Veille du jour
154 articles — mis à jour automatiquement chaque jour.
20 October 2026
A good TA: priceless
These are images of quizzes I took in 3.091, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry, in the fall of 1980. One is my very first exam at MIT, and getting 49 out of 100 was a soul-crushing experience. I can still picture the TA, Leszek Pawlowicz, PhD ’87, returning my paper. He had a big smile on…
Nebraska native explores galaxies far, far away
Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue ’85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library. Today, she is learning how the wider universe works by studying galaxy clusters. Donahue discovered her passion for physics in that library at age 12 and started her path into astronomy thanks…
A champion for brain injury patients
Alissa Totman ’13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and socializing. “That group was a great way to learn about the human experience of what people go through when they experience a brain injury,” she says. And it laid…
A cleaner path to rare earth metals
Tomás Villalón Jr. ’14 was raised in San Antonio, Texas, but vividly remembers smog hanging over the city his family came from—Monterrey, Mexico, a steel manufacturing and metal fabrication hub. Even as a child, he realized it was problematic to breathe that air. “I’m motivated because I’ve seen what metal-making does,” says Villalón, who majored…
19 October 2026
Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people. Websites have long allowed bots to perform automated tasks, like capturing the content of web pages, but rules…
“We were looking at it wrong”: The explosive claim that’s upended the AI world
“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well as cautious (and not-so-cautious) celebration. Cammarata’s claim is…
The Download: preserving the Arctic permafrost, and playful AI agents
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbon —James Temple In July 2021, a wildfire burned through a forest on the University of Alaska, Fairbanks campus,…
Inside the quest to combat Arctic fires and save the planet’s frozen carbon
In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The blaze, possibly sparked by lightning, burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the…
AI researchers stranded Claude on a virtual desert island. It started to “play.”
What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play. Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone. The agents—copies of Claude Opus 4.7 nicknamed Eko—were able to…
How far can we push computing?
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s…