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The Download: feeding the world with poop, and 2024’s performing stories

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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.

How poop could help feed the planet

A new industrial facility in suburban Seattle is giving off a whiff of futuristic technology. It can safely treat fecal waste from people and livestock while recycling nutrients that are crucial for agriculture but in increasingly short supply across the nation’s farmlands. 

Making fertilizer from the nutrients that we and other animals excrete has a long and colorful history; for generations it helped Indigenous cultures around the world create exceptionally fertile soil.

These systems fell out of favor in Western culture. But, if researchers and engineers across several companies get their way, that could be about to change. Read the full story.

—Bryn Nelson

This story is from the forthcoming magazine edition of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on January 6—it’s all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world right now. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies.

If you’re interested in poop’s wider scientific potential, check out the latest entry in our Jobs of the Future series: stool bank manager. Pediatric gastroenterologist Nikhil Pai is helping to treat children with a common bacterial infection of the large intestine by transplanting healthy stool into a patient’s gut—a highly effective, albeit unconventional, treatment. Read the full story.

Here are MIT Technology Review’s best-performing stories of 2024

MIT Technology Review published hundreds of stories in 2024, covering everything from AI, climate tech, and biotech, to robotics, space, and more. 

As the new year begins, take a look at a small selection of the stories that resonated most with you, our readers. Read the full story.

—Abby Ivory-Ganja

Unveiling the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025

Each year, MIT Technology Review selects the top ten breakthrough technologies that will have the greatest impact on how we live and work in the future. In the past, we’ve selected breakthrough technologies such as weight-loss drugs, a malaria vaccine, and GPT-3 (the precursor to ChatGPT).

Amy Nordrum, our executive editor, will join our news editor Charlotte Jee to unveil the new list live during an exclusive Roundtable discussion for subscribers at 12.30pm ET today. Register here to be among the first to know.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 A US appeals court has struck down net neutrality rules 
It’s the end of a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband providers. (NYT $)
+ Net neutrality has been in danger for a while, truthfully. (The Verge)
+ It’s bad news for the Biden administration as it prepares to hand over to Trump. (WP $)

2 Car rental app Turo is under scrutiny
But concerns over the app’s safety practices are nothing new. (WSJ $)
+ The app was used to book vehicles used in both the New Orleans attack and Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion. (NYT $)
+ Turo staff have been pulled off vacation to respond to the aftermath. (Bloomberg $)

3 Nick Clegg is leaving Meta
The former British deputy prime minister is making way for prominent Republican Joel Kaplan. (Semafor)
+ It’s part of the company’s desire to align itself with the incoming Trump administration. (WSJ $)
+ How tech is turning MAGA. (Economist $)

4 Yandex has been ordered to hide maps of a Russian oil refinery
In response to repeated attacks from Ukrainian drones. (Reuters)
+ The Ryazan refinery was hit four times last year alone. (Bloomberg $)
+ The uneasy coexistence of Yandex and the Kremlin. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Apple has agreed to settle a $95 million class-action lawsuit
Over claims the company violated user privacy by sharing Siri recordings. (WP $)

6 Several Californian AI laws have gone into effect
A new year means new regulations. (The Information $)
+ There are more than 120 AI bills in Congress right now. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Our understanding of genetic diseases is changing
Cell mutations suggest we’re far more genetically varied than we previously realized. (The Atlantic $)
+ ​​DeepMind is using AI to pinpoint the causes of genetic disease. (MIT Technology Review)

8 African content creators are struggling to make money
But it appears as though the tide may be slowly turning. (The Guardian)
+ What Africa needs to do to become a major AI player. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Get the new year off to a starry start ☄
There’s a meteor shower due tonight! (Wired $)

10 How to build a more sustainable refrigerator
A new kind of heat-absorbing crystal could hold the key. (New Scientist $)
+ The future of urban housing is energy-efficient refrigerators. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“He is quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time!”

—Nick Clegg, Meta’s outgoing chief policy executive, wishes his replacement Joel Kaplan the best in a post on X.

The big story

Is it possible to really understand someone else’s mind?

November 2023

Technically speaking, neuroscientists have been able to read your mind for decades. It’s not easy, mind you. First, you must lie motionless within a fMRI scanner, perhaps for hours, while you watch films or listen to audiobooks.

If you do elect to endure claustrophobic hours in the scanner, the software will learn to generate a bespoke reconstruction of what you were seeing or listening to, just by analyzing how blood moves through your brain.

More recently, researchers have deployed generative AI tools, like Stable Diffusion and GPT, to create far more realistic, if not entirely accurate, reconstructions of films and podcasts based on neural activity. So how close are we to genuine “mind reading?” Read the full story.

