Will Douglas Heaven • August 10, 2026 MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called “Attention Is All You
Eric Schmidt, Suhas Mahesh • August 10, 2026 Every few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the “facts of physical science have all been discovered.” In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century.
Jacek Krywko • August 9, 2026 Mount Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2.6 million years, and some have suggested it nearly wiped out humanity. Around 74,000 years ago, a caldera on what is now Sumatra emptied thousands of cubic kilometers of magma in about two weeks, roughly a thousand times more
Saima Sidik • August 10, 2026 Jason Semprini was excited about his research on policies mandating that elementary school students receive the human papillomavirus vaccine. HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer, but counterintuitively, Semprini found that mandates don’t do that much to reduce the overall rate of cervical cancer in a population. That’s odd,
TC. Sottek • August 9, 2026 In 2018 I bet my reputation and self-worth on a huge crowdfunded game design project. It could have been a failure for many reasons, but the one I became most worried about was losing all of the work that was stored locally on my home-built PC – a scenario
Terrence O’Brien • August 9, 2026 Head Coach Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco 49ers. | Image: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time, Shanahan said only that the accident was his
Terrence O’Brien • August 9, 2026 Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht “The Launchpad.” | Image: Sylvain Lefevre / Getty Images Earlier this week, the Alaskan cruise ship Wilderness Legacy rescued a small skiff stranded near Farragut Bay after running out of fuel. But, according to tracking data reviewed by the Alaska Beacon and Halifax Shipping News, the