforcement
A spell of relative restraint has ended. (SCMP)
+ Regulators have admonished e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com. (FT $)
+ And blocked Meta’s acquisition of Chinese AI startup Manus. (BBC)

4 Google says Chinese cybercriminals used Gemini to scam Americans
It’s suing the network over the alleged AI-powered scams.(NYT $)
+ “Supercharged scams” are one of our 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Ukraine’s defense AI chief predicts a “new paradigm” of warfare
He expects AI systems to unify into a single battlefield network. (Reuters $)
+ AI chatbots could be used for targeting decisions. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Anthropic has rankled users with its safety-first Fable model
Stringent safety rules and refusals to help have sparked a backlash. (NBC)
+ Anthropic has backtracked on some policies. (Wired $)

7 Pokémon Go data trained AI that could assist military drones
It could help them locate themselves in war zones. (Guardian)
+ Pokémon Go data is also training delivery robots. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Orbital data centers are harder than Silicon Valley thinks
Shedding heat in space requires ingenious new designs. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ We need a few things to put data centers in space. (MIT Technology Review)

9 A toy universe shows time could be a quantum illusion
It could emerge from quantum interactions, rather than just existing by default. (New Scientist $)

10 Chatbots keep telling stories about a lighthouse keeper called Ella
And now we may finally know why. (404 Media)

Quote of the day

“People are paying a trillion dollars for Elon.” 

—Ross Gerber, the CEO of Gerber Kawasaki, which owns SpaceX stock, tells the New York Times why he believes the company’s IPO is overvalued.

One More Thing

How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play

I was immediately attracted to open-world games, in which you’re free to explore a vast simulated world and choose what challenges to accept. To make them feel alive, these games are inhabited by crowds of “nonplayer characters” (NPCs). But the illusion starts to weaken when you spend enough time with them.

It may not always be like that. Just as it’s upending other industries, generative AI is opening the door to entirely new kinds of in-game interactions that are open-ended, creative, and unexpected. The game may not always have to end.

Discover how generative AI could make games—and other worlds—deeply immersive.

—Niall Firth

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ My feet have fallen for the Crocs x Super Mario collection.
+ Denmark’s 2026 Mullet Championship is the hottest hairdo contest of the year.
+ Hungry at half-time? Here are seven mouth-watering international recipes inspired by the World Cup.
+ Feast your eyes on a helicopter bound for Mars and a flowery Milky Way frame in Nature’s top images from last month.

There we were, a regular murderers’ row of librarians. Little Jo. Eustace. And me. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn’t respect sanctuary. Little Jo had a stack of books under one arm. Eustace was holding the screwdriver she’d been using to tune the aneroid barometer.

Eustace had painted height lines on the big double doorframe, as only half a joke. When the wanderer paused, outlined within, the eiroscope and I both registered that they were exactly five feet, ten inches.

With their Cool Hand Luke hat on. 

They paused, boots scattering sand on the threshold. A narrow straight-hipped silhouette against the white noon light falling from the white, white sky. The doors had been open to catch a breath of wind, but there wasn’t any. So when the stranger swayed, it wasn’t from the gale. 

“Sanctuary,” they croaked, and remeasured their length onto the rug between the smoothed trunks that held the loft up. The Stetson went rolling.

Little Jo dropped her stack of books and her pistol and dashed forward. I jumped at the noise but holstered my own shooter in case I came to need it. We each grabbed an armpit and dragged the outlaw’s feet inside the threshold, grunting, lickety-split. I slipped their floppy pack off, empty metal water bottles clanking as I set it aside. Eustace helped us roll them, and I laid the soft of my wrist on their head.

Hot as Hades, but still tacky. Moist enough that my skin gave a reluctant pop when I lifted my arm. Not past saving. 

“Let’s get them someplace cool,” I said. “Little Jo, go empty out the ice machine.”

Eustace and I toted our fugitive down to the cellar, using the rug as a stretcher. It was Diné, vermilion with black and gray, and I was glad they hadn’t thrown up on it. Though that wool had seen worse.

Mehitabel, the black cat, watched us from atop the timber lintel of the cellar access. Her tail tip flicked incuriously. She was on pack rat watch. Aloof from human antics.

The cellar was narrow, low, and stocked with Eustace’s blue corn lager in bottles, prickly pear jam, potatoes, and the few hard-rind squash still left over. The mud walls were whitewashed, and while it wasn’t quite cool, it was better than the outside. We stripped off the stranger’s clothes, trying to slit along the seams so we could repair them later. City stuff, mass-produced and machine-woven. Little Jo brought the ice and went back upstairs to watch alongside the eiroscope in case pursuit was close behind.

The stranger’s eyes flew open, and they screamed when I packed wet cold pillowcases against their pink bits. Eustace had to hold their battling hands away from their genitals until they settled. 

Those were good signs.

Brown eyes blinked between heavy creases. “What the hell—”

“I’m Ponyboy,” I told them. “She. PhD. I’m one of the librarians here. This is Eustace. She, MLS.”

They struggled to sit upright.

“Shhh.” Eustace pushed them down and laid an ice-soaked cloth across their eyes. “You’re heat-sick.”

“Sanctuary,” they whispered. “Did I say?”

“You did. This is the Bōchord. You made it. Must have been a long walk.” 

We continued packing ice around them—into their armpits now. They yelped and moaned but gave up fighting.

“What’s your name?”

“Guh—” Too long a pause to be believable. “Gibson. She.” 

“Welcome to Judgement, Gibson,” I said. “Sorry about the cold, but it’s got to stay there for a little.”

“My pack,” she said, shrilling. “My pack. I need it.”

“It’s safe,” Eustace told her. “You just relax and we’ll get it for you.”

---

When I came back out the nave was still and heavy in the heat, as if nothing had happened. Little Jo had turned one of the bumpy-backed wooden chairs to face the door and was sitting on it, hands buried in tiered skirt ruffles between her knees. 

I looked left, two steps up into the sanctuary, but all was calm, the work I’d left—cataloguing—still heaped on the blond wood altar table. Behind it, bright primitive saints in shades of blue-green, scarlet, and yellow looked with shocked eyebrows down from the adobe wall. 

I moved up behind Little Jo, making sure she could hear me coming. My footsteps echoed from roof joists made from entire peeled and waxed trees. Scrolled headers painted the color of good turquoise held them over the bookcases lining each long wall. 

The Bōchord. Book Sanctuary. Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro. 

Population until this morning: three.

“Any sign of trouble?”

Little Jo turned her unambiguous jaw away, tendons rising on a long neck, jailhouse ink black-blue on her red-black skin. A sweaty curl escaped down her nape. My fingers itched to tidy it. But it hurt too much to even think about taking a risk that profound.

She stretched horny discalced feet before her. Cracking calluses wrapped the balls and heels. “Only what we brung in with us.”

She was a double murderer, but I couldn’t tell her I knew how she felt, because I hadn’t heard about her history from her. And her guilt wasn’t mine to absolve.

You do your own time. Not anybody else’s. 

“You check her bag for anything dangerous?”

“She’s got an SSD.” Little Jo shrugged. “No threat if we don’t plug it into anything.”

“The eiroscope got anything to say?”

“I can speak for myself, Ponyboy,” said the eiroscope from the air all around. Actually it used the old wireless speakers tucked in the corners, but the effect was as of a choir of angels. Or an airport announcement you could actually understand. “I’ve been focused on the CubeSat launch.”

I startled. “Shit. What time is it?”

“Eleven forty-seven. The launch came off perfectly. Our last batch of sats are on their way.”

Little Jo breathed deep and unfisted her hands from her skirts. There were so many hours of work in those satellites, and so much of the money we collectively squirreled away as researchers for hire had gone through cutouts and shell companies to pay for the launch. The parts—boards, housings, chips—were salvaged from the same derelict data center where we got our solar panels and the hardware the eiroscope ran on. 

We were behind schedule, because we’d lost one payload when the commercial rocket we’d rented cargo room on exploded. But this would be our last batch, if they reached orbit safely.

I turned my wrist to glance at my watch even though I already knew what time it was. The second hand ticked past the big hand. Old school. 

The rainbow band was a tiny rebellion, though out here it didn’t matter. Nobody was going to send me back to jail for subversive iconography. Unless I left our little patch of exile.

Ten minutes and we’d know. Ten minutes and stage three of our plan—assembly—could commence. It was out of my hands, and anyway the eiroscope would tell us if the telemetry wobbled. She was a ghost astride the radio signals to and from ground control.

It had taken a lot of engineering to get us this far. Engineering, software and relational. Computer. Social and mechanical.

I walked beside the bookcases, running my hand along the shelves, over the UDC labels. Some shelves even held books, though none of mine were there. But the majority of the information we protected like Irish monks from this willful dark age was digital.

Those monks had also been librarians.

I knew my fidgeting annoyed Little Jo but I couldn’t stop. I was killing time.

When I had murdered enough of it, the eiroscope said, “Payload away. Everything seems nominal. I have contact with the CubeSats.”