—Grace Huckins

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)

+ Of course The Cure’s Robert Smith is an iPod fanatic.
+ Japan may be associated with tasteful minimalism, but there’s always room for a bit of clutter.
+ Meet the people who release 3,000 pounds of confetti into New York’s Times Square by hand every New Year’s Eve—then clear it all up.
+ How to start a healthy habit, and, crucially, stick to it. ($)

Read more

Small language models: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

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WHO

Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI

WHEN

Now

Make no mistake: Size matters in the AI world. When OpenAI launched GPT-3 back in 2020, it was the largest language model ever built. The firm showed that supersizing this type of model was enough to send performance through the roof. That kicked off a technology boom that has been sustained by bigger models ever since. As Noam Brown, a research scientist at OpenAI, told an audience at TEDAI San Francisco in October, “The incredible progress in AI over the past five years can be summarized in one word: scale.”

But as the marginal gains for new high-end models trail off, researchers are figuring out how to do more with less. For certain tasks, smaller models that are trained on more focused data sets can now perform just as well as larger ones—if not better. That’s a boon for businesses eager to deploy AI in a handful of specific ways. You don’t need the entire internet in your model if you’re making the same kind of request again and again. 

Most big tech firms now boast fun-size versions of their flagship models for this purpose: OpenAI offers both GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini; Google DeepMind has Gemini Ultra and Gemini Nano; and Anthropic’s Claude 3 comes in three flavors: outsize Opus, midsize Sonnet, and tiny Haiku. Microsoft is pioneering a range of small language models called Phi.

A growing number of smaller companies offer small models as well. The AI startup Writer claims that its latest language model matches the performance of the largest top-tier models on many key metrics despite in some cases having just a 20th as many parameters (the values that get calculated during training and determine how a model behaves). 

Explore the full 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

Smaller models are more efficient, making them quicker to train and run. That’s good news for anyone wanting a more affordable on-ramp. And it could be good for the climate, too: Because smaller models work with a fraction of the computer oomph required by their giant cousins, they burn less energy. 

These small models also travel well: They can run right in our pockets, without needing to send requests to the cloud. Small is the next big thing.

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Vera C. Rubin Observatory: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

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WHO

US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, US National Science Foundation

WHEN

6 months

The next time you glance up at the night sky, consider: The particles inside everything you can see make up only about 5% of what’s out there in the universe. Dark energy and dark matter constitute the rest, astronomers believe—but what exactly is this mysterious stuff? 

A massive new telescope erected in Chile will explore this question and other cosmic unknowns. It’s named for Vera Rubin, an American astronomer who in the 1970s and 1980s observed stars moving faster than expected in the outer reaches of dozens of spiral galaxies. Her calculations made a strong case for the existence of dark matter—mass we can’t directly observe but that appears to shape everything from the paths of stars to the structure of the universe itself. 

Explore the full 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

Soon, her namesake observatory will carry on that work in much higher definition. The facility, run by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the US National Science Foundation, will house the largest digital camera ever made for astronomy. And its first mission will be to complete what’s called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Astronomers will focus its giant lens on the sky over the Southern Hemisphere and snap photo after photo, passing over the same patches of sky repeatedly for a decade. 

By the end of the survey, this 3.2-gigapixel camera will have catalogued 20 billion galaxies and collected up to 60 petabytes of data—roughly three times the amount currently stored by the US Library of Congress. Compiling all these images together, with help from specialized algorithms and a supercomputer, will give astronomers a time-lapse view of the sky. Seeing how so many galaxies are dispersed and shaped will enable them to study dark matter’s gravitational effect. They also plan to create the most detailed three-dimensional map of our Milky Way galaxy ever made. 

If all goes well, the telescope will snap its first science-quality images—a special moment known as first light—in mid-2025. The public could see the first photo released from Rubin soon after. 

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Long-acting HIV prevention meds: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025

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WHO

Gilead Sciences, GSK, ViiV Healthcare

WHEN

1 to 3 years

In June 2024, results from a trial of a new medicine to prevent HIV were announced—and they were jaw-dropping. Lenacapavir, a treatment injected once every six months, protected over 5,000 girls and women in Uganda and South Africa from getting HIV. And it was 100% effective.

The drug, which is produced by Gilead, has other advantages. We’ve had effective pre-exposure prophylactic (PrEP) drugs for HIV since 2012, but these must be taken either daily or in advance of each time a person is exposed to the virus. That’s a big ask for healthy people. And because these medicines also treat infections, there’s stigma attached to taking them. For some, the drugs are expensive or hard to access. In the lenacapavir trial, researchers found that injections of the new drug were more effective than a daily PrEP pill, probably because participants didn’t manage to take the pills every day.

 In 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration approved another long-acting injectable drug that protects against HIV. That drug, cabotegravir, is manufactured by ViiV Healthcare (which is largely owned by GSK) and needs to be injected every two months. But despite huge demand, rollout has been slow.   

Explore the full 2025 list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies.

Scientists and activists hope that the story will be different for lenacapavir. So far, the FDA has approved the drug only for people who already have HIV that’s resistant to other treatments. But Gilead has signed licensing agreements with manufacturers to produce generic versions for HIV prevention in 120 low-income countries. 

In October, Gilead announced more trial results for lenacapavir, finding it 96% effective at preventing HIV infection in just over 3,200 cisgender gay, bisexual, and other men, as well as transgender men, transgender women, and nonbinary people who have sex with people assigned male at birth. 

