A rare warm spell in January melted enough snow to uncover Cornell University’s newest athletic field, built for field hockey. Months before, it was a meadow teeming with birds and bugs; now it’s more than an acre of synthetic turf roughly the color of the felt on a pool table, almost digital in its saturation.…
When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn’t help but obsess over the numbers. I’d known on some level that desalination—pulling salt out of seawater to produce fresh water—was an increasingly important technology, especially in water-stressed regions including the Middle East. But just how much some countries rely on desalination,…
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. As the conflict in Iran has escalated, a crucial resource is under fire: the desalination technology that supplies water across much of the region. In early…
As the war in Iran continues to engulf the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, one of the most visible global economic ripple effects has been fossil-fuel prices. In particular, you can’t get away from news about the price of gasoline, which just topped an average of $4 a gallon in the…
I live in a dense city with plentiful public transportation options and limited parking, so I don’t own a car. I’m often utterly clueless about the current price of gasoline. But as the conflict in Iran has escalated, fossil-fuel prices have been on a roller-coaster, and I’ve started paying attention. In the US, average gas…
The best snow-forecasting app for skiers and snowboarders isn’t from any of the federally funded weather services. Nor from any of the big-name brands. It’s an independent app startup that leverages government data, its own AI models, and decades of alpine-life experience to offer better snow (and soon avalanche) predictions than anything else out there.…
Qichao Hu doesn’t mince words about how he sees the state of the battery industry. “Almost every Western battery company has either died or is going to die. It’s kind of the reality,” he says. Hu is the CEO of SES AI, a Massachusetts-based battery company. It once had aims of making huge amounts of…
The prospect of making trash useful is always fascinating to me. Whether it’s used batteries, solar panels, or spent nuclear fuel, getting use out of something destined for disposal sounds like a win all around. In nuclear energy, figuring out what to do with waste has always been a challenge, since the material needs to…
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. The way the world currently deals with nuclear waste is as creative as it is varied: Drown it in water pools, encase it in steel, bury…
Just a few years ago, the battery industry was hot, hot, hot. There was a seemingly infinite number of companies popping up, with shiny new chemistries and massive fundraising rounds. My biggest problem was sifting through the pile to pick the most exciting news to cover. That tide has turned, and in 2026, what seems…