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 a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier”

The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica, guarding the low-lying ice sheet behind it.

But a strong, warm ocean current is weakening its foundations and accelerating its slide into the sea. Scientists fear the waters could topple the walls in the coming decades, kick-starting a runaway process that would crack up the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, marking the start of a global climate disaster. As a result, they are eager to understand just how likely such a collapse is, when it could happen, and if we have the power to stop it. 

Scientists at MIT and Dartmouth College founded Arête Glacier Initiative last year in the hope of providing clearer answers to these questions. The nonprofit research organization will officially unveil itself, launch its website, and post requests for research proposals today, timed to coincide with the UN’s inaugural World Day for Glaciers, MIT Technology Review can report exclusively. Read the full story.

—James Temple

Europe is finally getting serious about commercial rockets

Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent’s reliance on American rockets.

In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a company based in Munich, will try to launch its Spectrum rocket from a site in the frozen reaches of Andøya island in Norway. A spaceport has been built there to support small commercial rockets, and Spectrum is the first to make an attempt.

Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, the launch attempt heralds an important moment as Europe tries to kick-start its own private rocket industry. It and other launches scheduled for later this year could give Europe multiple ways to reach space without having to rely on US rockets. Read the full story.

—Jonathan O’Callaghan

Autopsies can reveal intimate health details. Should they be kept private?

—Jessica Hamzelou

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been following news of the deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa. It was heartbreaking to hear how Arakawa appeared to have died from a rare infection days before her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease and may have struggled to understand what had happened.

But as I watched the medical examiner reveal details of the couple’s health, I couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable. Media reports claim that the couple liked their privacy and had been out of the spotlight for decades. But here I was, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, being told what pills Arakawa had in her medicine cabinet, and that Hackman had undergone multiple surgeries.

Should autopsy reports be kept private? A person’s cause of death is public information. But what about other intimate health details that might be revealed in a postmortem examination? Read the full story.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, sign up here.

The must-reads

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

1 Elon Musk will be briefed on the US’s top-secret plans for war with China
Despite Tesla’s reliance on China, and SpaceX’s role as a US defense contractor. (WSJ $)
+ Other private companies could only dream of having access to sensitive military data. (NYT $)

2 Take a look inside the library of pirated books that Meta trains its AI on 
It considered paying for the books, but decided to use LibGen instead. (The Atlantic $)
+ “Copyright traps” could tell writers if an AI has scraped their work. (MIT Technology Review)

3 A judge has blocked DOGE from accessing social security systems
She accused DOGE of failing to explain why it needed to see the private data of millions of Americans. (TechCrunch)
+ Federal workers grilled a Trump appointee during an all-hands meeting. (Wired $)
+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)

4 The Trump administration is poised to shut down an anti-censorship fund
The project, which helps internet users living under oppressive regimes, is under threat. (WP $)
+ Tens of millions will lose access to secure and trusted VPNs. (Bloomberg $)
+ Activists are reckoning with a US retreat from promoting digital rights. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Tesla is recalling tens of thousands of Cybertrucks
After it used the wrong glue to attach its steel panels. (Fast Company $)
+It’s the largest Cybertruck recall to date. (BBC)

6 This crypto billionaire has his sights set on the stars
Jed McCaleb is the sole backer of an ambitious space station project. (Bloomberg $)
+ Is DOGE going to come for NASA? (New Yorker $)

7 The irresistible allure of Spotify
Maybe algorithms aren’t all bad, after all. (Vox)
+ By delivering what people seem to want, has Spotify killed the joy of music discovery? (MIT Technology Review)

8 Dating apps and AI? It’s complicated
While some are buzzing at the prospect of romantic AI agents, others aren’t so sure. (Insider $)

9 Crypto bars are becoming a thing
And Washington is the first casualty. (The Verge)

10 The ways we use emojis is evolving
Are you up to date? (FT $)

Quote of the day

“It’s an assault, and a particularly cruel one to use my work to train the monster that threatens the ruination of original literature.”

—Author AJ West, whose books were included in the library of pirated material Meta used to train its AI model, calls for the company to compensate writers in a post on Bluesky.

The big story

Are we alone in the universe?

November 2023

The quest to determine if anyone or anything is out there has gained a greater scientific footing over the past 50 years. Back then, astronomers had yet to spot a single planet outside our solar system. Now we know the galaxy is teeming with a diversity of worlds.

We’re now getting closer than ever before to learning how common living worlds like ours actually are. New tools, including artificial intelligence, could help scientists look past their preconceived notions of what constitutes life.

Future instruments will sniff the atmospheres of distant planets and scan samples from our local solar system to see if they contain telltale chemicals in the right proportions for organisms to prosper. But determining whether these planets actually contain organisms is no easy task. Read the full story.

—Adam Mann

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.)

+ Get your weekend off to a good start with these beautiful nebulas.
+ Justice for Mariah: a judge has ruled that she didn’t steal All I Want For Christmas Is You from other writers.
+ We’re no longer extremely online any more apparently—so what are we?
+ The fascinating tale of White Mana, one of America’s oldest burger joints.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been following news of the deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa. It was heartbreaking to hear how Arakawa appeared to have died from a rare infection days before her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease and may have struggled to understand what had happened.

But as I watched the medical examiner reveal details of the couple’s health, I couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable. Media reports claim that the couple liked their privacy and had been out of the spotlight for decades. But here I was, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, being told what pills Arakawa had in her medicine cabinet, and that Hackman had undergone multiple surgeries.

It made me wonder: Should autopsy reports be kept private? A person’s cause of death is public information. But what about other intimate health details that might be revealed in a postmortem examination?

The processes and regulations surrounding autopsies vary by country, so we’ll focus on the US, where Hackman and Arakawa died. Here, a “medico-legal” autopsy may be organized by law enforcement agencies and handled through courts, while a “clinical” autopsy may be carried out at the request of family members.

And there are different levels of autopsy—some might involve examining specific organs or tissues, while more thorough examinations would involve looking at every organ and studying tissues in the lab.