The United Nations has set a goal of ending AIDS by 2030. It’s ambitious, to say the least: We still see over 1 million new HIV infections globally every year. But we now have the medicines to get us there. What we need is access. 

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The Download: AI flops, and what the year ahead holds for EVs

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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.

The biggest AI flops of 2024

The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel Prizes. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing.

AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in new, weird, and sometimes harmful ways. These were some of 2024’s biggest AI misfires. 

—Rhiannon Williams

If you’re interested in the latest developments in the weird and wonderful world of AI, check out the AI Hype Index—MIT Technology Review’s highly subjective take on what’s for real and what’s just a lot of hallucinatory nonsense. Our latest edition features emotional robotic pets, Pokémon Go, simulated humans, and much more.

Why EVs are (mostly) set for solid growth this year

It looks as though 2025 will be a solid year for electric vehicles—at least outside the United States. (Inside the US, sales will depend on the incoming administration’s policy choices.)

Globally, these cleaner cars and trucks will continue to eat into the market share of gas-guzzlers as costs decline, consumer options expand, and charging stations proliferate.

But ultimately, the fate of EV sales will depend on the particular dynamics within specific regions. Here’s a closer look at what’s likely to steer the sector in the world’s three largest markets: the US, the EU, and China. Read the full story.

—James Temple

This piece is part of MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series, looking across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.

How wind tech could help decarbonize cargo shipping

Inhabitants of the Marshall Islands—a chain of coral atolls in the center of the Pacific Ocean—rely on sea transportation for almost everything. For millennia they sailed largely in canoes, but much of their seafaring movement today involves big, bulky, diesel-fueled cargo ships that are heavy polluters.

They’re not alone. Cargo shipping is responsible for about 3% of the world’s annual greenhouse-­gas emissions, and at the current rate of growth, the global industry could account for 10% of emissions by 2050.

The islands have been disproportionately experiencing the consequences of human-made climate change: warming waters, more frequent extreme weather, and rising sea levels. Now its residents are exploring a surprisingly traditional method of decarbonizing its fleets. Read the full story.

—Sofia Quaglia

This story is from the forthcoming magazine edition of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on January 6—it’s all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world right now. If you don’t already, subscribe to receive future copies.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 A Tesla Cybertruck exploded at Trump’s Las Vegas hotel
Authorities are investigating if the incident is linked to a similar attack in New Orleans. (The Guardian)
+ The Cybertruck’s driver was killed, while seven others were injured. (Reuters)
+ Both vehicles were rented using the same app, called Turo. (Insider $)
+ The New Orleans suspect appears to be inspired by the Islamic State. (Economist $)

2 What five years of covid has taught us
How prepared we are for future pandemics hinges on governments’ willingness to listen. (New Scientist $)+ Covid exposed how vulnerable global health systems are. (The Guardian)

3 America’s tech industry needs imported labor
Escalating tensions over the future of the H-1B visa lays that bare. (WSJ $)
+ Thousands of overseas workers are trapped by the US immigration system. (Insider $)
+ Tech workers had a pretty rough 2024. (Ars Technica)

4 Elon Musk has support in his legal battle with OpenAI
Two major tech investors have joined his cause. (WP $)

5 A science journal’s editors have resigned over its use of AI
The Journal of Human Evolution’s board is protesting how owner Elsevier used te technology to format papers. (Ars Technica)
+ The world’s most expensive artist isn’t a fan of AI, either. (The Guardian)

6 How much will it cost to live forever?
Investment in longevity firms has dropped in recent years. (FT $)
+ Maybe you will be able to live past 122. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Podcasts aren’t restricted to just audio any more
Aspiring podcasters better be prepared to appear on video these days. (NY Mag $)

8 We’re on the verge of living in the ocean
Within five years, this ambitious project hopes to establish permanent underwater colonies. (IEEE Spectrum)

9 What the year ahead holds for tech
Elon Musk attempting to buy TikTok appears pretty inevitable. (The Information $)

10 How to spend less time staring at your phone in 2025
Take back control and break the habit. (Wired $)
+ How to log off. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“It’s nothing other than business as usual for me.”

—Sarah Perl, a Los Angeles-based content creator, tells the Wall Street Journal why she’s not worried about the looming prospect of a US-wide TikTok ban.

The big story

This fuel plant will use agricultural waste to combat climate change

February 2022

A startup called Mote plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide, starting from 2024.

It’s among a growing number of efforts to commercialize a concept first proposed two decades ago as a means of combating climate change, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, or BECCS.

It’s an ambitious plan. However, there are serious challenges to doing BECCS affordably and in ways that reliably suck down significant levels of carbon dioxide. Read the full story. 

—James Temple

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or  skeet ’em at me.)

+ Feel like time’s running away with you? To slow it down, you need to shake things up.
+ Sicily’s cathedral of Monreale houses Italy’s largest Byzantine-style mosaics, and they’re truly awe-inspiring.
+ If you’re looking for some sci-fi short stories to get your year off to a literary start, look no further.
+ How to teach yourself to love winter—even when it’s really freezing.

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