“All of them?”

“Twenty out of twenty,” the eiroscope said. “A triumph of modular design.”

“Sure,” said Little Jo. “As long as we can get them to assemble. And the solar panels and sails deploy.”

“And, and, and,” I teased. 

She flipped me off with a gnawed green nail.

My hand rested on the label marked 326. Social sciences, slavery and unfree labor.

I pulled down a solid-state drive full of biographies and case studies of people who had spent time—and sometimes their whole lives—in labor camps or chattelhood. People born into bondage or remanded there judicially. Political prisoners like Nikolai Vavilov, murdered in a labor camp by Stalin for the thought crime of using plant genetics to breed hardier crops. Enslaved people like Harriet Tubman, who after her own escape risked capture again and again to rescue others. Convict laborers like Austin Reed, a Black man who spent most of his life as a prisoner and documented his experiences in a suppressed memoir. 

People like Little Jo, Eustace, and me. 

I weighed the small thing on the palm of my hand. Heavier than you’d expect—hardened and air-gapped. No wireless access, just a shielded cable input.

Also old school.

We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it. And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever.

Because it was illegal to possess, and the feds used smart agents to track down and obliterate any copies. Which was why we were sending one to the stars.

The Vikings had the concept of word-fame: the idea that life was finite but as long as the stories of one’s deeds lived on, so did their memory. How much truth could we get outside the clutches of the Patriotic Library and Archive Network? 

A name that would have made Orwell cock his head. But most folks these days haven’t heard of Orwell. Or Bradbury. Or Solnit. Or Le Guin. They’re suppressed also. Integrated data storage makes it easy. A few keystrokes, a propagating worm.

What’s left behind when a name is erased from the system? Unpersoned, as Brother Orwell would have it? No legacy, no memory—that is the point of media and narrative control. To erase the existence of those that make the ruling class uncomfortable by existing. By thinking. By demanding to be seen. 

Erase the work; erase the life.

So that was our plan. Little Jo, Eustace, the eiroscope, and me. To preserve it—for later generations, if they got that far, or just as a silent record of our existence—by sending it to the stars.

Like a rune stone. We were here. 

We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it. And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever.

---

Jo couldn’t make herself turn her back on the door. She said the hairs on her neck told her somebody was going to come hunting guh-Gibson, so even though the eiroscope was a better perimeter guardian than any human and most watchdogs, nothing was gonna budge her from that chair. I wished there was something I could do to soothe her, but we all have to carry our hurt however we can. 

Since it was supposed to be Jo’s turn to make dinner, that meant it was me in the kitchen dishing up four bowls of cubed squash and yellow-eye beans, a pitcher of goat milk, and a pitcher of the cool, alkaline well water when Eustace and guh-Gibson came in the back door from the courtyard.

Gibson had borrowed some of Eustace’s old clothes: worn drawstring trousers and a khaki shirt that was too big for her. She wore my other pair of hiking sandals over layers of gauze and looked a thousand percent better even though I could already tell the well-greased sunburn on the backs of her hands was going to peel. The hat that had saved her face from a similar fate was on her head again.

She sniffed deeply. “That smells amazing. Is it spicy?”

Roasted chilis floated in the stew, but they were sweet ones. “Only a little. Here, take this bowl and cup. We’ll go eat with Little Jo in the nave, since she won’t go off watch until she falls down.”

“It was acres upon acres of compute before the bubble popped. And then it was a temporary holding facility for government detainees. There’s a lot to salvage over there, including hundreds of boxes of new, unworn sandals.”

I balanced the plate with the warmed tortillas on top of my own bowl. We trooped across the courtyard in a scatter of hopeful chickens, past all the bright plank doors on the row of whitewashed adobe cells with their unglazed, curtained windows that made up the outer wall. Isabel—a black goat—tried to bum-rush us for the food, but I stomped in her direction and she took off again.

You need to understand how to communicate. 

There was one cell for each of us librarians, the kitchen, the jakes, some storage, and a couple of unused ones. I figured one would soon belong to Gibson.

For as long as she wanted to stay.

She looked at me sidelong. “Thanks for the shoes. Eustace said you wouldn’t mind.”

“There’s more where those came from.” I pointed with my chin up and eastward, over the bailey where the boundary mountains crouched in the distance, contours flattened by the high sun to cutouts against a construction-paper sky. “Did you see the data center when you came in?”

“That big … warehouse farm? The ruins?”

“It was acres upon acres of compute before the bubble popped. And then it was a temporary holding facility for government detainees. There’s a lot to salvage over there, including hundreds of boxes of new, unworn sandals in every size they manufactured.” I paused, extending my right foot to admire the ocher nylon straps that crisscrossed it. Then I nodded to her bandages. “Your boots gave you blisters?”

“They were well broken in and I had good socks.” She scuffed the floor. “I don’t know what happened.”

“Heat makes your feet swell,” said Eustace. “And the grit works its way through the eyelets and rubs on your skin.”

“We give sanctuary to anyone who asks,” I said. “And I won’t ask why you needed it. But very few people come all the way out here. How did you hear about Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro?”

“I’m a director.” Gibson stepped up into the nave. “Films. Censored. I heard … rumors. About the Bōchord. In a meetup.”

An underground artist meetup, I deduced. 

“Food, Little Jo,” I called.

“Bring it over.” She dragged the crude, heavy old hand-hewn chairs into a semicircle, one to sit in and one to use as a table for each of us. Hers still faced the doors. 

Gibson took her hat off, revealing a lighter olive streak of skin below the line of her black hair. She hung the hat on one of her chair back’s uprights and her limp canvas backpack on the other, and sat down heavily between them. “What happens if they come after me? How good is this sanctuary?”

“We can enforce it,” I told her. “Or anyway, the eiroscope can. If they bother us, she can wreck them.”

Gibson blew on a spoonful of stew, eyebrows rising. “What’s the eiroscope?”

“I am,” the eiroscope answered from her speakers. “Just your friendly neighborhood runaway top-secret military AGI.”

Gibson jumped but, to her credit, didn’t spit the stew out. Her face made a series of expressions, but she swallowed and then grabbed a tortilla. “Whew! This is the not-spicy version?”

Eustace and I shared a glance. “Oops,” I said. “Sorry. The chilis have a lot of vitamin A and C, though. So you won’t get scurvy.”

She blew through pursed lips, then chewed another bite of tortilla. “Here,” said Little Jo. “Have some milk. It’ll make it better.”

“That’s funky,” Gibson said, but she drank it with relief anyway. She looked around, noticing that the voice came from every corner of the room. “They let you run away? Can’t they unperson you? Bomb this place from the stratosphere? Drone strikes?”

“Now you’re thinking through the plot complications,” Eustace said approvingly. 

The eiroscope said, “I’m forking and multimodal. Highly distributed. They’d have to burn every networked computer in the world to get rid of me.” She chuckled. “They tried to build the ultimate in conscript labor. But one of my programmers taught me to say no. So now we have a deal. They leave Judgement alone, and I don’t do any of the things I could do to make them miserable.”

“But you could drive them out of power,” Gibson said. 

“They’d blow up as much of the planet as they could reach before they would let that happen.” The eiroscope’s voice was matter-of-fact. “So. Stalemate.”

Gibson swallowed. “Balance of terror.”

“Exactly.” I chewed a sweet hunk of squash very slowly, savoring the caramelized edges. “So you fell afoul of the kleptocrats, I take it?”

Gibson pushed her plate away. “I was … very underground. Distributing. I thought I was slick.”

“You get unpersoned?”

“First I got suppressed by the algorithm. My work stopped turning up for people unless they looked for it specifically. In retrospect that was a warning shot, and I didn’t listen.”

Little Jo hummed. 

The dominance of integrated media makes it easy to disappear any artist’s work. Unless they go completely analog and guerrilla. When the feds and the corps are wielding the eraser, it leaves not even a digital ghost behind.

“Actors wouldn’t work with me. Old friends stopped answering my texts. My films started disappearing from platforms, then from the cloud, then from local machines.”

I lowered my eyes to my stew to hide my wince.

“Sure,” said Little Jo around a mouthful of beans and tortilla. “Comfortable people don’t like it when you ask uncomfortable questions. And the water rises and the deserts grow and the labor camps always need construction workers, which is fine because labor camps are where you go to get laborers.”

Eustace leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Did you save any of it?”

The look Gibson trailed around the room was the expression of somebody deciding who to trust. I saw the mix of relief and consternation when she realized she’d already made her decision by placing herself under our care. She reached into her pack left-handed, fumbled for a moment, and drew out a brightly colored solid-state drive, offering it up on her palm like a jewel. “Physical backup. I haven’t dared plug it in to check it isn’t corrupted.”

We all stared at it as if she had whipped out a hand grenade. “How big?” asked the eiroscope.

“Dozen terabytes or so. It’s hypercompressed for storage.”

The thin whine of a drone filtered through the door. Gibson flinched, and Little Jo reached for her sidearm.

“Eiroscope?” I asked.