The goal of an autopsy is to discover the cause of a person’s death. Autopsy reports, especially those resulting from detailed investigations, often reveal health conditions—conditions that might have been kept private while the person was alive. There are multiple federal and state laws designed to protect individuals’ health information. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects “individually identifiable health information” up to 50 years after a person’s death. But some things change when a person dies.

For a start, the cause of death will end up on the death certificate. That is public information. The public nature of causes of death is taken for granted these days, says Lauren Solberg, a bioethicist at the University of Florida College of Medicine. It has become a public health statistic. She and her student Brooke Ortiz, who have been researching this topic, are more concerned about other aspects of autopsy results.

The thing is, autopsies can sometimes reveal more than what a person died from. They can also pick up what are known as incidental findings. An examiner might find that a person who died following a covid-19 infection also had another condition. Perhaps that condition was undiagnosed. Maybe it was asymptomatic. That finding wouldn’t appear on a death certificate. So who should have access to it?

The laws over who should have access to a person’s autopsy report vary by state, and even between counties within a state. Clinical autopsy results will always be made available to family members, but local laws dictate which family members have access, says Ortiz.

Genetic testing further complicates things. Sometimes the people performing autopsies will run genetic tests to help confirm the cause of death. These tests might reveal what the person died from. But they might also flag genetic factors unrelated to the cause of death that might increase the risk of other diseases.

In those cases, the person’s family members might stand to benefit from accessing that information. “My health information is my health information—until it comes to my genetic health information,” says Solberg. Genes are shared by relatives. Should they have the opportunity to learn about potential risks to their own health?

This is where things get really complicated. Ethically speaking, we should consider the wishes of the deceased. Would that person have wanted to share this information with relatives?

It’s also worth bearing in mind that a genetic risk factor is often just that; there’s often no way to know whether a person will develop a disease, or how severe the symptoms would be. And if the genetic risk is for a disease that has no treatment or cure, will telling the person’s relatives just cause them a lot of stress?

One 27-year-old experienced this when a 23&Me genetic test told her she had “a 28% chance of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease by age 75 and a 60% chance by age 85.”

“I’m suddenly overwhelmed by this information,” she posted on a dementia forum. “I can’t help feeling this overwhelming sense of dread and sadness that I’ll never be able to un-know this information.”

In their research, Solberg and Ortiz came across cases in which individuals who had died in motor vehicle accidents underwent autopsies that revealed other, asymptomatic conditions. One man in his 40s who died in such an accident was found to have a genetic kidney disease. A 23-year-old was found to have had kidney cancer.

Ideally, both medical teams and family members should know ahead of time what a person would have wanted—whether that’s an autopsy, genetic testing, or health privacy. Advance directives allow people to clarify their wishes for end-of-life care. But only around a third of people in the US have completed one. And they tend to focus on care before death, not after.

Solberg and Ortiz think they should be expanded. An advance directive could specify how people want to share their health information after they’ve died. “Talking about death is difficult,” says Solberg. “For physicians, for patients, for families—it can be uncomfortable.” But it is important.

On March 17, a New Mexico judge granted a request from a representative of Hackman’s estate to seal police photos and bodycam footage as well as the medical records of Hackman and Arakawa. The medical investigator is “temporarily restrained from disclosing … the Autopsy Reports and/or Death Investigation Reports for Mr. and Mrs. Hackman,” according to Deadline.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

The Thwaites glacier is a fortress larger than Florida, a wall of ice that reaches nearly 4,000 feet above the bedrock of West Antarctica, guarding the low-lying ice sheet behind it.

But a strong, warm ocean current is weakening its foundations and accelerating its slide into the Amundsen Sea. Scientists fear the waters could topple the walls in the coming decades, kick-starting a runaway process that would crack up the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

That would mark the start of a global climate disaster. The glacier itself holds enough ice to raise ocean levels by more than two feet, which could flood coastlines and force tens of millions of people living in low-lying areas to abandon their homes.

The loss of the entire ice sheet—which could still take centuries to unfold—would push up sea levels by 11 feet and redraw the contours of the continents.

This is why Thwaites is known as the doomsday glacier—and why scientists are eager to understand just how likely such a collapse is, when it could happen, and if we have the power to stop it. 

Scientists at MIT and Dartmouth College founded Arête Glacier Initiative last year in the hope of providing clearer answers to these questions. The nonprofit research organization will officially unveil itself, launch its website, and post requests for research proposals today, March 21, timed to coincide with the UN’s inaugural World Day for Glaciers, MIT Technology Review can report exclusively. 

Arête will also announce it is issuing its first grants, each for around $200,000 over two years, to a pair of glacier researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

One of the organization’s main goals is to study the possibility of preventing the loss of giant glaciers, Thwaites in particular, by refreezing them to the bedrock. It would represent a radical intervention into the natural world, requiring a massive, expensive engineering project in a remote, treacherous environment. 

But the hope is that such a mega-adaptation project could minimize the mass relocation of climate refugees, prevent much of the suffering and violence that would almost certainly accompany it, and help nations preserve trillions of dollars invested in high-rises, roads, homes, ports, and airports around the globe.

“About a million people are displaced per centimeter of sea-level rise,” says Brent Minchew, an associate professor of geophysics at MIT, who cofounded Arête Glacier Initiative and will serve as its chief scientist. “If we’re able to bring that down, even by a few centimeters, then we would safeguard the homes of millions.”

But some scientists believe the idea is an implausible, wildly expensive distraction, drawing money, expertise, time, and resources away from more essential polar research efforts. 

“Sometimes we can get a little over-optimistic about what engineering can do,” says Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“Two possible futures”

Minchew, who earned his PhD in geophysics at Caltech, says he was drawn to studying glaciers because they are rapidly transforming as the world warms, increasing the dangers of sea-level rise. 

“But over the years, I became less content with simply telling a more dramatic story about how things were going and more open to asking the question of what can we do about it,” says Minchew, who will return to Caltech as a professor this summer.

