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It feels like everyone is interested in nuclear power—but how much can we rely on it to meet rising electricity demand from data centers?

Every Wednesday, MIT Technology Review’s senior climate reporter, Casey Crownhart, dives into the biggest energy and climate tech stories of the week in her newsletter, The Spark.

Click the link in bio to sign up. (It’s free!)

When Jennifer got a research job in 2023, she ran her new professional headshot through a facial recognition program. She wanted to see whether it would pull up the porn videos she’d made more than a decade earlier. It did, but it also surfaced something she’d never seen before: one of her old videos, now featuring someone else’s face on her body.

Conversations about sexualized deepfakes usually focus on the people whose faces are inserted into explicit content without consent. But another group often gets ignored: the people whose bodies those faces are attached to. Adult content creators say AI systems are training on their work, cloning their likenesses, and generating explicit content they never agreed to make, all with little legal protection or control.

Click the link in bio to read the full story on the threat to their rights, livelihoods, and ownership of their own bodies.

NASA wants to fly the first nuclear reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft to Mars by the end of 2028. Experts say that’s … ambitious.

🚀 Click the link in bio to read the full story.

The US military says it wants AI models free of political bias. Is that even possible?

Every Monday, MIT Technology Review’s senior AI reporter, James O’Donnell, breaks down stories like this in his (free!) weekly newsletter, The Algorithm.

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Synthetic biologists were tantalized by the idea of making mirror images of microbes. Then things got complicated.

🦠 Click the link in bio to read the full story.

What is really worth your attention in the busy, buzzy world of AI? Our reporters and editors have spent years thinking about this question, charting AI’s progress and mapping out what’s next. Now, for the first time, we’ve distilled our answers into a single list.

The 10 things that matter in AI right now is a brand new look at the big ideas, trends, and new advances in AI that are driving progress or shifting power dynamics today—and will shape what’s possible tomorrow.

✨ Click the link in bio to explore the list.

On April 17, executives from Zoom, Tinder, and DocuSign went on stage to announce their partnerships with a project called “World,” which verifies that humans are, in fact, humans—and not AI bots.

World, previously known as Worldcoin, is part of Sam Altman’s vision for a world where AI is everywhere—and increasingly hard to tell apart from humans. Of course, the reason that humans may be hard to tell apart from bots is largely because of Sam Altman’s other company: OpenAI.

A few years ago, MIT Technology Review’s investigative reporter, @eileenguo_reports, wrote about Worldcoin. She and a team of reporters across the globe found that the company used questionable tactics to bring in new users, and its chrome orbs collected far more biometric data than the company acknowledged.

Click the link in bio to read our previous reporting. And if you’re asked to verify your humanness online with World ID, let us know at tips@technologyreview.com.

Introducing: The Nature issue.

Technology remade the world. Now what? As we work to understand how much our own ingenuity has created an increasingly unnatural world, we’re also confronting tough choices about what to preserve—and how. Plus: Killer microbes from the mirror universe and fresh fiction from Jeff VanderMeer.

🌲Click the link in bio to explore the full issue.

After operating in secrecy for years, a startup company called R3 Bio, in Richmond, California, suddenly shared details about its work last week—saying it had raised money to create nonsentient monkey “organ sacks” as an alternative to animal testing. But there is more to the story. And R3 doesn’t want that story told.

MIT Technology Review discovered that the stealth startup’s founder John Schloendorn also pitched a startling, medically graphic, and ethically charged vision for what he's called “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies.

Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver. Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.

The idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3’s clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by Schloendorn’s enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove.”

🧠 Click the link in bio to find out all the details on the company's radical proposal.

The Mars Sample Return mission got off to a promising start, hunting for potentially humanity-changing space rocks. How did it fall off the rails?

🪨 Click the link in bio to find out how the U.S. effectively ceded its pole position in the hunt for alien life to its greatest geopolitical rival: China.

The explosion of vehicle transport fraud follows a pattern that has played out across the economy over the past roughly two decades: A business that once ran on phones, faxes, and personal relationships shifted to online marketplaces that increased efficiency and brought down costs—but the reduction in human-to-human interaction introduced security vulnerabilities that allowed organized and often international fraudsters to enter the industry.

Click the link in bio to learn about the new wave of theft rocking the luxury car industry.

In 2024, the Mars Perseverance rover came across an intriguing rock. Instead of the usual crystals or layers of sediment, this one had spots. Two kinds, in fact: one that looked like poppy seeds, and another that resembled those on a leopard. It’s possible that run-of-the-mill chemical reactions could have cooked up these odd features. But on Earth, these marks are almost always produced by microbial life.

To put it plainly: Holy crap.

Sure, those specks are not definitive proof of alien life. But they are the best hint yet that life may not be a one-off event in the cosmos. And they meant the most existential question of all—Are we alone?—might soon be addressed.

But only way to confirm whether these seeds and spots are the fossilized imprint of alien biology is to bring a sample of that rock home to study.

Perseverance was the first stage of an ambitious scheme to do just that—in effect, to pull off a space heist. The mission—called Mars Sample Return and planned by the US, along with its European partners—would send a Rube Goldberg–like series of robotic missions to the planet to capture pristine rocks.

But now, just over a year and a half later, the project is on life support, with zero funding flowing in 2026 and little backing left in Congress. In the race to find evidence of alien life, America has effectively ceded its pole position to its greatest geopolitical rival: China.

🚀 Click the link in bio to explore how America blew its massive lead in the new space race. Art by @cat_mover