A new study argues that conditions necessary for intelligent extraterrestrial life may be far less common than once thought. Planets lacking plate tectonics and sufficient carbon dioxide and oxygen could make advanced civilizations like ours extremely rare, Manuel Scherf and Helmut…
The die is cast: A close-up view of Apple's A19 SoC
The A19 is a considerable refinement over the A18 in terms of chip construction, a microscopic view of the iPhone 17 SoC has demonstrated. A19 Pro – Image Credit: Apple The iPhone 17 generation brought with it the new A19 and…
“It could be catastrophic to the city” – US Secret Service takes down massive million-dollar network of SIM cards it says was capable of taking down comms across New York
A massive communications network was uncovered in New York The network is made of 300 servers containing 100,000 SIM cards Only part of the network was deployed, with more equipment discovered ready to be added to the network The US Secret…
Roundtables: Meet the 2025 Innovator of the Year
Every year, MIT Technology Review selects one individual whose work we admire to recognize as Innovator of the Year. For 2025, we chose Sneha Goenka, who designed the computations behind the world’s fastest whole-genome sequencing method. Thanks to her work, physicians can…
Google AI Mode now speaks Spanish
Google’s AI Mode is continuing its rapid global growth. Today, the company announced that this addition to Google Search is rolling out in Spanish. The new option is available in all countries that support AI Mode. The move will allow Spanish…
Russian ‘Noah’s Ark’ probe carrying 75 mice and 1,500 flies lands back on Earth
They came from outer space: 75 mice, over 1,500 flies, cell cultures, microorganisms, plant seeds and more. A Russian biological research satellite toting more than 30 experiments landed on Sept. 19 in the steppes of the Orenburg region after spending 30…
EU tells Apple to crack down on online fraud
The European Union is preparing to look into whether Apple and other major tech companies are doing enough to prevent online financial fraud. Image Credit: European Union Online fraud is a major problem for consumers, and one that the EU thinks…
What might the “AI-fueled finance department of tomorrow” look like?
While there’s much agreement that AI is good at automating routine tasks and freeing up people for more valuable work, some departments are clearly a more obvious fit than others. Finance may appear as something of an outlier; a more skeptical…
AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers
“If [a tool is] facing the general public, then using retraction as a kind of quality indicator is very important,” says Yuanxi Fu, an information science researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There’s “kind of an agreement that retracted papers…
Facebook adds an AI assistant to its dating app
Facebook Dating has added two new AI tools, because clearly a large language model is what the search for love and companionship has been missing all this time. The social media platform introduced a chatbot called dating assistant that can help…