Last March, he cofounded Arête Glacier Initiative with Colin Meyer, an assistant professor of engineering at Dartmouth, in the hope of funding and directing research to improve scientific understanding of two big questions: How big a risk does sea-level rise pose in the coming decades, and can we minimize that risk?

“Philanthropic funding is needed to address both of these challenges, because there’s no private-sector funding for this kind of research and government funding is minuscule,” says Mike Schroepfer, the former Meta chief technology officer turned climate philanthropist, who provided funding to Arête through his new organization, Outlier Projects. 

The nonprofit has now raised about $5 million from Outlier and other donors, including the Navigation Fund, the Kissick Family Foundation, the Sky Foundation, the Wedner Family Foundation, and the Grantham Foundation. 

Minchew says they named the organization Arête, mainly because it’s the sharp mountain ridge between two valleys, generally left behind when a glacier carves out the cirques on either side. It directs the movement of the glacier and is shaped by it. 

It’s meant to symbolize “two possible futures,” he says. “One where we do something; one where we do nothing.”

Improving forecasts

The somewhat reassuring news is that, even with rising global temperatures, it may still take thousands of years for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to completely melt. 

In addition, sea-level rise forecasts for this century generally range from as little as 0.28 meters (11 inches) to 1.10 meters (about three and a half feet), according to the latest UN climate panel report. The latter only occurs under a scenario with very high greenhouse gas emissions (SSP5-8.5), which significantly exceeds the pathway the world is now on.

But there’s still a “low-likelihood” that ocean levels could surge nearly two meters (about six and a half feet) by 2100 that “cannot be excluded,” given “deep uncertainty linked to ice-sheet processes,” the report adds. 

Two meters of sea-level rise could force nearly 190 million people to migrate away from the coasts, unless regions build dikes or other shoreline protections, according to some models. Many more people, mainly in the tropics, would face heightened flooding dangers.

Much of the uncertainty over what will happen this century comes down to scientists’ limited understanding of how Antarctic ice sheets will respond to growing climate pressures.

The initial goal of Arête Glacier Initiative is to help narrow the forecast ranges by improving our grasp of how Thwaites and other glaciers move, melt, and break apart.

Gravity is the driving force nudging glaciers along the bedrock and reshaping them as they flow. But many of the variables that determine how fast they slide lie at the base. That includes the type of sediment the river of ice slides along; the size of the boulders and outcroppings it contorts around; and the warmth and strength of the ocean waters that lap at its face.

In addition, heat rising from deep in the earth warms the ice closest to the ground, creating a lubricating layer of water that hastens the glacier’s slide. That acceleration, in turn, generates more frictional heat that melts still more of the ice, creating a self-reinforcing feedback effect.

Minchew and Meyer are confident that the glaciology field is at a point where it could speed up progress in sea-level rise forecasting, thanks largely to improving observational tools that are producing more and better data.

That includes a new generation of satellites orbiting the planet that can track the shifting shape of ice at the poles at far higher resolutions than in the recent past. Computer simulations of ice sheets, glaciers and sea ice are improving as well, thanks to growing computational resources and advancing machine learning techniques.

On March 21, Arête will issue a request for proposals from research teams to contribute to an effort to collect, organize, and openly publish existing observational glacier data. Much of that expensively gathered information is currently inaccessible to researchers around the world, Minchew says.

By funding teams working across these areas, Arête’s founders hope to help produce more refined ice-sheet models and narrower projections of sea-level rise.

This improved understanding would help cities plan where to build new bridges, buildings, and homes, and to determine whether they’ll need to erect higher seawalls or raise their roads, Meyer says. It could also provide communities with more advance notice of the coming dangers, allowing them to relocate people and infrastructure to safer places through an organized process known as managed retreat.

A radical intervention

But the improved forecasts might also tell us that Thwaites is closer to tumbling into the ocean than we think, underscoring the importance of considering more drastic measures.

One idea is to build berms or artificial islands to prop up fragile parts of glaciers, and to block the warm waters that rise from the deep ocean and melt them from below. Some researchers have also considered erecting giant, flexible curtains anchored to the seabed to achieve the latter effect.

Others have looked at scattering highly reflective beads or other materials across ice sheets, or pumping ocean water onto them in the hopes it would freeze during the winter and reinforce the headwalls of the glaciers.

But the concept of refreezing glaciers in place, know as a basal intervention, is gaining traction in scientific circles, in part because there’s a natural analogue for it.

The glacier that stalled

About 200 years ago, the Kamb Ice Stream, another glacier in West Antarctica that had been sliding about 350 meters (1,150 feet) per year, suddenly stalled.

Glaciologists believe an adjacent ice stream intersected with the catchment area under the glacier, providing a path for the water running below it to flow out along the edge instead. That loss of fluid likely slowed down the Kamb Ice Stream, reduced the heat produced through friction, and allowed water at the surface to refreeze.

The deceleration of the glacier sparked the idea that humans might be able to bring about that same phenomenon deliberately, perhaps by drilling a series of boreholes down to the bedrock and pumping up water from the bottom.

Minchew himself has focused on a variation he believes could avoid much of the power use and heavy operating machinery hassles of that approach: slipping long tubular devices, known as thermosyphons, down nearly to the bottom of the boreholes. 

These passive heat exchangers, which are powered only by the temperature differential between two areas, are commonly used to keep permafrost cold around homes, buildings and pipelines in Arctic regions. The hope is that we could deploy extremely long ones, stretching up to two kilometers and encased in steel pipe, to draw warm temperatures away from the bottom of the glacier, allowing the water below to freeze.

Minchew says he’s in the process of producing refined calculations, but estimates that halting Thwaites could require drilling as many as 10,000 boreholes over a 100-square-kilometer area.

He readily acknowledges that would be a huge undertaking, but provides two points of comparison to put such a project into context: Melting the necessary ice to create those holes would require roughly the amount of energy all US domestic flights consume from jet fuel in about two and a half hours. Or, it would produce about the same level of greenhouse gas emissions as constructing 10 kilometers of seawalls, a small fraction of the length the world would need to build if it can’t slow down the collapse of the ice sheets, he says.

