The Download: MIT Technology Review's Engineering Issue

The Download: MIT Technology Review's Engineering Issue">

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. We can’t fix everything, but we can be ambitious. We can take on the challenge of making the world better through human ingenuity.

That’s what the new Engineering issue of MIT Technology Review is all about. Sometimes the challenges we face are giant, like tunneling beneath the seafloor. Some exist at the nanoscale, as with a new ASML machine powering the future of chipmaking.

Others represent problems at a planetary scale and in truly unknown territory, like replicating a volcano’s mechanism to cool the Earth on purpose. These incredible engineering stories show we can come together to get to work and, when the smoke clears, find we’ve made real progress. Subscribe now to read all of them—and more—in the full print issue.

The common cold comes for us all—often more than once a year. And there is no way to prevent it. The best you can do is take vitamin C and stay away from people with the sniffles.

Now, the payment company Stripe is funding a new $500-million nonprofit aiming to prevent both the common cold and the flu. Its eventual goal is to get rid of respiratory viruses altogether. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Bill Gates have also backed the venture, which will investigate whether modern technologies can counter the common cold and the flu.

As asteroid 2024 YR4 hurtled toward Earth, astronomers determined that this massive rock posed a higher risk of impact than any object of its size in recorded history. Then, just as quickly as history was made, experts declared that the danger had passed. This is the inside story of the network of global scientists who found, followed, planned for, and finally dismissed the most dangerous asteroid ever discovered —all under the tightest of timelines and with the highest of stakes.

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 China has taken the US’s crown for the world’s fastest supercomputer Shenzhen’s LineShine overtook California’s El Capitan.

China had not had a machine at the top of the list since 2017. But the supercomputer race isn’t geared for AI work. 2 Mythos reportedly found flaws in classified US government systems A US official said Anthropic’s model identified certain vulnerabilities.