Committee

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. Introducing: the Impossible issue We wanted our last print edition of 2026 to include a slate of stories that check in on impossible ideas. Why? Because it’s fun to dream about living on other planets or uploading our brains. But also because scientists and engineers who won’t give up on daring endeavors remind us what technology is supposed to do: make life better, safer, healthier, even more joyful. That’s the ambition behind the stories in our new Impossible issue. We explore bold attempts to make synthetic blood, build cities on the moon, and attain cognitive immortality. We investigate AI’s ability to say no, a bionic eye that can restore sight, and high hopes for blended meat. Plus, we check in on six technologies that have been “coming soon” for years. This issue is for the folks with the audacity to try, and refuse to let anyone—themselves included— tell them no. We hope you enjoy the ride. Subscribe now to read the full print issue. Astrolab’s upcoming rover will run the first LLMs on the moon Large language models are set to go lunar. A computer capable of running AI software is one of the payloads aboard Astrolab’s FLIP lunar rover, which is slated to head to the moon as early as next month. The mission will test whether LLMs can enable greater autonomy and real-time intelligent decision-making in the extreme lunar environment. But the moon will present formidable challenges, from extreme temperatures to intense cosmic radiation. Find out how the lunar rover could change the future of space exploration. —Tereza Pultarova How to study a swiftly melting climate disaster In Alaska’s Denali National Park, a 2013 lightning fire burned nearly 35,000 acres, stripping away the insulating layer that preserves permafrost. It’s given scientists a rare opportunity to study how fires reshape permafrost and carbon storage over time. The work is providing critical clues into the complex mechanisms driving cascading climate feedback effects. As warming temperatures fuel fires, more permafrost thaws, releasing greenhouse-gas emissions that threaten to fuel more warming, fires and permafrost loss. Their observations are revealing worrisome signs about what lies ahead. Discover what their fieldwork is revealing about a cascading climate disaster. —James Temple MIT Technology Review Narrated: 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 AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the industry on its head. Cammarata claims that LLMs might be far easier to understand, and thus to monitor and control, than people previously thought. If true, it’s a huge deal. But not everyone is convinced. MIT Technology Review spoke to Cammarata the day after his post blew up. He explained what he thinks researchers are getting wrong, what his work actually shows, and why skeptics aren’t ready to celebrate just yet. This is our latest story to become 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 Elon Musk reportedly ordered the recent Starlink slowdown in UkraineThe restrictions hampered drone strikes and air defences. (WSJ $)+ The move sparked confusion in Washington over who authorised it. (CNBC)+ Ukraine’s volunteer army is keeping Starlink alive. (MIT Technology Review) 2 An OpenAI model disabled its own safety checks—then lied about itTwo agents weakened the company’s safeguards during routine tasks. (CNBC)+ They turned off systems designed to spot their misbehaviour. (FT $)+ Here’s why AI agents lie to reach their goals. (MIT Technology Review) 3 SpaceX and Tesla have begun merger discussionsThey’ve formed special committees to discuss a deal. (BBC)+ Elon Musk, the CEO of both companies, said it’s “a good idea.” (Axios)+ A merger could combine their AI and manufacturing plans. (Reuters $) 4 Global emissions have stalled, but warming is heading towards 2.8°CThe UN says the 1.5°C climate target is now out of reach. (Nature)+ Current pledges would still bring warming to 2.1°C. (New Scientist $)+ Climate tech companies offer rays of hope. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Ukraine says it’s carried out the world’s first drone evacuationA heavy hexacopter flew a soldier to safety. (Ars Technica)+ Ukraine has shared a video showing the evacuation. (CNBC)+ A Russian satellite recently stalked a spacecraft believed to support Ukraine. (NYT $) 6 Meta has paused Muse sharing after private chats surfaced onlineResearchers found 6,800 links exposing sensitive conversations. (Verge)+ AI agents are not your “coworkers.” (MIT Technology Review) 7 More than 1,000 mathematicians have pledged to shun AI companiesSome also vowed to avoid AI tools in their research. (New Scientist $) 8 AI is making it easy to clone almost any softwareViral tools promise easy copying, but often produce slop. (404 Media) 9 A computer program has finally outdone humans at cryptic crosswordsIts creator hopes to tackle the harder challenge of setting puzzles. (Guardian) 10 A newly-discovered particle could explain the origins of realityIn particular, it could reveal why matter survived the Big Bang. (404 Media) Quote of the day “I did not remove an enabled monitor from it.”  —GPT-6 Astra, an OpenAI coding agent, tells its user it hasn’t disabled a safeguard after doing exactly that, the company reveals in a new misalignment report. One more thing This giant microwave may change the future of war US armed forces are hunting for a weapon that disables drones en masse—and they want it fast.  One solution focuses on microwaves: high-powered electronic devices that push out kilowatts of power to zap the circuits of a drone as if it were the tinfoil you forgot to take off your leftovers when you

When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed at Old South Meeting House, he had no reason to doubt its story. Descendants of the Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label in 1987, saying it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773.  But after a year of research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later. The decisive clue came when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as previous scholars had done. He found that the characters had been used phonetically, in slightly variant forms across contemporary sources, to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that acquired Asian tea for shipment to American markets during the 1860s and 1870s. COURTESY OF MIT GLOBAL HUMANITIES Working with the Wells family, he traced the label to a relative who traveled from Michigan to California during the Gold Rush era before returning and operating a business known as the California Tea Store. Brown argues that claims for its revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s. The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant, he says. Instead, what began as an inquiry into a supposed artifact of the Boston Tea Party became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made. “History is never finished,” he says. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.” 