“Kick the system”

One of Arête’s initial grantees is Marianne Haseloff, an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies the physical processes that govern the behavior of glaciers and is striving to more faithfully represent them in ice sheet models. 

Haseloff says she will use those funds to develop mathematical methods that could more accurately determine what’s known as basal shear stress, or the resistance of the bed to sliding glaciers, based on satellite observations. That could help refine forecasts of how rapidly glaciers will slide into the ocean, in varying settings and climate conditions.

Arête’s other initial grant will go to Lucas Zoet, an associate professor in the same department as Haseloff and the principal investigator with the Surface Processes group.

He intends to use the funds to build the lab’s second “ring shear” device, the technical term for a simulated glacier.

The existing device, which is the only one operating in the world, stands about eight feet tall and fills the better part of a walk-in freezer on campus. The core of the machine is a transparent drum filled with a ring of ice, sitting under pressure and atop a layer of sediment. It slowly spins for weeks at a time as sensors and cameras capture how the ice and earth move and deform.

The research team can select the sediment, topography, water pressure, temperature, and other conditions to match the environment of a real-world glacier of interest, be it Thwaites today—or Thwaites in 2100, under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario. 

Zoet says these experiments promise to improve our understanding of how glaciers move over different types of beds, and to refine an equation known as the slip law, which represents these glacier dynamics mathematically in computer models.

The second machine will enable them to run more experiments and to conduct a specific kind that the current device can’t: a scaled-down, controlled version of the basal intervention.

Zoet says the team will be able to drill tiny holes through the ice, then pump out water or transfer heat away from the bed. They can then observe whether the simulated glacier freezes to the base at those points and experiment with how many interventions, across how much space, are required to slow down its movement.

It offers a way to test out different varieties of the basal intervention that is far easier and cheaper than using water drills to bore to the bottom of an actual glacier in Antarctica, Zoet says. The funding will allow the lab to explore a wide range of experiments, enabling them to “kick the system in a way we wouldn’t have before,” he adds.

“Virtually impossible”

The concept of glacier interventions is in its infancy. There are still considerable unknowns and uncertainties, including how much it would cost, how arduous the undertaking would be, and which approach would be most likely to work, or if any of them are feasible.

“This is mostly a theoretical idea at this point,” says Katharine Ricke, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, who researches the international relations implications of geoengineering, among other topics.

Conducting extensive field trials or moving forward with full-scale interventions may also require surmounting complex legal questions, she says. Antarctica isn’t owned by any nation, but it’s the subject of competing territorial claims among a number of countries and governed under a decades-old treaty to which dozens are a party.

The basal intervention—refreezing the glacier to its bed—faces numerous technical hurdles that would make it “virtually impossible to execute,” Moon and dozens of other researchers argued in a recent preprint paper, “Safeguarding the polar regions from dangerous geoengineering.”

Among other critiques, they stress that subglacial water systems are complex, dynamic, and interconnected, making it highly difficult to precisely identify and drill down to all the points that would be necessary to draw away enough water or heat to substantially slow down a massive glacier.

Further, they argue that the interventions could harm polar ecosystems by adding contaminants, producing greenhouse gases, or altering the structure of the ice in ways that may even increase sea-level rise.

“Overwhelmingly, glacial and polar geoengineering ideas do not make sense to pursue, in terms of the finances, the governance challenges, the impacts,” and the possibility of making matters worse, Moon says.

“No easy path forward”

But Douglas MacAyeal, professor emeritus of glaciology at the University of Chicago, says the basal intervention would have the lightest environmental impact among the competing ideas. He adds that nature has already provided an example of it working, and that much of the needed drilling and pumping technology is already in use in the oil industry.

“I would say it’s the strongest approach at the starting gate,” he says, “but we don’t really know anything about it yet. The research still has to be done. It’s very cutting-edge.”

Minchew readily acknowledges that there are big challenges and significant unknowns—and that some of these ideas may not work.

But he says it’s well worth the effort to study the possibilities, in part because much of the research will also improve our understanding of glacier dynamics and the risks of sea-level rise—and in part because it’s only a question of when, not if, Thwaites will collapse.

Even if the world somehow halted all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the forces melting that fortress of ice will continue to do so. 

So one way or another, the world will eventually need to make big, expensive, difficult interventions to protect people and infrastructure. The cost and effort of doing one project in Antarctica, he says, would be dwarfed by the global effort required to erect thousands of miles of seawalls, ratchet up homes, buildings, and roads, and relocate hundreds of millions of people.

“One thing is challenging—and the other is even more challenging,” Minchew says. “There’s no easy path forward.”

Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent’s reliance on American rockets.

In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a company based in Munich, will try to launch its Spectrum rocket from a site in the frozen reaches of Andøya island in Norway. A spaceport has been built there to support small commercial rockets, and Spectrum is the first to make an attempt.

“It’s a big milestone,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and spaceflight expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “It’s long past time for Europe to have a proper commercial launch industry.”

Spectrum stands 28 meters (92 feet) tall, the length of a basketball court. The rocket has two stages, or parts, the first with nine engines—powered by an unusual fuel combination of liquid oxygen and propane not seen on other rockets before, which Isar says results in higher performance—and the second with a single engine to give satellites their final kick into orbit.

The ultimate goal for Spectrum is to carry satellites weighing up to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) to low Earth orbit. On this first launch, however, there are no satellites on board, because success is anything but guaranteed. “It’s unlikely to make it to orbit,” says Malcolm Macdonald, an expert in space technology at Strathclyde University in Scotland. “The first launch of any rocket tends not to work.”

Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, the launch attempt heralds an important moment as Europe tries to kick-start its own private rocket industry. Two other companies—Orbex of the UK and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) of Germany—are expected to make launch attempts later this year. These efforts could give Europe multiple ways to reach space without having to rely on US rockets.  

