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Roundtables: Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product

Recorded on April 23, 2025 Brain-Computer Interfaces: From Promise to Product Speakers: David Rotman, editor at large, and Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have been crowned the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 by MIT Technology Review‘s readers. BCIs are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily...
The Download: introducing the Creativity 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. Introducing: the Creativity issue The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But…
3 Things Caiwei Chen is into right now

A new play about OpenAI I recently saw Doomers, a new play by Matthew Gasda about the aborted 2023 coup at OpenAI, here represented by a fictional company called MindMesh. The action is set almost entirely in a meeting room; the first act follows executives immediately after the firing of company CEO Seth (a stand-in…
Why we still need AM radio

Ariel Aberg-Riger is the author of America Redux: Visual Stories from Our Dynamic History.
Seeing AI as a collaborator, not a creator

The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago. I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things…
Building better cities

Clara Brenner, MBA ’12, arrived in Cambridge on the lookout for a business partner. She wanted to start her own company—and never have to deal with a boss again. She would go it alone if she had to, but she hoped to find someone whose skills would complement her own. It’s a common MBA tale.…
Inside-out learning

When the prison doors first closed behind him more than 50 years ago, Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, felt decidedly unsettled. In his first job out of college, as a researcher for a consulting company working on a project for the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, he had been tasked with interviewing incarcerated participants in…
Unleashing the potential of qubits, one molecule at a time

It all began with a simple origami model. As an undergrad at Harvard, Danna Freedman went to a professor’s office hours for her general chemistry class and came across an elegant paper model that depicted the fullerene molecule. The intricately folded representation of chemical bonds and atomic arrangements sparked her interest, igniting a profound curiosity…
The Institute’s greatest ambassadors

After decades of working as a biologist at a Southern school with a Division 1 football team, coming to MIT was a bit of a culture shock—in the best possible way. I’ve heard from MIT alumni all about late-night psetting, when to catch MITHenge, and the best way to celebrate Pi Day (with pie, of course).…
Bug-size robots that fly and flip could pollinate futuristic farms’ crops

Tiny flying robots could perform such useful tasks as pollinating crops inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture’s harmful impacts on the environment. The latest robo-bug from an MIT lab, inspired by the anatomy of the bee, comes closer to matching nature’s performance than ever before. Led by Kevin Chen, an associate…