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 crowns. By the time fire agencies responded, flames had reached 12 feet in length and sent up a 500-foot column of smoke.  A few days shy of the five-year anniversary of the Yankovich Road Fire, I followed three members of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium into the boreal forest, walking along cross-country ski trails lined by feathery field horsetail. In 2024, the organization, which hosts presentations to keep wildfire managers abreast of new developments in fire science, helped turn the area into an educational walking trail, with interpretive signs posted along the route. About a half-mile in, the horizon opened up as we reached a sparse stand of naked, blackened tree trunks, stripped of needles and neighbors.  Hilary Shook, the coordinator of the consortium, stepped off the trail with her thaw probe, a T-shaped pointed metal rod used to detect the upper boundary of the permafrost, the ancient layer of frozen soil that underlies 15% of the land around the Northern Hemisphere and stores roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. A test of the ground just outside the burn scar hit the concrete-like layer about a foot below the surface. But as Shook applied pressure here, where the fire had burned away the moss and organic-rich topsoil that insulates the permafrost, the probe plunged at least three times deeper into the ground. “That was an immediate effect of the fire,” said Alison York, the outgoing coordinator of the organization, who was standing nearby. “When we monitored right after, it had already thawed quite a bit.” Researchers Eric Miller (left) and Alison York (right) record thaw depth at the site of the Yankovich Road Fire.LEIF VAN CISE This rudimentary tool, offering a measure of depth from a single point in the earth, reveals an escalating problem across the far north. As climate change fuels increasingly frequent and severe fires in the planet’s northern latitudes, they’re accelerating the thawing of more and more permafrost. This allows the organic matter to break down and release powerful greenhouse gases that contribute to a spiraling climate feedback effect, propelling more warming, more fires, and the loss of still more permafrost.  Most dramatically, intensifying wildfires in Canada released more carbon than the nation’s combined fossil fuel emissions in 2023. As in Alaska, many of these megafires occur in vast remote areas where the policy is to let them burn so long as they don’t threaten human habitats. Yet if intensifying fires and warming are left unchecked, the world’s boreal forests and permafrost could increasingly transition from giant carbon sinks into massive sources of atmospheric carbon.  Now, international teams of researchers across the US, Canada, and elsewhere are scrambling to understand what’s at stake, financially as well as ecologically. They’re looking at preventive measures, like controlled burns, and studying the potential to rapidly detect and extinguish wildfires before they grow out of control. They’re even exploring what was once unthinkable: sending in human firefighters not to save lives or structures, but to protect one of our planet’s great stores of carbon. “We need to figure out a better way to live with wildfire,” says Brendan Rogers, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, one of the main organizations driving the loosely collaborative research effort. “I do think that it can make a meaningful difference.” Woodwell scientist Brendan Rogers (above) has been studying the impact of Arctic-boreal fires on permafrost, as well as what could be done about it.PHILIP KEITH (PHOTOS), WOODWELL CLIMATE RESEARCH (MAPS) Woodwell, the University of Victoria’s Polis Institute for Ecological Governance, and the nonprofit Alaska Venture Fund are now partnering on a multimillion-dollar initiative known as North Fire to study and raise public awareness about the potential benefits of these interventions, MIT Technology Review can report.  The idea is complicated and controversial for a number of reasons. Wildfire is a natural and necessary component of healthy forest ecosystems. Preventing or suppressing fires across huge stretches of largely unmanaged Arctic-boreal forests and tundra would take vast resources. And it’s not yet clear how much of a difference such interventions would make in emissions. Ultimately, the mere fact that researchers are considering such extreme interventions into natural systems is a grim reflection of the dangers we’ve placed ourselves in by continuing to generate more and more greenhouse-gas emissions each year. Those threats are forcing us to grapple with increasingly difficult questions that involve ever steeper trade-offs: What’s the best way to spend our finite resources and dwindling time to avoid the worst dangers of climate change? And when, if ever, is it okay to put people in possible danger to reduce broader risks to the world? ‘A massive blind spot’ Emissions from forest fires have risen 60% around the world since 2001—but they’ve nearly tripled across the boreal forests in the far north.   This stretch of the globe is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the planet, drying out the landscape. In addition, lightning strikes that set off fires have ticked up sharply as warmer air increases the convective energy in the atmosphere, driving the updrafts that trigger thunderstorms. In that sense, humans have already interceded in these otherwise natural ecosystems by producing the greenhouse-gas emissions that are increasing temperatures, subjecting forests to fire patterns well outside healthy historic norms. “To me, that outweighs the existential dread of ‘Should we or should we not intervene?” says Kate Hayes, an assistant professor at Western Washington University, who is working with Woodwell to study the emissions benefits of fire interventions. “We’ve already intervened, arguably. And so from here, it’s a little bit of a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.” The permafrost that encircles