“Europe has to be prepared for a more uncertain future,” says Macdonald. “The uncertainty of what will happen over the next four years with the current US administration amplifies the situation for European launch companies.”

Trailing in the US’s wake 

Europe has for years trailed behind the US in commercial space efforts. The successful launch of SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, in 2008 began a period of American dominance of the global launch market. In 2024, 145 of 263 global launch attempts were made by US entities—and SpaceX accounted for 138 of those. “SpaceX is the benchmark at the moment,” says Jonas Kellner, head of marketing, communications, and political affairs at RFA. Other US companies, like Rocket Lab (which launches from both the US and New Zealand), have also become successful, while commercial rockets are ramping up in China, too.

Europe has launched its own government-funded Ariane and Vega rockets for decades from the Guiana Space Centre, a spaceport it operates in French Guiana in South America. Most recently, in March 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched its new heavy-lift Ariane 6 rocket from there for the first time. However, the history of rocket launches from Europe itself is much more limited. In 1997 the US defense contractor Northrop Grumman air-launched a Pegasus rocket from a plane that took off from the Canary Islands. In 2023 the US company Virgin Orbit failed to reach orbit with its LauncherOne rocket after a launch attempt from Cornwall in the UK. No vertical orbital rocket launch has ever been attempted from Western Europe.

Isar Aerospace is one of a handful of companies hoping to change that with help from agencies like ESA, which has provided funding to rocket launch companies through its Boost program since 2019. In 2024 it awarded €44.22 million ($48 million) to Isar, Orbex, RFA, and the German launch company HyImpulse. The hope is that one or more of the companies will soon begin regular launches from Europe from two potential sites: Isar’s chosen location in Andøya and the SaxaVord Spaceport on the Shetland Islands north of the UK, where RFA and Orbex plan to make their attempts. 

“I expect four or five companies to get to the point of launching, and then over a period of years reliability and launch cadence [or frequency] will determine which one or two of them survives,” says McDowell.

Unique advantages

In their initial form these rockets will not rival anything on offer from SpaceX in terms of size and cadence. SpaceX sometimes launches its 70-meter (230-foot) Falcon 9 rocket multiple times per week and is developing its much larger Starship vehicle for missions to the moon and Mars. However, the smaller European rockets can allow companies in Europe to launch satellites to orbit without having to travel all the way across the Atlantic. “There is an advantage to having it closer,” says Kellner, who says it will take RFA three or four days to get its rockets to SaxaVord, versus one or two weeks to travel across the Atlantic.

Launching from Europe is useful, too, for reaching specific orbits. Traditionally, a lot of satellite launches have taken place near the equator, in places such as Cape Canaveral in Florida, to get an extra boost from Earth’s rotation. Crewed spacecraft have also launched from these locations to reach space stations in equatorial orbit around Earth and the moon. From Europe, though, satellites can launch north over uninhabited stretches of water to reach polar orbit, which can allow imaging satellites to see the entirety of Earth rotate underneath them.

Increasingly, says McDowell, companies want to place satellites into sun-synchronous orbit, a type of polar orbit where a satellite orbiting Earth stays in perpetual sunlight. This is useful for solar-powered vehicles. “By far the bulk of the commercial market now is sun-synchronous polar orbit,” says McDowell. “So having a high-latitude launch site that has good transport links with customers in Europe does make a difference.”

Europe’s end goal

In the longer term, Europe’s rocket ambitions might grow to vehicles that are more of a match for the Falcon 9 through initiatives like ESA’s European Launcher Challenge, which will award contracts later this year. “We are hoping to develop [a larger vehicle] in the European Launcher Challenge,” says Kellner. Perhaps Europe might even consider launching humans into space one day on larger rockets, says Thilo Kranz, ESA’s program manager for commercial space transportation. “We are looking into this,” he says. “If a commercial operator comes forward with a smart way of approaching [crewed] access to space, that would be a favorable development for Europe.”

A separate ESA project called Themis, meanwhile, is developing technologies to reuse rockets. This was the key innovation of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, allowing the company to dramatically drive down launch costs. Some European companies, like MaiaSpace and RFA, are also investigating reusability. The latter is planning to use parachutes to bring the first stage of its rocket back to a landing in the sea, where it can be recovered.

“As soon as you get up to something like a Falcon 9 competitor, I think it’s clear now that reusability is crucial,” says McDowell. “They’re not going to be economically competitive without reusability.”

The end goal for Europe is to have a sovereign rocket industry that reduces its reliance on the US. “Where we are in the broader geopolitical situation probably makes this a bigger point than it might have been six months ago,” says Macdonald.

The continent has already shown it can diversify from the US in other ways. Europe now operates its own successful satellite-based alternative to the US Global Positioning System (GPS), called Galileo; it began launching in 2011 and is four times more accurate than its American counterpart. Isar Aerospace, and the companies that follow, might be the first sign that commercial European rockets can break from America in a similar way.

“We need to secure access to space,” says Kranz, “and the more options we have in launching into space, the higher the flexibility.”

Recorded on March 20, 2025

AI Chatbots Have Joined the Chat

Speakers: Rachel Courtland, commissioning editor, Rhiannon Williams, news reporter, and Eileen Guo, features & investigations reporter.

Chatbots are quickly changing how we connect to each other and ourselves. But are these changes for the better? How should they be monitored and regulated? Hear from MIT Technology Review editor Rachel Courtland in conversation with reporter Rhiannon Williams and senior reporter Eileen Guo as they unpack the landscape around chatbots.

Related Coverage

• The AI relationship revolution is already here
• An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it

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.

4 technologies that could power the future of energy

Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit just outside Washington, DC.

Energy innovation can take many forms, and the variety in energy research was on display at the summit. ARPA-E, part of the US Department of Energy, provides funding for high-risk, high-reward research projects. The summit gathers projects the agency has funded, along with investors, policymakers, and journalists.