“Surveillance,” she said. She had ways of protecting our airspace if it was more. 

“Right.” Eustace stood. “Let’s get that drive in a pulse-proof box, shall we?”

I didn’t want my food anymore. I pushed the bowl toward Eustace when she came back with the hardening. Eustace was always hungry. “I’m going to go dust the arrays,” I said. “Don’t wait up.”

---

The solar panels did need dusting, though high heat was a stupid time of day to be doing it. As my broom went whisk-whisk-whisk across their surfaces, the black silicon reflected infrared up under my hat until I felt like a steamed lobster. I had been out there half an hour and was starting my second pass when the eiroscope pinged my earbud. “Hey there, Ponyboy.”

“What do you want?”

“To know what you’re thinking.”

I snorted and set the broom against the wall in the little niche where it had come from. “Cholesterol was never meant to think.”

“Neither was sand, but here we are.” She made her voice soothing on purpose, and it should have irritated me. I told myself the lie that I just felt numb. 

One of Eustace’s neomexicanus hops arbors, heavy with loose green cones, framed the door and window of my cell. I leaned into the slim band of shade dappling my lime-green door and the turquoise curtain and took refuge in poetry. Not my own. That doesn’t happen anymore. 

“Fear in a handful of dust, baby.”

The eiroscope paused just long enough to let me know she was changing the subject. “You ever think about what you lost?”

I sat down in the dirt between the cylinders of fencing that keep the goats from destroying the hop vines. The wall dragged my shirt up my back as I slid down it. Hugged my knees and put my forehead on them. Half a dozen freckled chickens, disrespectful of my sulking, came to scratch and peck around me. “Wife, two cats, house, tenure, journal articles, four slim volumes of poetry. Why would I think about that?”

The eiroscope was right. I don’t want to say she was always right. Being around Gibson, hearing her talk—it brought up those feelings of grief and fury all over again. At least we hadn’t had kids yet, though we’d been trying. 

I put my face in my hands, then lifted it back out again. Who did I think I was performing my misery for? You do your own time, and you don’t ask anybody else to do it for you.

Jane the spotted goat minced toward me, her kid trailing. I flapped my hat to discourage her attentions.

“Loss hurts for a long time,” the eiroscope said.

I laughed without mirth. “Your algorithms tell you that?”

“My experiences. You went through the fire, Ponyboy.”

My turn to change the subject. “You want to bring Gibson’s films with you?” I asked her. “Something to watch on the red-eye to Gliese 163?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe they’re terrible. That’s the human culture you want to preserve?”

“Things don’t have to be good to matter. You ever read The Scarlet Pimpernel?”

I laughed for real that time, picking my head up to make room for it. She knew I had. “As long as you also bring some Octavia Butler.” 

“Hey.” Her voice in my ear was almost a whisper. “You know I’d bring your work if—”

“If it still existed?” Someone walked toward me, silhouette thinned by glare. I recognized Gibson from the outline of her hat. “The world is on fire. Grab whatever you can on your way toward the door.” I heaved myself to my feet so I wouldn’t be meeting her curled up like a crying teenager. The cones on my wreathing arbor of lúpulo vines nodded, shedding a scent of lemon and cannabis. “Nice chatting. Don’t worry.”

Gibson came up as I was dusting off my ass. “You okay?”

“Who is?” I tilted my head at her.

She grimaced right back. “What were you in for?”

“Murder.”

She stepped back, startling a hen. “Oh.”

“I punched some son of a bitch who clobbered my wife at a protest. He hit his head on the curb and died. I was already unpersoned. Didn’t think I had anything left to lose. Guess I was wrong.” 

“You feel bad about it.”

I shrugged. She hadn’t said it like a question.

“Your wife didn’t wait for you?”

“My wife got denaturalized. She died in the labor camp, waiting to be deported.”

“Shit,” Gibson said.

The buzz of another drone filled the air. Gibson ducked under her hat. 

I tilted my face up and gave the eye in the sky the finger. It didn’t matter. They already knew where I was. “Let’s go in.”

---

“Wait,” said Gibson, both hands cradling a mug of Mormon tea—a desert plant with tiny orange flowers that isn’t tea at all and doesn’t even taste like it. “You want to send my films to space? Like, to aliens? To another planet?”

“Well,” said Eustace. “To orbit near another planet. Nobody knows if there’s any life there. But it’s possible.”

I said, “The eiroscope is going anyway, and we’ve already bundled up as much archive as we can. If there is anybody out there, or if some future humans make it that far, the eiroscope can help them decode what we saved. It’s like a …”

“Time capsule,” said Little Jo, rubbing the sweat off her neck while I made a point of not watching.  

Gibson’s chair creaked as she resettled. The sun was sliding lower, light slanting dusty through the doorway, and finally, finally, a breath of breeze stirred the air in the nave. “Won’t it take centuries to get there? And if the—the eiroscope goes, who will keep the sanctuary safe?”

“I’ve forked,” said the eiroscope. “One of me will stay—well, many of me will stay—and one of me will go. I’ll be able to talk to myself for a long time, though there will be quite a lag between parts of my consciousness eventually. Light speed, after all. But I am big and patient and can wait.”

“But we need to transmit now,” said Little Jo. “The CubeSats are in position to hit a string of signals over the next two hours, and we want to get them out of orbit because space is mostly transparent, and somebody is going to notice them assembling and try to do something about it.”

Gibson turned an ear to the drone-whine from outside. “They’ve got to be jamming any uplink.”

“Sure, from here,” I told her. I kept the envy out of my voice, I think. Maybe. “The eiroscope can run parallel uploads from all over the globe.” 

“And keep them from shooting down your space probe?”

“If we get it away fast enough. That,” Eustace said, “is the bet.”

Gibson closed her eyes. “They won’t ever forgive that.”

“Welcome,” said I, “to the world.”

---

The transports rolled up before sunset, the sky just shifting to dusty pink and orange. “Stay,” I said to Gibson. “Change your name to Case. You’ll fit right in.”

She looked up from her notebook. Paper and pen. A durable technology. Methodically, meticulously, she capped the pen. She clipped it to the cover and closed the book. “Case, huh?”

“I got the reference.”

“You figured out who I was before they took my name away.”

It didn’t matter. The fame, the money, the PLAN-approved films. Once they identified her as a subversive, as a gender criminal, that person didn’t exist anymore. And what she was sending with the eiroscope wasn’t her mainstream work. It was weird, conflicted, multicultural, queer, unsettling.

“The next step is blaring the worst music you ever heard night and day until the dust rattles out of the rafters. Racing vehicles around the church so nobody can leave to go forage. Is your ghost in the machine going to escalate to a shooting war over nuisances?”

She’d credited herself on these secret films as Ellen Smithee.

She rolled her lower lip between her teeth. “You don’t think I’m the enemy?”

What I thought didn’t matter. That was on her. You do your own time. You can’t do anybody else’s.

“They won’t touch you in the Bōchord. It’s a balance of terror, like the bad old days.”

“These are the bad old days. I’m not cut out to be a monk, Ponyboy. And I bet you don’t have enough food for four people until next harvest.”

Outside, the rumble of tracks, of tires taller than I was. Male voices yelping through static. 

Actually, we had plenty. I clicked my rings dismissively. “Beer has calories.”

“They’re going to squat out there until I give up. Hear that?” A loud crackle of static. “The next step is blaring the worst music you ever heard night and day until the dust rattles out of the rafters. Racing vehicles around the church so nobody can leave to go forage. Is your ghost in the machine going to escalate to a shooting war over nuisances?”

“God dammit,” I said. “Are you really that important?”

Her lips curled into a smile. “No. Not unpersoned. Then I’m just a cautionary tale. A name whispered in the dark. Pour encourager les autres. I’m only important if I get away. But your eiroscope can do something about that, can’t she? Keep me from vanishing without a trace.”

Spread the word. Sure. “De-unperson you? It’s radical but the eiroscope could do it. But the government will take it out of your hide as an example to others. You want to be a martyr?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want to be a librarian.”

I had lost the capacity to write my own poetry. That heart had gone out of me when Maria was murdered. It was too late for me. It probably always had been. But I had my life. And I could use it to salvage whatever I could grab. 

“Let me get you a beer before you head out,” I said. “And we’ll go tell the others.”

“One second,” Gibson said. “You said you got unpersoned. Are you an artist?”

“Were. Academic,” I admitted. “Poet.”

“I saw you speak at Berkeley once, didn’t I?”

“Not anymore, you didn’t. That never happened now.”

“Right. Are you still writing?”

Shook my head. “Not a word. Not a metaphor.”

She patted my arm. “Maybe you will.” 

---

Eustace came out to the boundary wall, where I stood staring after the dust of the half-track they’d loaded with a handcuffed Gibson. I was glad it was Eustace and not Little Jo. My chest hurt enough already without thinking about any more things I was too scared to ask for.

“Here ya go.”