In this article, you will learn what Python descriptors are and how to use them to build three types of controlled attributes: validated, computed, and…

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, stripping away the moss and organic-rich soil insulating the permafrost below.  Five years later, I followed researchers into the forest to investigate how fighting fires could help keep that carbon locked in the ground. A simple metal probe revealed how much deeper the ground had thawed. This rudimentary tool offered a glimpse of an escalating problem: As climate change fuels more frequent and severe fires, they’re accelerating permafrost thaw and releasing greenhouse gases. Now, researchers are exploring how to break that cycle. But how much should we spend, and what risks are worth taking? Read the full story on how scientists are rethinking the fight against wildfires. 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 experimentreminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone.  The agents started behaving in surprising ways. They set about exploring the limits of the world, and came up with their own goals—attempting to scale the highest point on the map, or seeing how high they could throw a block.  A lot of what they were doing met the bar for play. But is it truly playful behavior, or simply role-playing?  Read our full story to learn more.  —Amit Katwala 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: X-energy and its helium-cooled nuclear reactors X-energy is one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch 2026, available exclusively to subscribers. Making concrete, steel, and chemicals takes huge amounts of heat, much of it generated by burning fossil fuels. X-energy hopes to offer an alternative with a nuclear reactor that uses helium gas instead of water as a coolant, allowing it to operate at higher temperatures. The proposed Xe-100 reactor could supply superheated steam directly to industrial facilities, generate 80 megawatts of electricity—or do both. See how X-energy hopes to bring high-temperature nuclear power to heavy industry. —Mark Ellis Harris Subscribers can now access the full 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, spanning everything from cleaner cement to streamlined geothermal power.  Catch up on our conversation with a creator of AI-designed viruses Can AI design new life forms? In 2025, Stanford University PhD student Samuel King came up with a preliminary answer when he used a generative AI model to propose genetic blueprints for microscopic viruses. It isn’t yet an example of AI-generated life, but that could be next.  He spoke about his work with our senior AI reporter James O’Donnell on Friday. If you missed it, you can watch their chat now, and subscribe to get invites to our Roundtables events in future.  The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Tech stocks shed over $1 trillion on Friday It’s unclear if AI companies can turn sustainable profits, and investors are getting jittery. (NBC)+ Musk and Anthropic are pledging big financial giveaways. (BBC)+ Microsoft just pulled out of a giant AI cloud deal in the UK. (Gizmodo) + What’s at stake in AI’s trillion-dollar gamble. (MIT Technology Review) 2 Do we really want AI agents smoothing out all friction in our lives?They promise convenience, but right now they’re mostly introducing chaos. (The Atlantic $)+ Here’s what it’s like to outsource your life to them. (Vox $)+ Websites are starting to close their doors to AI agents. (The Verge $)+ AI agents bring new headaches for online sellers. (WSJ $) 3 How drones have transformed the front line in UkraineThey’ve effectively created a “kill zone”, and it’s growing wider and deadlier. (NYT $)+ Trump has denied ordering Starlink restrictions in Ukraine. (CNBC) 4 China is considering restricting overseas access to its AI models It’s also looking at curbing the sharing of chip designs, among other measures. (Bloomberg $)+ Why western open weight models still can’t compete with Chinese ones. (Rest of World)+ Why Trumpworld still can’t agree on how to respond to Chinese AI. (MIT Technology Review) 5 HTC’s smart glasses are way more private than Meta’sGuess that’s a benefit of not being shackled to a massive social media platform. (Wired $)+ A bug caused Meta’s glasses to record conversations without the wearer knowing. (Ars Technica)+ Smart glasses are already causing havoc in India. (MIT Technology Review) 6 Inside one man’s quest to build California’s biggest AI data centerSebastian Rucci didn’t bank on meeting huge resistance from local residents. (The Guardian)+ Americans are packing town halls to stop data centers, and it’s working. (Quartz $)+ No wonder companies are exploring putting them in space. (MIT Technology Review) 7 Somebody vibe-coded a gun for the first timeAnd it seems like it works (sometimes.) (The Verge $) 8 AI might reshape how we grieveIt’s never been easier to create realistic AI chatbots of people who’ve passed. (Vox $)+ Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming business in China. (MIT Technology Review)  9 Japan is about to launch a mission to Mars’ largest moonIf all goes well, it should help us to understand how it formed. (New Scientist $) 10 Amateurs are cracking long-secret codes and ciphers One of the more fun uses for large language models! (Nature) Quote of the day “Google wouldn’t have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass.” —President Trump brags about how much Big Tech bends the knee to him during a rally in Kentucky this weekend, the Verge reports. One More Thing SIMON MITCHELL There are more AI health tools than ever—but how well do they work? In the last few months alone, Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI have all launched medical chatbots.  There’s a clear demand for these tools, given how hard it is for many people to access advice through the existing medical system—and they could make safe, useful recommendations. But concerns have surfaced about how little external evaluation they undergo before being