Hundreds of projects were exhibited in a massive hall during the conference, featuring demonstrations and research results. Here are four of the most interesting innovations MIT Technology Review spotted on site. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

If you’re interested in hearing more about what Casey learnt from the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, check out the latest edition of The Spark, our weekly climate and energy newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Join us today to chat about chatbots

Chatbots are changing how we connect to each other and ourselves. But are these changes for the better, and how should they be monitored and regulated?

To learn more, join me for a live Roundtable session today at 12pm ET. I’ll be chatting with MIT Technology Review editor Rachel Courtland and senior reporter Eileen Guo, and we’ll be unpacking the landscape around chatbots. Register to ensure you don’t miss out!

The must-reads

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

1 A French scientist was denied US entry over anti-Donald Trump messages 
US authorities claimed the exchanges criticising the Trump administration’s research policy qualified as terrorism. (Le Monde)
+ France’s research minister is a high-profile critic of Trump policy. (The Guardian)
+ Customs and Border Protection is cracking down at airports across the US. (The Verge)

2 RFK Jr wants to let bird flu spread through poultry farms
Experts warn that this approach isn’t just dangerous—it won’t work. (Scientific American $)
+ A bird flu outbreak has been confirmed in Scotland. (BBC)
+ How the US is preparing for a potential bird flu pandemic. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Clearview AI tried to buy millions of mugshots for its databases
But negotiations between the facial recognition company and an intelligence firm broke down. (404 Media)

4 Top US graduates are desperate to work for Chinese AI startups
DeepSeek’s success has sparked major interest in firms outside America. (Bloomberg $)
+ Four Chinese AI startups to watch beyond DeepSeek. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Reddit has become a lifeline for US federal workers
Unpaid moderators are working around the clock to help answer urgent questions. (NYT $)
+ The only two democrats on the board of the FTC have been fired. (Vox)
+ Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem. (MIT Technology Review)

6 The European Commission is targeting Apple and Google
It’s proceeding with regulatory action, despite the risk of retaliation from Trump. (FT $)
+ It has accused Alphabet of favoring its own services in search results. (The Information $)
+ Meta’s AI chatbot is finally launching in Europe after all. (The Verge)

7 AI agents could spell bad news for shopping apps
DoorDash and Uber could suffer if humans outsource their ordering to bots. (The Information $)
+ Dunzo was a major delivery success story in India. So what happened? (Rest of World)
+ Your most important customer may be AI. (MIT Technology Review)

8 This startup is making concrete using CO2
It combines the gas with a byproduct from coal power plants to make lower carbon concrete. (Fast Company $)
+ How electricity could help tackle a surprising climate villain. (MIT Technology Review)

9 This robot dog has a functional digital nervous system
And will be taught to walk by a real human dog trainer, not an algorithm. (Reuters)

10 Dark matter could be getting weaker
If it’s true, it holds major implications for our understanding of the universe. (Quanta Magazine)
+ Are we alone in the universe? (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“The corrupting influence of billionaires in law enforcement is an issue that affects all of us.”

—Alvaro Bedoya, a former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, speaks out after being fired by Donald Trump, the Verge reports.

The big story

The arrhythmia of our current age

October 2025

Arrhythmia means the heart beats, but not in proper time—a critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable. It’s frightening to experience, but what if it’s also a good metaphor for our current times? That a pulse once seemingly so steady is now less sure. 

Perhaps this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s. 

Maybe you feel it, too—that the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, and glaciers dissolve. We can’t stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we don’t need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands. 

All the resulting anxiety has been hard on our hearts—literally and metaphorically. Read the full story.

—David Ewing Duncan

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.)

+ Now that David Lynch is no longer with us, who is the flagbearer for transcendental meditation?+ Who doesn’t love a little mindless comedy—especially when Leslie Nielsen is involved.
+ China’s pets are seriously pampered ($)
+ The world’s oldest known cerapodan dinosaur, which were massive herbivores, has been discovered in Morocco.

At a conference dedicated to energy technology that I attended this week, I noticed an outward attitude of optimism and excitement. But it’s hard to miss the current of uncertainty just underneath. 

The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, held this year just outside Washington, DC, gathers some of the most cutting-edge innovators working on everything from next-generation batteries to plants that can mine for metals. Researchers whose projects have received funding from ARPA-E—part of the US Department of Energy that gives money to high-risk research in energy—gather to show their results and mingle with each other, investors, and nosy journalists like yours truly. (For more on a few of the coolest things I saw, check out this story.)

This year, though, there was an elephant in the room, and it’s the current state of the US federal government. Or maybe it’s climate change? In any case, the vibes were weird. 

The last time I was at this conference, two years ago, climate change was a constant refrain on stage and in conversations. The central question was undoubtedly: How do we decarbonize, generate energy, and run our lives without relying on polluting fossil fuels? 

This time around, I didn’t hear the phrase “climate change” once during the opening session, which included speeches from US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and acting ARPA-E director Daniel Cunningham. The focus was on American energy dominance—on how we can get our hands on more, more, more energy to meet growing demand. 

Last week, Wright spoke at an energy conference in Houston and had a lot to say about climate, calling climate change a “side effect of building the modern world” and climate policies irrational and quasi-religious, and he said that when it came to climate action, the cure had become worse than the disease. 

I was anticipating similar talking points at the summit, but this week, climate change hardly got a mention.

What I noticed in Wright’s speech and in the choice of programming throughout the conference is that some technologies appear to be among the favored, and others are decidedly less prominent. Nuclear power and fusion were definitely on the “in” list. There was a nuclear panel in the opening session, and in his remarks Wright called out companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Zap Energy. He also praised small modular reactors. 

Renewables, including wind and solar, were mentioned only in the context of their inconsistency—Wright dwelled on that, rather than on other facts I’d argue are just as important, like that they are among the cheapest methods of generating electricity today. 

In any case, Wright seemed appropriately hyped about energy, given his role in the administration. “Call me biased, but I think there’s no more impactful place to work in than energy,” he said during his opening remarks on the first morning of the summit. He sang the praises of energy innovation, calling it a tool to drive progress, and outlined his long career in the field. 