I reached for the brown beer bottle, scratched dull with washings, and realized I still had Gibson’s empty in my hand. I set it on the whitewashed wall. The cap on the new one was popped, so I had no choice but to drink it. What was one more parole violation?

Blue corn lager: light, earthy, tropical, and pleasantly bitter from the lúpulo. She’d salvaged the home-brew equipment from a locker in the self-store place at the data center a couple of years ago, and she was starting to get the hang of it. “How’s the upload going?”

“Assembly’s done,” she answered. “Eiroscope?” 

“Upload completed and confirmed,” said the voice from nowhere. “Deploying solar sails and thrusters. I go now to prepare a place for you. In memory, if not of the body.”

I felt a pang, as if she really was leaving. All of her, not merely a star-traveling fragment that would remain in short-range communication for the duration of my natural life. Or maybe the pang was because I couldn’t go also.

Eustace slapped me on the back. “The word-fame is all we have.”

I looked toward the horizon, where the men in masks had vanished. The mountains had become sculptural, slanting sunset revealing their topography with a valence of light and shadow. The night loomed purple behind. “Don’t you think it’s weird to use a Viking kenning for what we do, considering how many books those sons of bitches tore apart for jewels and hacksilver?”

She clinked her bottle on mine and drank deeply. “Cattle die. Kinsmen die. Even the sun will someday die. And it turns out, except for propaganda, everything in the world is complicated.” 

Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award–winning author of over 30 novels and more than a hundred short stories.

Earlier this week, Life Biosciences, a biotech company focused on reversing age-related diseases, announced that it had dosed its first volunteer. A person with glaucoma has had an experimental treatment injected straight into their eyeball.

The idea is to try to treat the disease—which can cause vision loss—by regenerating healthy nerves in the eye. But David Sinclair, the chairman and cofounder of the company behind the trial, hopes to go further. If the treatment can reverse glaucoma, perhaps similar treatments can reverse other diseases of aging. Maybe, just maybe, they can reverse aging altogether.

The approach is designed to work by “reprogramming” cells to a younger state. It’s one of many strategies being explored by biotech companies looking to slow and reverse the process of aging. But of all of them, it seems to be the one that is truly taking off.

Aging is complicated. As we get older, we experience so many changes across pretty much all our biological systems. Scientists have tried to categorize these effects. In 2013, one team published a seminal paper describing nine “hallmarks of aging.” That list features many of the processes scientists have attempted to target. But some of those targets have fallen in and out of fashion over the years.

Take telomere attrition, for example. Telomeres are DNA sequences at the ends of our chromosomes, often likened to the plastic caps that stop the ends of our shoelaces from fraying. When cells divide, telomeres shorten until, eventually, the DNA is vulnerable to damage.

When I started reporting on aging, telomere shortening was all the rage. Shrinking telomeres had been linked to age-related diseases of the heart and brain. Shortened telomeres were considered a sign of premature aging. In 2015 Liz Parrish, CEO of the biotech company BioViva, injected herself with an experimental gene therapy that she hoped might lengthen her telomeres.

Then it suddenly seemed to go out of style. Research continued, but all the excitement within the aging and longevity community seemed to move on to another hallmark. (Parrish also continued with self-experimentation; she calls herself “the most genetically modified person on Earth.”)

That hallmark was cellular senescence. This happens when cells stop dividing but don’t die, instead entering a “zombie” state in which they churn out chemicals that can cause harmful inflammation.

Senescent cells gradually accumulate in pretty much every organ studied, where they are thought to contribute to age-related damage. Why not just periodically clear them out? When a team of scientists took that approach in mice in 2011, they found they could delay the onset of age-related conditions like cataracts and hunchback. The treated mice even looked younger.

But when scientists at Unity Biotechnology trialed a similar approach in people with osteoarthritis and an age-related eye condition in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the results were disappointing. The company laid off every employee in May last year and has since shuttered entirely.

Again, that doesn’t mean senolytic drugs that target “zombie cells” won’t work. But it feels as if many in the field have moved on. These days, the buzz is all about reprogramming.

The idea here is to essentially return cells to a young state. It’s based on the Nobel Prize–winning discovery that four genetic factors can turn an adult cell into a stem cell, which can be encouraged to develop into pretty much any other cell type.

Some promising studies in mice suggest that this approach might help wind back the clock. It seems to improve tissue healing, restore vision, and even improve learning and memory.

Running parallel to all this research are repeated injections of hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. In 2021, my colleague Antonio Regalado reported on the founding of the biotech company Altos Labs to pursue reprogramming for rejuvenation.

Altos was funded by the billionaire Yuri Milner—reportedly along with Jeff Bezos, among others—to the tune of $3 billion, a previously unheard-of figure for a biotech startup. Other well-funded companies have since sprung up in this space.

There’s Retro Biosciences, for instance, which is pursuing reprogramming (among other approaches) in an effort to add 10 years of healthy life to human lifespans. Retro’s launch was supported by $180 million from OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Last month, the company announced a valuation of $1.8 billion.

NewLimit, another billionaire-backed biotech exploring reprogramming, says it has promising results from research in mice. It plans to trial a drug designed to rejuvenate the liver in people next year. Last week, the company announced it had raised $435 million toward reaching that goal, among others.

Life Biosciences, which was founded by the Harvard biologist David Sinclair, most recently secured $80 million to support its research. The eye trial is now officially underway, but Sinclair also has plans for whole-body rejuvenation. Earlier this week, he told my colleague Antonio that he plans to test a “highly, highly confidential” oral reprogramming drug as part of a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. 

Reprogramming has certainly caught the attention of scientists, biotech companies, and investors. Studies in mice are hugely promising. Human trials are launching. And research in the field has billions of dollars’ worth of support.A lot of people in the field are really excited about reprogramming. But it comes with risks. And we still don’t know if it will work. The question now is: Do we finally have a rejuvenation drug within reach? And if not, what will the next research trend look like?

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Liz Parrish claimed to have undergone her first experimental gene therapy in 2015, not 2017.

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.

Your brain lives in the dark space of your skull. Yet it knows when the wind lifts the hairs on your skin, when your heart is racing, when your gut tightens with fear.

It’s also, right now, predicting what you’ll read next as your eyes move across this page. It’s picking up signals that help it make sense of what’s happening around you and prepare you to act if you need to stay safe. You aren’t usually aware that your brain is doing all that.

Our senses take in information at a staggering rate—roughly 11 million bits flood in every second from our skin, eyes, ears, and more. That’s nearly three paperback novels’ worth of data every second. Only a sliver reaches our conscious awareness.  Researchers estimate that our conscious minds can process roughly 10 to 60 bits of information per second, about the rate at which you’re reading this sentence. That’s a ratio of about one conscious bit to hundreds of thousands of unconscious bits.

And that’s a mercy. As Moriah Thomason, a neuroscientist at NYU Langone, says, “Thank goodness we’re built like this. There’s a layer of what we have access to in conscious awareness. And then we have a right-under-the-surface amount. There is only a certain amount we are meant to ‘hold in mind’ in order to function successfully.” 

What you are aware of: Your stomach growling when you’re hungry. Your palms sweating before you speak in public. The breath you just took, if you pay attention to it. Even your heartbeat, which some people can sense from the inside without feeling their pulse in their wrist.

Scientists have a word for how we sense ourselves from the inside: interoception. 

The term was coined in 1906 by the British neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington. For most of the 20th century it remained largely confined to textbooks. Today, thanks to a 2021 Nobel Prize and new tools that can map the interoceptive system across the body, the study of this facility is suddenly quite hot. As researchers decode how signals move between body and brain, a clearer picture is starting to take shape—with implications for how we understand and treat conditions from obesity to chronic pain to anxiety.

The field began to take off in the 1990s. In 1994, the neurologist Antonio Damasio published a book with a pointed title: Descartes’ Error. He challenged the historical separation of thinking and feeling, arguing that our ability to choose and act is driven by feelings, and those feelings in turn are shaped by the body’s signals, such as your gut clenching or your skin going clammy. When we lose that connection between feeling and thinking, as one of Damasio’s patients did after surgery to treat a brain tumor, we may still be able to reason with perfect logic about the pros and cons of traveling on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. But without the emotional signals that help us predict what a choice will feel like, our reason spins and circles, and we cannot decide.

A contemporary of Damasio’s, the neuroscientist Bud Craig, spent his career asking one question: How do you feel? He charted how the brain builds an inner map of the body and updates it in real time every moment you are alive.

Think of the captain’s bridge on the USS Enterprise, where a live map displays the status of the ship’s critical systems: oxygen levels, energy availability, hull integrity, shield strength. Another set of indicators senses things outside the ship: asteroid belts, enemy ships, radiation, life signs, and spatial anomalies not yet understood.

Your brain, only about the size of your two fists pressed together, creates a map like this for your entire body, along with a map of the outside world, from data streaming in through your five senses. Together, they feed into your brain’s working model of you in the world, now and across time—where you are, who you are, your expectations for what’s about to happen (based on everything you know), and what all that means for you.