This all comes after a chaotic couple of months for the federal government that are undoubtedly affecting the industry. Mass layoffs have hit federal agencies, including the Department of Energy. President Donald Trump very quickly tried to freeze spending from the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax credits and other support for EVs and power plants. 

As I walked around the showcase and chatted with experts over coffee, I heard a range of reactions to the opening session and feelings about this moment for the energy sector. 

People working in industries the Trump administration seems to favor, like nuclear energy, tended to be more positive. Some in academia who rely on federal grants to fund their work were particularly nervous about what comes next. One researcher refused to talk to me when I said I was a journalist. In response to my questions about why they weren’t able to discuss the technology on display at their booth, another member on the same project said only that it’s a wild time.

Making progress on energy technology doesn’t require that we all agree on exactly why we’re doing it. But in a moment when we need all the low-carbon technologies we can get to address climate change—a problem scientists overwhelmingly agree is a threat to our planet—I find it frustrating that politics can create such a chilling effect in some sectors. 

At the conference, I listened to smart researchers talk about their work. I saw fascinating products and demonstrations, and I’m still optimistic about where energy can go. But I also worry that uncertainty about the future of research and government support for emerging technologies will leave some valuable innovations in the dust. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit just outside Washington, DC.

Energy innovation can take many forms, and the variety in energy research was on display at the summit. ARPA-E, part of the US Department of Energy, provides funding for high-risk, high-reward research projects. The summit gathers projects the agency has funded, along with investors, policymakers, and journalists.

Hundreds of projects were exhibited in a massive hall during the conference, featuring demonstrations and research results. Here are four of the most interesting innovations MIT Technology Review spotted on site. 

Steel made with lasers

Startup Limelight Steel has developed a process to make iron, the main component in steel, by using lasers to heat iron ore to super-high temperatures. 

Steel production makes up roughly 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions today, in part because most steel is still made with blast furnaces, which rely on coal to hit the high temperatures that kick off the required chemical reactions. 

Limelight instead shines lasers on iron ore, heating it to temperatures over 1,600 °C. Molten iron can then be separated from impurities, and the iron can be put through existing processes to make steel. 

The company has built a small demonstration system with a laser power of about 1.5 kilowatts, which can process between 10 and 20 grams of ore. The whole system is made up of 16 laser arrays, each just a bit larger than a postage stamp.

The components in the demonstration system are commercially available; this particular type of laser is used in projectors. The startup has benefited from years of progress in the telecommunications industry that has helped bring down the cost of lasers, says Andy Zhao, the company’s cofounder and CTO. 

The next step is to build a larger-scale system that will use 150 kilowatts of laser power and could make up to 100 tons of steel over the course of a year.

Rocks that can make fuel

The hunks of rock at a booth hosted by MIT might not seem all that high-tech, but someday they could help produce fuels and chemicals. 

A major topic of conversation at the ARPA-E summit was geologic hydrogen—there’s a ton of excitement about efforts to find underground deposits of the gas, which can be used as a fuel across a wide range of industries, including transportation and heavy industry. 

Last year, ARPA-E funded a handful of projects on the topic, including one in Iwnetim Abate’s lab at MIT. Abate is among the researchers who are aiming not just to hunt for hydrogen, but to actually use underground conditions to help produce it. Earlier this year, his team published research showing that by using catalysts and conditions common in the subsurface, scientists can produce hydrogen as well as other chemicals, like ammonia. Abate cofounded a spinout company, Addis Energy, to commercialize the research, which has since also received ARPA-E funding. 

All the rocks on the table, from the chunk of dark, hard basalt to the softer talc, could be used to produce these chemicals. 

An electric guitar powered by iron nitride magnets

The sound of music drifted from the Niron Magnetics booth across nearby walkways. People wandering by stopped to take turns testing out the company’s magnets, in the form of an electric guitar. 

Most high-powered magnets today contain neodymium—demand for them is set to skyrocket in the coming years, especially as the world builds more electric vehicles and wind turbines. Supplies could stretch thin, and the geopolitics are complicated because most of the supply comes from China. 

Niron is making new magnets that don’t contain rare earth metals. Instead, Niron’s technology is based on more abundant materials: nitrogen and iron. 

The guitar is a demonstration product—today, magnets in electric guitars typically contain aluminum, nickel, and cobalt-based magnets that help translate the vibrations from steel strings into an electric signal that is broadcast through an amplifier. Niron made an instrument using its iron nitride magnets instead. (See photos of the guitar from an event last year here.)

Niron opened a pilot commercial facility in late 2024 that has the capacity to produce 10 tons of magnets annually. Since we last covered Niron, in early 2024, the company has announced plans for a full-scale plant, which will have an annual capacity of about 1,500 tons of magnets once it’s fully ramped up. 

Batteries for powering high-performance data centers

The increasing power demand from AI and data centers was another hot topic at the summit, with server racks dotting the showcase floor to demonstrate technologies aimed at the sector. One stuffed with batteries caught my eye, courtesy of Natron Energy. 

The company is making sodium-ion batteries to help meet power demand from data centers. 

Data centers’ energy demands can be incredibly variable—and as their total power needs get bigger, those swings can start to affect the grid. Natron’s sodium-ion batteries can be installed at these facilities to help level off the biggest peaks, allowing computing equipment to run full out without overly taxing the grid, says Natron cofounder and CTO Colin Wessells. 

Sodium-ion batteries are a cheaper alternative to lithium-based chemistries. They’re also made without lithium, cobalt, and nickel, materials that are constrained in production or processing. We’re seeing some varieties of sodium-ion batteries popping up in electric vehicles in China.

Natron opened a production line in Michigan last year, and the company plans to open a $1.4 billion factory in North Carolina. 

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.

HIV could infect 1,400 infants every day because of US aid disruptions

Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration’s cuts to funding to AIDS organizations, new modeling suggests.