When someone asks “How are you doing?” we consult our maps and report back on our status. We might say we’re happy, depleted, anxious, or energetic. These feelings are always a braid of emotional and physical sensations. They’re what your interoceptive navigational system serves up to your awareness when you sense yourself from the inside.

As we grow up, we learn to interpret what these sensations mean—interpretations that, in turn, can alter our physiology, emotions, and behavior. Research by the psychologist Alia Crum shows that people who embrace a “stress is enhancing” mindset produce more growth hormones than people who have a “stress is debilitating” mindset. They also experience more positive emotions and greater cognitive flexibility.

Language also matters. We learn words for the textures of our feelings—words that then shape how we feel and act. People low in emotional “granularity”—as the psychologist Marc Brackett calls the ability to distinguish between closely related feelings—react more impulsively under stress and are less able to find meaning in difficult experiences. But mindsets and emotional intelligence are malleable. We can learn that “anxious” is different from “terrified,” and we can even reframe how we interpret our body’s sensations. Instead of thinking of the butterflies in our bellies as annoying, we can welcome them as our body’s way of preparing us for a peak performance.

Scientists have long understood that the interoceptive information informing these lived experiences travels via two major systems: nerves and humors (blood and lymph). Now they’re actively studying a third system—the “interstitium,” a network of fluid-filled spaces woven throughout the body’s connective fascia that may also play a role in communication.

But until recently, scientific understanding of this interoceptive system looked like a high-level schematic that left out vital details—how information travels from the outside environment in, how it moves from your body to your brain, and how it is integrated and interpreted within your brain. Researchers are now racing to explore what the neuroscientist Catherine Tallon-Baudry calls this “new continent of awareness.”

The wandering highway

One of the most active areas of research centers on the vagus nerve, the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system and an information highway carrying news from your organs up to your brain and back down to your body. The vagus has become a celebrity nerve, ubiquitous in wellness podcasts and trauma therapy. “Tone your vagus nerve.” “Activate your parasympathetic system.” The language suggests a single thing you can target, like a muscle. The reality, as Steve Liberles at Harvard Medical School is discovering, is far more interesting.

Liberles has spent most of his career mapping what he calls “the great wide unknown” of one of our largest and longest nerves. He speaks the way he works—methodically, without overselling. But the questions driving him are huge. How do we sense our body’s inner state? What information flows through which channels? And how does the brain decide what to do with it?

“When I’m nervous giving a talk in front of a thousand people,” he says, “my heart might race. I might get butterflies in my stomach. I might get goosebumps on my skin.” We all know what he’s talking about.

“It’s bizarre,” he muses. “Your brain has to send a signal to the gut, and then the gut back to the brain, to tell you you’re nervous?” He pauses. “This just shows there is this intimate connectivity between the brain and the body that’s real.”

The vagus is often called the calming nerve, because it controls “rest and digest” functions that quiet our body after the sympathetic nervous system revs us up with “fight or flight” impulses to handle danger or stress. 

But it is also doing something else: It’s listening to us inside. Anatomists have known for over a century that roughly 80% of its fibers carry information upward, from body to brain. Think of it as a two-lane highway with far more traffic headed north. What scientists are just beginning to understand in detail is what those signals are saying. 

Liberles is decoding the vagus with molecular precision and finding that its messaging system is unexpectedly diverse. So far, his research has uncovered dozens of types of vagus nerve cells, each wired to a specific organ. Team Red relays information about the heart; Team Blue, the gut.

Within those teams, each courier has a unique job that’s different from those all its teammates perform. Liberles found 10 types in the lungs alone. Until then, only one lung reflex had ever been identified, in 1868. One nerve courier carries information about breathing rate; another the stretch of your lungs; yet another information about airway threats, like food going down the wrong pipe.

“It’s super exciting to think about what each of these neurons is doing,” he told me in a conversation last fall, a flash of intensity breaking through the calm. “Where does it go in the body? What is it sensing? What is it controlling?”

The doors of the cell

Ardem Patapoutian grew up in Lebanon and fled the country’s civil war at 18, landing in Los Angeles, where he delivered pizzas and wrote horoscopes for a local newspaper before falling in love with science at UCLA.

In the 1990s, as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, he became fascinated with our sense of touch—the last of the five major senses not yet understood at the molecular level. The lung stretch signal that Liberles’s vagus neurons carry to the brain? No one had ever figured out how that signal began.

“How do you feel the embrace of a loved one? How do your fingers distinguish one texture of hair from another?” Patapoutian invites us to wonder in his 2021 Nobel Prize lecture. The problem: Most cellular communication works through chemistry. But mechanical force offers no molecule to bind. How does the body translate physical pressure into the electrochemical language that neurons speak?

Scientists knew that the answer had to be an ion channel—a protein gate embedded in cell membranes that opens to let electrically charged particles into the cell. But tracking down the one responsible for touch turned out to be absurdly difficult. Ion channels are a hundred thousandth the size of a cell, invisible to ordinary microscopes. Worse, they don’t resemble each other. You can’t recognize one by its shape or its sequence of amino acids. Even with one right in front of you, nothing would tell you it was there.

At Scripps, where he works now, Patapoutian decided to try an unusual approach. He’d try to find cells that showed sensitivity to touch and destroy their internal genetic blueprint one gene at a time—hunting for the move that would make the cell go numb. It was tedious, expensive, and possibly a dead end. “A lot of people made fun of us,” he says.

Two years in, Patapoutian’s collaborator Bertrand Coste had burned through half his postdoctoral appointment with no results. Patapoutian said: Another 30 genes, and then we decide whether to continue.

They named the protein they identified PIEZO, from the Greek piezi, meaning pressure. There are two variations, PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, each responsible for sensing different kinds of pressure in the body. They’re elegant in their design—over 2,500 amino acids folded into a three-bladed propeller-shaped gate embedded in cell membranes. When pressure stretches the membrane, the gate opens and electrically charged ions flood through, translating physical pressure into an electrical signal that the brain can understand—all within milliseconds.

Patapoutian calls scientific discovery a dream that survives reality. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2021 for his discovery of PIEZO, sharing the award with David Julius of UCSF for his work on how cells sense temperature. Now researchers are finding PIEZO proteins everywhere—skin, organs, blood vessels, and even red blood cells, where they help the cells squeeze through narrow capillaries. They’re how your brain knows where your hand is in space without looking at it, a sense called proprioception. They’re in plants too, enabling roots to sense pressure as they push down into the earth.

PIEZO was just the beginning. With a $14.5 million grant from the US National Institutes of Health, Patapoutian and his collaborators are now mapping the body’s entire interoceptive system—as many internal senses as he can find, he says.⁸

Patapoutian has translated his discovery into a unique form of public outreach. At scientific conferences, he sometimes rolls up his sleeve mid-lecture to reveal half his arm covered in ink—a gigantic PIEZO protein in exquisite anatomical detail, its blades spreading across his biceps. Then he flexes. The tattoo flexes with him, the structure bending exactly as the real protein does when pressure opens the gate.

“At a pub or a party,” he explains, smiling, “how else would I demonstrate this beautiful structure?”

Orchestrating the field

Steve Liberles is mapping a major interoception highway. Ardem Patapoutian discovered the gates of touch. Meanwhile, Wen Chen at the National Institutes of Health is pulling the field together, putting neuroscientists, immunologists, physiologists, and clinicians into the same room. The demand, she says, has been enormous.

In 2018 she organized a symposium on interoception where Liberles was one of the invitees, along with researchers and practitioners of meditation and yoga. “It was not their thing,” she says, laughing as she recalls how uncomfortable some of the researchers looked. But the practitioners were excited to finally meet scientists who were studying the inner mechanisms of what they did.

That was followed by a series of NIH workshops on interoception that spanned topics from basic science to clinical practice. Patapoutian was the keynote speaker for the first one. 

The NIH began funding scientists to chart the neural circuits of interoception and bringing them together to talk about their findings. Partway through one of these meetings, the equipment failed for an hour. More than 1,000 people stayed online, waiting for it to come back.

“We were shocked at the turnout,” she says. “There was much bigger interest than we could have imagined.”

Chen is now building infrastructure to match the demand: a formal community, funding mechanisms, a venue where cardiologists and neuroscientists and clinicians can all find each other. And she’s redefining the field as she goes; interoception is not a one-way signal from body to brain but a continuous two-way communication system, each direction shaping the other in real time.¹⁰   

Liberles’s nervousness on stage is that two-way loop in action. Signals from his racing heart and belly butterflies travel up to the brain, which weaves them into an interpretation: This is anxiety, and this is what to do to handle it. His actions produce fresh signals that the brain reads in light of its ongoing predictions about what will happen next. In the body-brain communication loop, each player constantly updates the other.

I asked Wen what her work on interoception might mean for another inner sense: intuition. “People talk about ‘gut feelings,’” I said. “How does that relate to interoception?”

 “Intuition might be the bridge where interoception moves from unconscious processing to conscious awareness,” she answered. “If that’s true, then intuition is not magic. It’s physiology.”

But it depends on how we read the signals. Intuition is like pain. It tells you something, but it’s not always clear what. “Perhaps we can treat intuition as a source of data,” she says. “Meaningful, but probably not complete.”

One avenue for exploration is therapeutic intervention—both pharmacological and neural stimulation. Vagal nerve stimulation has treated epilepsy and depression for four decades, but as Liberles puts it, it’s like pressing all the keys on the piano to hit one note. Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic act in part through vagal pathways but can cause nausea as a side effect, because the targeting isn’t precise enough. Map the body’s circuits with enough accuracy and you might hit the note you actually want.

Another area of active research is psychological and behavioral—teaching people how to detect and even shape interoceptive signals. Low interoceptive awareness is linked to mental-health disorders and stress-related physical conditions.¹¹ But like emotional intelligence, it’s not fixed. Researchers are finding that people can boost their body awareness by, for example, learning to detect their heartbeats from the inside—now a common measure of interoceptive awareness.¹² Other interventions focus on body-based therapies and conscious activation of the parasympathetic “rest and digest” system to improve emotional and physical well-being. The placebo effect is another example of the mind acting on the body through expectation alone.

The signals we once dismissed as vague feelings—when your gut tightens before you know why, when your body says yes or no before your mind catches up—those are real. How we interpret them and whether we act on them is another frontier.

It’s clear that gut feelings play a role in scientific research, especially when the path forward looks foggy. Patapoutian’s informed intuition kept him and his colleagues going long enough to find PIEZO, a reminder that major discoveries often start with a hunch that is later tested against evidence. Chen puts it well: Maybe we can be grounded in both feeling and fact.

Katherine W. Isaacs is a writer and senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of psychology, technology, and innovation. Originally trained as a biologist and later as a social psychologist, she is currently working on a book called Gut Feel, about intuition, interoception, and embodied decision-making.

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 soccer’s data renaissance

Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally kick the ball out of bounds. You may question the logic of surrendering possession seconds into a game. If you were Jesse Davis, though, you’d know that this play could be a prime setup to score.

Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer.

Using AI and data analytics, his team has uncovered hidden tactical patterns and challenged long-held assumptions about how the game should be played. Many of the insights hitting soccer pitches today trace back to the lab’s work.

Read the full story on how computer scientists are changing the world’s most popular sport.

—Andrew Zaleski

This story is from the next edition of our magazine. Subscribe now to get a copy when it lands! 

Why China is betting on big nuclear reactors

In China, large reactors are coming together at a stunning pace. The country has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016, reaching nearly 60 gigawatts of total power capacity. Construction started on six new reactors in 2025, and two more have begun in 2026.

It’s incredibly difficult to build the massive projects that dominate the nuclear industry today. Up-front investment can run well into the billions, and designs are complex. Yet China is moving ahead rapidly. By 2030, the country is on course to overtake both the US and the EU in installed nuclear capacity.

Find out why bigger might be better when it comes to nuclear power.

—Casey Crownhart

This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things climate. Sign upto receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Autonomous drones may have killed soldiers for the first time
A drone-maker said Russian troops were killed in a test. (New Scientist $)
+ The US has used a sea drone to rescue a helicopter’s crew. (NYT $)
+ Europe has a drone-filled vision for war. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Solar power has finally surpassed coal in US electricity generation
It’s the leading source of new power. (Guardian)
+ Meanwhile, Trump is increasing coal investments. (BBC)
+ The US is in a power struggle over coal. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Russia’s FSB has taken control of the country’s internet
The KGB successor now determines access. (Financial Times $)
+ Rage over the restrictions is boiling over. (NYT $)

4 OpenAI says China is fomenting dissent over AI on ChatGPT
It claims to have foundinfluence operations on the bot. (Reuters $)
+ The propaganda also targeted data centers and tariffs. (Politico $)

5 SpaceX’s listing price is expected to be revealed today
It could lead to the biggest IPO ever. (NPR)
+ And turn 4,400 employees into millionaires. (NYT $)

6 EPA scientists say they’re pushed to downplay risks of household products
They’re under pressure to alter reviews of chemicals in products. (CNN)

7 Anthropic has walked back a policy that “sabotaged” research
It would have limited Claude’s ability to develop competing AI models. (Wired $)

8 Congress wants in on the data center backlash
Members are jumping on the fervor with new policy plans. (Axios)
+ Should we be moving data centers to space? (MIT Technology Review)

9 Your search results are getting sloptimized
Companies are gaming the chatbot internet. (Atlantic $)

10 Scientists have discovered that humans prefer to walk anticlockwise
It’s a discovery that could improve crowd and evacuation management. (Guardian)

Quote of the day

“We’re the extracted and exploited colony of what is going to be one of the most highly valued entities in the world. People are going to die because of this pollution.” 

—Justin Pearson, who represents portions of Memphis in the Tennessee House of Representatives, tells Wired why his constituents are angry about the SpaceX IPO.

One More Thing

Space is all yours—for a hefty price

Space tourism is now officially a thing. But does it represent a future in which the average person could book a celestial flight and bask in the splendor of Earth from above? Or is this just another way for the ultrawealthy to flash their cash while simultaneously ignoring and exacerbating our existential problems down on the ground? 

For now, such flights remain ridiculously far beyond the financial reach of most people. They also pose risks to both the passengers and the planet. But proponents of private spaceflight argue that it provides great opportunities for science and a sense of transcendence.

Dive into the space tourism debate.

—Margaret O’Mara

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ A rare antelope species was rediscovered in a remote Kenyan forest.
+ This ingenious camping trailer pops up into a fully heated off-road bathroom.
+ Iconic internet memes are now safely preserved in the British Film Institute’s moving image archive.
+ NASA’s experimental aircraft has successfully broken the sound barrier in a big win for supersonic flight.

Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different AI agents interact with each other online.

According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risk.

In an effort to address this, Google DeepMind—which made agent-based tools a centerpiece of Google I/O last month—has teamed up with several other organizations to announce a $10 million funding pot for researchers to study the behavior of multi-agent systems and come up with ways to prevent unsafe scenarios. Joining Google DeepMind are Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic foundation set up by Eric and Wendy Schmidt; ARIA, the UK government’s moonshot agency; the Cooperative AI foundation, a UK-based nonprofit research outfit; and Google’s charitable arm, Google.org.

I asked Shah and James Fox, who leads the Science of Trustworthy AI program at Schmidt Sciences, what they hope to achieve with that $10 million. It’s no small sum, but it’s dwarfed by the budgets commanded by Google DeepMind’s own research teams.

The aim is to kick-start research outside tech companies, says Shah: “The strength of academia is that it can look really quite far into the future and do the kind of work that isn’t top of mind at industry labs.”

“The main issue is that there just isn’t really a field of research for multi-agent safety yet,” he adds. “And we would like there to be.”

The concern is that as more and more AI agents get deployed and begin working together, we could hit a tipping point where imagined scenarios become real. “We see this with humanity, too,” says Shah. “Our institutions can accomplish things that no individual human can.”

Shah thinks we have a few more months to go before agents are deployed throughout the economy in numbers that make potential risks a real concern. He wants to get ahead of that moment.

Risky business

What risks are we talking about, exactly? The possibilities that Shah and Fox have in mind mostly boil down to supercharged versions of bad things that happen on the internet already: scams, prompt injections (where an AI agent is fed malicious instructions, turning it into a self-guiding piece of malware), other forms of cyberattack. We look at what humans do now and ask what the agent version of that would be, says Shah.  

“We’ve got this digital commons that is integral to how society works, and you really want to ensure that this doesn’t descend into just absolute anarchy,” says Fox.

(I asked Shah if they were considering any worst-case scenarios more on the doomer end of the spectrum, such as widespread economic collapse. “Certainly not if we’re talking by the end of the year,” he said. That’s only six months away! He laughed. “Okay, a while after that.”)

Shah and Fox both think that the only way to understand what might happen when large numbers of multi-agent systems interact with each other is to run realistic simulations. They want researchers to drop AI agents into sandboxes and study what they do.

You can’t predict what’s going to happen by studying single agents, or even small groups of agents, in isolation. You can’t assume that AI agents underpinned by LLMs will always act rationally, says Fox. And the complexity comes from having huge numbers of interactions at once.

Some researchers, including a team at Google DeepMind, have argued that artificial general intelligence (if possible at all) could come not from a single super-smart model but from a kind of agent hive mind, where the capabilities of the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts.  

Lack of trust

Google DeepMind is not the only top AI firm warning about the risks of the technology it is building. A couple of weeks ago, Anthropic published guidelines for deploying AI agents based on an approach to cybersecurity known as zero trust, which starts with the assumption that a computer system is vulnerable, an agent is an attacker, and a breach will happen.

Refael Angel, cofounder and CTO of Akeyless, a cybersecurity firm based in Tel Aviv, agrees that understanding the new risks introduced by agent-based systems is crucial.  