In an executive order issued January 20, President Donald Trump paused new foreign aid funding to global health programs. Four days later, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a stop-work order on existing foreign aid assistance. Surveys suggest that these changes forced more than a third of global organizations that provide essential HIV services to close within days of the announcements. 

Hundreds of thousands of people are losing access to HIV treatments as a result. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

MIT Technology Review Narrated: What the future holds for those born today

Happy birthday, baby.

You have been born into an era of intelligent machines. They have watched over you almost since your conception. They let your parents listen in on your tiny heartbeat, track your gestation on an app, and post your sonogram on social media. Well before you were born, you were known to the algorithm.

How will you and the next generation of machines grow up together? We asked more than a dozen experts to imagine your joint future.

This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which 
we’re publishing 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 A judge has ordered DOGE to cease dismantling USAID 
It’s been told to reinstate employees’ email access and let them return to their offices. (WP $)
+ The judge believes its efforts probably violated the US Constitution.(Reuters)
+ The department has also targeted workers that prevent tech overspending. (The Intercept)
+ Can AI help DOGE slash government budgets? It’s complex. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Can Oracle save TikTok? 
A security proposal from the cloud giant could reportedly allow it to keep operating in the US. (Bloomberg $)
+ The deal would leave the app’s algorithm in the hands of its Chinese parent company. (Politico)

3 NASA’s astronauts have touched down on Earth
They safely landed off the coast of Florida yesterday evening. (FT $)
+ A pod of dolphins dropped by to witness the spectacle. (The Guardian)

4 AI is turning cyber crime into a digital arms race
Europol warns that more criminals than ever are exploiting AI tools for nefarious means. (FT $)
+ Five ways criminals are using AI. (MIT Technology Review)

5 An Italian newspaper has published an edition produced entirely by AI
The technology was responsible for “the irony” too, apparently. (The Guardian)

6 Tesla’s taxi service has been greenlit in California
But the road ahead is still full of obstacles. (Wired $)
+ Chinese EVs are snapping at Tesla’s heels across the world. (Rest of World)
+ It certainly seems as though Asia will birth the next EV superpower. (Economist $)
+ Robotaxis are one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Online platforms are fueling ‘facial dysmorphia’
Hours of staring at their own faces made these women anxious and depressed. (NY Mag $)
+ The fight for “Instagram face.” (MIT Technology Review)

8 Inside the hunt for water on Mars
We know that the red planet was once host to it, but we don’t know why. (Knowable Magazine)

9 This robotic spider is shedding light on how real spiders hunt  
Namely using a form of echolocation. (Ars Technica)

10 We could be dramatically underestimating the Earth’s population
New data analysis suggests it could be much higher than previously thought. (New Scientist $)

Quote of the day

“In no uncertain terms is this an audit. It’s a heist, stealing a vast amount of government data.”

—An anonymous auditor offers a scathing review of DOGE’s attempts at auditing US government departments to Wired.

The big story

The humble oyster could hold the key to restoring coastal waters. Developers hate it.

October 2023

Carol Friend has taken on a difficult job. She is one of the 10 people in Delaware currently trying to make it as a cultivated oyster farmer.

Her Salty Witch Oyster Company holds a lease to grow the mollusks as part of the state’s new program for aquaculture, launched in 2017. It has sputtered despite its obvious promise.

Five years after the first farmed oysters went into the Inland Bays, the aquaculture industry remains in a larval stage. Oysters themselves are almost mythical in their ability to clean and filter water. But human willpower, investment, and flexibility are all required to allow the oysters to simply do their thing—particularly when developers start to object. Read the full story.

—Anna Kramer

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.)

+ If you’re stuck for something to do this weekend, why not host a reading hang?
+ Do baby owls really sleep on their stomachs? Like most things in life, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
+ Keep your eyes peeled the next time you’re in the British countryside, you might just spot a black leopard.
+ I couldn’t agree more—why When Harry Met Sally is a perfect film.

There has never been a more pressing time for food producers to harness technology to tackle the sector’s tough mission. To produce ever more healthy and appealing food for a growing global population in a way that is resilient and affordable, all while minimizing waste and reducing the sector’s environmental impact. From farm to factory, artificial intelligence and machine learning can support these goals by increasing efficiency, optimizing supply chains, and accelerating the research and development of new types of healthy products. 

In agriculture, AI is already helping farmers to monitor crop health, tailor the delivery of inputs, and make harvesting more accurate and efficient. In labs, AI is powering experiments in gene editing to improve crop resilience and enhance the nutritional value of raw ingredients. For processed foods, AI is optimizing production economics, improving the texture and flavor of products like alternative proteins and healthier snacks, and strengthening food safety processes too. 

But despite this promise, industry adoption still lags. Data-sharing remains limited and companies across the value chain have vastly different needs and capabilities. There are also few standards and data governance protocols in place, and more talent and skills are needed to keep pace with the technological wave. 

All the same, progress is being made and the potential for AI in the food sector is huge. Key findings from the report are as follows: 

Predictive analytics are accelerating R&D cycles in crop and food science. AI reduces the time and resources needed to experiment with new food products and turns traditional trial-and-error cycles into more efficient data-driven discoveries. Advanced models and simulations enable scientists to explore natural ingredients and processes by simulating thousands of conditions, configurations, and genetic variations until they crack the right combination. 

AI is bringing data-driven insights to a fragmented supply chain. AI can revolutionize the food industry’s complex value chain by breaking operational silos and translating vast streams of data into actionable intelligence. Notably, large language models (LLMs) and chatbots can serve as digital interpreters, democratizing access to data analysis for farmers and growers, and enabling more informed, strategic decisions by food companies. 

Partnerships are crucial for maximizing respective strengths. While large agricultural companies lead in AI implementation, promising breakthroughs often emerge from strategic collaborations that leverage complementary strengths with academic institutions and startups. Large companies contribute extensive datasets and industry experience, while startups bring innovation, creativity, and a clean data slate. Combining expertise in a collaborative approach can increase the uptake of AI. 

Download the full report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.