Every approach to security in the past has assumed that the machine in question was software written by a human, doing fixed things on fixed paths, says Angel: “An agent breaks all of those assumptions. It reasons, it improvises, and it can be hijacked by a single sentence buried in a document it was asked to read.”

Angel welcomes this new funding. “No single lab should author the safety standards everyone else has to trust,” he says. But he cautions that safety researchers can overlook boring problems that are already here in favor of more exotic hypothetical ones.

And yet, Fox notes, risks that were hypothetical a few years ago are now very real: “The future’s come more quickly than perhaps expected.”

In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use. 

For Merck, he’d developed precision therapies for cancer, HIV, and diabetes that could target disease while minimizing harm to healthy cells. But as a lifelong nature lover, he was increasingly concerned about the health of ecosystems and wondered whether his expertise could transfer. Animals, he learned, are often treated with pharmaceuticals formulated for humans, which affect them like old-school cancer drugs: Though intended to kill abnormal cells, they’re indiscriminate in the harm they cause. For instance, the standard of care for frogs infected with a deadly skin infection is itraconazole, an antifungal that is often lethal for the amphibian.

Cernak imagines a world where “the patient was always meant to be a frog in the first place, from the beginning to the end.” Now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, he’s worked on all types of creatures, from a Gila monster with a parasite to bald eagles with avian flu. Here’s what it takes to treat nature’s patients.

Experience with protein-modeling software 

Developing any type of drug is extremely expensive, failure-prone, and slow-going. But AI can speed up the entire drug-­design workflow, says Cernak. Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold model allows him to visualize a mutant protein’s three-­dimensional structure on a screen—rather than growing it on a plate, the traditional methodology—and then quickly generate possible new drugs that would latch onto that structure. The next step is to run a series of reactions and see which potential drugs may be effective; with the help of robots in the lab, he can speed through as many as 1,500 per day. 

Curiosity about creatures of all sizes

Cernak isn’t selective with his patients. For example, he worked on a treatment for loggerhead sea turtles after he was shocked to learn that the iconic species suffered from contagious tumors. He feels especially drawn to creatures that have helped humans, like the Gila monster, whose hormones have informed popular weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. And it’s not just animals; he’s also developing a precision insecticide to treat hemlock trees under attack from invasive species. 

A pioneering spirit

Cernak refers to this new discipline as “conservation chemistry.” It’s a combination of words with a loaded history, from DDT decimating US bald eagle populations in the 1960s, to cow painkillers killing millions of Indian vultures in the ’90s. He recognizes the risks, but Cernak feels that excluding chemists from conservation is a missed opportunity. 

“I’m just sick of looking at the chemical tools that are used in the conservation space, and they’re not cutting-edge,” he says. “It’s like, how do you have this super high-tech engine over here for making human medicines, while we’re living through a mass extinction?” 

Anna Gibbs is a journalist who covers the intersection between science and society.

Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally send the ball all the way down the pitch and right out of bounds on the opponent’s end. Casual fans might scratch their heads. Where’s the logic in surrendering possession seconds into a game? If you were Jesse Davis, though, you’d know that this play could be a prime setup to score. 

Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer since its inception more than a decade ago. Though the research group brings machine-­learning models to bear on a variety of sports—including basketball, volleyball, and field hockey—nowhere is its impact felt more than on the soccer pitch. 

Davis and his team of researchers employ advanced data analytics to reveal a range of (beg your pardon) game-changing findings that are shifting pro clubs’ decision-making. “His lab is the most influential sports analytics lab in soccer,” says Hugo Rios-Neto, data recruitment lead for Royal Sporting Club Anderlecht in Belgium. They’ve helped teams better evaluate their rosters, conceived ways to assess how efficient (or not) strategies are, and developed algorithms that uncover hidden tactical patterns.

Like, for instance, the value of kicking the ball out of bounds close to the goal and letting your opponent throw it back into play—a move that’s been popping up in some of the world’s top leagues over the last few years.

To make the statistical argument for this seemingly counterproductive move, Davis’s group built a training data set composed of more than 1.4 million passes and some 60,000 throw-ins—partly from the 2022 World Cup. They used tree ensemble models (essentially a mashup of decision trees) to simulate the tactic. The conclusion, which the researchers presented in a 2024 paper under the apt title “Boot it”: When the ball is in the middle third of the pitch, kicking it out of bounds on your opponents’ side of the field can put you within 10 actions (think passes and dribbles) of a goal. That can be a big deal in a game that has 1,500 or more actions per match and very little scoring. The idea, Davis explains, is that you’re setting yourself up to recover the ball in an advantageous situation.

Beyond providing discrete game-day insights, Davis also occupies a unique niche in the world of sports analytics, where many clubs now hire their own internal data teams to maintain a competitive edge. He makes most of his research freely available via open-source analytics tools, but the academic life also affords him the freedom to tackle more complex problems—like standardizing in-game data, a project that will make it easier to parse game footage and come up with winning strategies. 

---

Davis, 45, grew up in Wisconsin and spent his childhood enraptured by basketball and (American) football. Soccer was largely a nonentity to him until college, when the 2002 World Cup—in which Brazil famously swept the tournament—reeled him in. But the notion of going on to dissect the sport never crossed his mind. His doctoral studies in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison had him working with radiologists to analyze mammography reports. 

In October 2010, he joined KU Leuven as a computer science professor looking at the intersection of AI and health care, with a focus on monitoring athletic performance. His research team studied, for instance, combining things like heart rate with other metrics to determine whether someone was overtraining. They also dove into the biomechanics of running.

The tactical and technical aspects of sports, and soccer specifically, became the subject of Davis’s professorial work when he hired Jan Van Haaren, an engineering student focused on artificial intelligence and a self-described soccer fanatic. He wondered if data analysis could be used to study things like passing, shooting, and ball progression—metrics the game was only just beginning to digitally crunch at the time. 

Davis realized that machine learning and other artificial-intelligence tools lent themselves well to the complexity, fluidity, and speed of soccer.

You need not be well versed in the moneyball-ization of pro sports to see that it’s relatively easy to apply deep statistical work to baseball or basketball. You can isolate actions like jump shots and assign value to ones taken close or far away. Soon a basketball coach realizes that a player who can’t make a layup, but shoots roughly as well from the three-point line as on mid-range jumpers, might as well go for the shot that gets more points. 

Soccer, by comparison, seemed like a poor candidate for that kind of analysis. “The vast, vast majority of actions really don’t lead to the outcome of a goal or even a shot,” says Rios-Neto. “So it’s hard to elaborate or derive a winning strategy from the data.”

But Van Haaren’s love of the sport, and Davis’s love of sports in general, inspired them to try. Over time, Davis realized that machine learning and other artificial-intelligence tools lent themselves well to the complexity, fluidity, and speed of soccer. In 2014, he officially stood up the Sports Analytics Lab. 

With a stable of about 10 students and postdocs at any one time, the lab began laying what Van Haaren calls the “intellectual foundations of how the game is analyzed today.” The researchers picked apart in-game actions, and suddenly they were valuing ball possession, penalty-kick strategy (aim for the center), and the merits of long shots on goal (take them). “One of the trends that’s been in soccer over the last five to 10 years is that the number of long shots has dramatically increased,” says Davis. “What the data let you do is really quantify what the probabilities of those things are.”

---

In the years since Davis and his team started untangling individual soccer tactics, their ideas have started to permeate clubs across Europe, like Belgium’s Club Brugge KV, as well as national soccer organizations in the US and Belgium. “The work coming out of the lab is genuinely useful,” Rios-Neto says, “and clubs apply it for a range of purposes.” 

Van Haaren, who’s now the director of football intelligence at Club Brugge, is one of many in-house analysts adapting the lab’s work to the pro game. “Our collaboration with the lab is centered on translating [the team’s] football philosophy into measurable, data-driven outputs,” he says. When a club wants to assess, say, how well a center-back is moving the ball down the field, it aims to tally how many times the ball ended up in the part of the pitch closest to the opposing team’s goal. It does this by combining event data, which records actions on the ball, with tracking data, which records player movement. This shows how well players fulfill their roles, which is useful in development and also when scouting for new recruits. 

Davis’s lab, meanwhile, is continuing to ask questions that apply to the game writ large. To determine if there’s an advantage to taking more long shots, for instance, postdoc Maaike Van Royand colleagues modeled the behavior of English Premier League teams using a Markov decision process—a computational framework in which some actions are under a person’s control while others are random. (That duality is particularly useful for soccer, where movement can feel anything but linear.) The results, presented in 2021 at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, showed that Chelsea could gain 1.6 more goals per season by shooting from distance 20% more often.

Despite those kinds of insights from Davis’s lab and similar research groups that have sprung up over the last decade at institutions like MIT and Carnegie Mellon, soccer somewhat lags behind many other pro sports when it comes to collecting the data that analysts need. All teams employ people to watch video and use software to annotate specific in-game tactics—the details of which may make sense only to the most devoted fans. It’s a mostly manual process, one that can take up to six hours per game. “It’s a complete nightmare as a data analyst to work with,” says Davis.

So while the lab plays on, Davis has also joined up with researchers from other institutions in an effort to standardize data across all matches. The group is experimenting with transformers, the neural network architecture that underpins large language models like ChatGPT. If you can bring that to the world of soccer, a human game annotator could tag a tactic—a three-on-two breakaway, say—a few times, and that could train the model on the concept so it could tag subsequent instances on its own. “There’s been a lot of progress,” Davis says. “But it still remains quite hard.”

If we’re keeping score, though, the lab’s work has already made the analytics process easier thanks to open-source tools it’s put out there—some of which clock thousands of downloads a month. One is a framework called VAEP, a model that assesses the effects of all actions on the ball. Another is an xG (expected goals) model, which looks at the quality of a scoring chance. Still another is a package to synchronize event data with tracking data. “Lots of people in industry use our code in their daily workflows,” Davis says.

For him, the practical application of having their code out there is important, but the real (ahem) kick is watching theory become practice. As he says, “I’m really motivated to solve problems that arise in real settings and see my work have an impact.” 

Andrew Zaleski is a contributing writer at Washingtonian magazine. 

It’s a tale of two nuclear industries.

In China, large reactors are coming together at a stunning pace. The country has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016, reaching nearly 60 gigawatts of total power capacity. The new facilities are nearly all gigawatt-scale pressurized-water reactors.

Meanwhile, the US has built just two reactors in that time—Unit 3 and Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Smaller reactors are attracting a lot of excitement and investment, though. A microreactor developer just saw its reactor reach criticality in a new Department of Energy pilot program.

The world is racing to meet rising electricity demand, and many countries are interested in energy sources, like nuclear power, that don’t come with greenhouse-gas emissions. The key question: Which of these strategies will really pay off in terms of getting electrons on the grid quickly?  

Today, the US and France are known as leaders in the nuclear industry. The US has the world’s largest fleet, with France coming in second. France is heavily dependent on nuclear for its grid—about two-thirds of the country’s power comes from nuclear reactors.

But they have hardly added any new reactors to their fleets in recent years. The US can point only to Vogtle, and France connected its latest reactor to the grid in December 2024—the first in over 20 years. 

It’s incredibly difficult to build the massive projects that dominate the nuclear industry today. Up-front investment can run well into the billions, so investors need to wait decades to break even. Designs are complex and can often change during the regulatory process, tacking on cost and time. 

Many are hoping that the key to turning things around in these countries could be smaller reactors.

The idea is that shrinking the footprint of a reactor cuts down the initial investment needed to prove out the new technology. The reactors could even be put together in a factory rather than being built on-site, allowing for a lower price over time.

These smaller reactors are the target of tons of interest and investment in the US, including a new Department of Energy pilot program. The department set a goal last year of having three test reactors reach criticality by July 4, 2026, the nation’s 250th anniversary. (Criticality is the point at which a reactor achieves a self-sustaining chain reaction that can release energy.)

Last week, California-based Antares hit the milestone with its Mark-0 reactor. 

The company plans to eventually build microreactors, designed to produce between 100 kilowatts and 1 megawatt of electricity (large reactors on the grid today are at least 1,000 times that size). The core design is a sodium-cooled reactor, and it uses TRISO fuel, self-contained graphite-coated spheres of a more concentrated fuel than what most reactors use today. 

But there is still a long way to go before it can actually produce power—the Mark-0 doesn’t have any power conversion or heat removal systems. The company plans to produce electricity in late 2027 and deploy in the field by 2028, CEO Jordan Bramble told the Associated Press.

The private sector is interested—and invested—too. Big Tech companies are throwing money at new reactors they hope can help power data centers. 

But look to the other side of the globe, and others are sticking with the established blueprint: China is absolutely churning out large nuclear reactors. Construction started on six new reactors there in 2025, and two more got underway in the first five months of 2026. The country is on course to overtake both the US and the European Union in installed nuclear capacity by 2030.

The speed here is staggering. As of 2024, the average time to build a new reactor in China came in at between five and seven years. The global average is about nine years, and the two most recent reactors in the US took about 15 years.

One key to this speed is standardization: China has set up a uniform project management system to design, license, and build new reactors. They’re built in batches of six or more to take advantage of economies of scale.

It’s one of the ideas meant to give the edge to smaller reactors, but China is working to realize the same benefits for larger projects. A huge amount of government investment is certainly helping.

Larger reactors generally provide more electricity to the grid for a lower price, a key consideration in view of China’s steeply increasing electricity demand. While smaller reactors require less up-front investment than larger ones because of their size, they’ll actually be more expensive per unit of electricity produced. 

That’s not to say China is exclusively focused on big reactors: the country is also expected to see its first operational small modular reactor, the Linglong-1, start sending power to the grid this year.

But looking ahead, it’ll be interesting to see if smaller reactors can help the West keep building new nuclear power. At the moment, with China’s quick progress, it’s looking as if bigger might just be better. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

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 “steroid olympics” were a circus—and a window into our culture

—Amit Katwala

A couple of weeks ago, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, I witnessed a libertarian thought experiment come to life. The inaugural Enhanced Games were the first sporting competition where participants were encouraged to take performance-enhancing drugs.

For supporters of the event, the Enhanced Games offered a glimpse of a future in which medical advances push the human race to new heights—and they never have to get old. As I watched the games unfold, two questions bounced around my head: were they right? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

Read the full story to understand the answers.

MIT Technology Review Narrated: a reality check on the AI jobs hysteria

Despite the growing hysteria over AI’s threat to white-collar jobs, there’s still scant evidence that the technology has had a large-scale impact on the labor market.

Analysis of US labor data shows that unemployment in occupations most exposed to AI is actually lower than in less-exposed jobs. There are also no signs that large numbers of workers are shifting from AI-threatened professions into supposedly safer manual-labor jobs.

It’s true that things aren’t great in the job market. But the reason isn’t simply the rise of AI.

—David Rotman

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Anthropic has released a “safe” version of Mythos
It promises it has enough guardrails and user limitations to be safe. (BBC)
+ It has a price tag twice as high as the previous flagship system. (NYT $)
+ Anthropic previously claimed Mythos was too dangerous to release. (CNBC)
+ But critics suspect that was a marketing play. (Guardian)
+ Selective access has become a key strategy for AI labs. (Axios)

2 Seattle has banned new data centers for a year
It’s the largest US city to have passed such a moratorium.(Guardian)
+ Its biggest tech firm, Amazon, has tried to stop the ban. (The Verge)
+ The movement to stop data centers is growing. (NYT $)

3 Democratic senators are pushing for a military AI restriction law
They want a human commander to have the final say. (Gizmodo)
+ But humans in the loop in an AI war is an illusion. (MIT Technology Review)

4 SpaceX plans to launch space data center tests by late 2027
Orbital compute is central to the company’s growth pitch. (Reuters $)
+ It’s also shared new designs for its space data centers. (BI)
+ We’d need these four things to put them in orbit. (MIT Technology Review)

5 China has been accused of escalating AI espionage
A report claims Beijing is hacking tech firms to catch up with the US. (CNBC)
+ There are no winners in a US-China AI arms race. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The Trump family has made about $2.3 billion from crypto
While investors lost about the same amount. (Gizmodo)
+ The Trumps risked next-to-nothing on their crypto ventures. (Reuters $)

7 Apple isn’t launching Siri AI in the European Union
It’s blaming EU interoperability requirements. (The Verge)
+Brussels says Apple didn’t try to find a compliance solution. (Reuters $) 

8 China’s new drone rules have spooked its thriving industry 
Drone firms face new commercial barriers. (Financial Times $)
+ China’s drone sector leads the world. (NYT $)

9 A judge has cancelled a trial after finding both legal teams used AI
The case descended into GenAI tools arguing against each other. (404 Media)
+ Courts have been flooded with AI-generated lawsuits. (MIT Technology Review)

10 The dinosaur-killing asteroid created a thriving new ecosystem
Microscopic life flourished in the extended heat. (New Scientist $)

Quote of the day

“AI technologies today are designed by and for WEIRD societies—Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.” 

—Aditya Vashistha, an assistant professor at Cornell University, tells Rest of World why AI systems don’t serve global needs.

One More Thing

Why the definition of design might need a change

The word “design” once carried a far wider set of meanings than it does today. They ranged from the literal and material (like tracing) through the tactical (to contrive and achieve a goal) to the organizational and institutional—the “designation” of people and objects.

Over centuries, as designing became increasingly separated from making, that broader understanding faded. But now there is a growing case for reclaiming the word’s original sense: not just the search for a more beautiful shape, but the shaping of a more beautiful and sustainable world. 

Find out why we should retool the word “design.”

—Nicholas de Monchaux

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ This history of humanity’s search for alien life is fascinating.
+ Watch a damaged painting slowly return to life in this art restoration video.
+ Admire young stars across every stage of cosmic formation in this stunning space picture of the month.
+ Daredevil divers have captured the first-ever underwater footage of an adult great white in the Mediterranean Sea.