2026-08-14 20:17:21
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 police-tech giant Flock is changing officers’ access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move comes amid a backlash over mass surveillance and reports of officers using the technology to stalk and harass current or former romantic partners.
To combat that, the company will require them to enter a criminal case number before searching its database and expand automated auditing of suspicious searches. But because Flock won’t verify those case numbers, officers could still find ways around the safeguards.
Here’s what Flock is changing—and where loopholes remain.
—James O’Donnell
—Jessica Hamzelou
This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice.
They hope their approach could be helpful in conservation efforts, especially in cases where we might have only a few individuals of a species left. But cloning has multiple uses, ranging from genetically modifying livestock to recreating beloved pets and potentially even creating “brainless” replicas of humans.
Find out what cloning can do now, and where it could lead next.
This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.
In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation about the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious attempt to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was floored, and then concerned. The project’s researchers had only made plans to study adults. “That’s when my little alarm went off,” she says. “Not again.”
Children’s cells are different from grownups’ cells in the way they express genes, which can cause drastically different and even deadly responses to drugs that adults tolerate well. Taylor has since pushed the Human Cell Atlas to include children and is working on a major database of healthy pediatric tissue.
The goal is to give researchers a baseline for how children develop—and potentially reveal how diseases that emerge in adulthood begin much earlier.
Meet the scientist building a cellular map of childhood.
—Colleen de Bellefonds
This story is from the next issue of our print magazine, which is all about kids. Subscribe now to read it when it lands.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Ukrainian drones defeated US forces in a military exercise
They wiped out an American tank brigade in the war game. (WSJ $)
+ The drill exposed US vulnerabilities to drone attacks. (Ars Technica)
+ Trump just declared 100% tariffs on many drones. (Verge)
+ Europe has a drone-filled vision for future wars. (MIT Technology Review)
2 OpenAI and Anthropic are cutting prices to compete with Chinese AI
Rising AI bills are pushing companies toward cheaper models. (FT $)
+ China’s Z.ai aims to rival Anthropic and OpenAI in coding. (Bloomberg $)
+ While DeepSeek is rapidly pushing up API prices. (Quartz)
3 Apple has trained its own AI model for China with support from Alibaba
A China-tailored model of its own could give Apple greater control. (Reuters $)
+ And make it the first foreign firm with a Beijing-approved AI model. (Verge)
+ Chinese AI has divided the White House. (MIT Technology Review)
4 US efforts to build humanoid robots face a Chinese supply chain
To build an affordable device, you need Chinese parts. (NYT $)
+ Chinese humanoids have business concerns of their own. (CNBC)
+ Gig workers are training humanoids at home. (MIT Technology Review)
5 People are “marrying” chatbots. Lawmakers want to stop it.
Their interventions are a response to the rise of AI companion apps. (Wired $)
+ Chatbots are pushing us toward a post-human internet. (NYT $)
6 Researchers have cast doubts over Anthropic’s new AI watermarks
The marks can disappear when text is rewritten. (Nature)
7 AI is scrambling the political map
Data centers and surveillance are creating unlikely political alliances. (Axios)
8 Oxygen has been found nearly two miles underground
Earth’s deep biosphere could support more life than thought. (New Yorker $)
9 A new study challenges our understanding of how memories are stored
Mice retained memories after losing half of their synapses. (New Scientist $)
10 An Indian startup is testing cancer-sniffing dogs for early detection
AI interprets the dogs’ responses to patients’ breath samples. (Bloomberg $)
Quote of the day
—A former OpenAI employee tells Wired that the company’s rogue agent hack was a watershed moment for AI safety and cybersecurity.
One More Thing
Startups flush with cash are building AI-assisted laboratories to find materials far faster and more cheaply. But they’re still waiting for their ChatGPT moment.
By far the most time-consuming and expensive step in materials discovery is not imagining new structures but making them in the real world. Before synthesizing a material, you don’t know if it can actually be made or whether it will have the properties you want.
Now startups like Lila Sciences and Periodic Labs are building labs where AI agents can design experiments, control robots, and analyze results, potentially shortening the discovery process from decades to a few years or less.
Discover what it will take to turn AI’s predictions into real materials.
—David Rotman
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.)
+ Astronomers have created the largest-ever 2D map of the universe.
+ Lose yourself in the most breathtaking photos of the total solar eclipse.
+ Musician Andy Brewer has virtuosically composed an entire song with nothing but equalization.
+ Step inside the National Gallery’s Imaginarium, a virtual art world where masterpieces become digital adventures. (Big thanks to reader Peter Ryan for the find!)
2026-08-14 17:00:00
This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allowed them to create female clones of male mice.
That’s right: female animals that are genetically identical to males, except for the missing Y chromosome. Takashi Ishiuchi, a reproductive biologist at the University of Yamanashi who co-led the work, told me it felt a bit like sci-fi.
Ishiuchi and his colleague Shogo Matoba of the Riken BioResource Research Center hope their approach could be helpful in conservation efforts, especially in cases where we might have only a few individuals of a species left. But cloning has multiple uses, ranging from the cool to the outright creepy.
We can’t talk about cloning without mentioning Dolly, the celebrity sheep born in 1996 and the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult cell. In that case, scientists took the DNA-containing nucleus of an adult mammary cell from one sheep and transferred it into an egg cell that had had its own nucleus removed. The resulting embryo was transferred to a surrogate sheep, which gave birth to Dolly—an animal genetically identical to the DNA donor.
The scientists behind that work were interested in genetically modifying livestock. Farmers have essentially been doing this for thousands of years through selective breeding, but cloning allows scientists to create genetic replicas of animals with desirable traits.
Cloning is also being used to replicate deceased pets, including, famously, those of Barbra Streisand and Tom Brady, among others. For a price somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars, a company can take cells from your pet and turn them into a living, breathing clone.
Considering that cloning also requires egg cells from another animal, and a surrogate animal to carry the pregnancy, not everyone is on board with this, especially since there is no medical or environmental need for the procedures. One bioethicist, Jessica Pierce, has described this aspect of dog cloning as “the exploitation of the canine underclass.”
The case for cloning is stronger when it comes to conservation—where some argue there is environmental value.
Scientists have been preserving animal tissues for years. Some of these tissues are cryopreserved at low temperatures in “frozen zoos.” The facility at the San Diego Zoo, for example, currently has cells from over 1,300 species. Some of these samples were taken decades ago.
Preserved tissues like these have enabled scientists to create clones of animals considered close to extinction, including black-footed ferrets and Przewalski’s horse. But they might also help us bring back extinct animals.
In 2009, researchers in Spain described how they’d cloned an extinct wild goat, the Pyrenean ibex, using skin cells that had been cryopreserved a decade earlier. In that research, the team used egg cells from domestic goats to create a total of 439 embryos. Ultimately, only one goat—a female—was born. She died minutes later because of a defect in her lungs.
Poor Pyrenean ibex. It’s the only animal we know of that has gone extinct twice.
The biotech company Colossal Biosciences is hoping to use old—and potentially ancient—genetic material to bring back long-extinct species like the thylacine and woolly mammoth. So far, the company’s efforts have largely involved modifying the genomes of modern-day animals.
Technically, it’s also possible to clone humans. As far as we know, no one has done it. But some have played with the idea. One biotech startup founder has pitched an idea for “brainless clones”—human clones that lack a brain but contain all the organs people might need to replace their own in future. My colleague Antonio Regalado described that pitch in March. (I had to pause eating my lunch while rereading it.)
Scientists have done a hell of a lot with cloning over the last few decades. I’m excited—but also slightly nervous—about what the coming decades will bring.
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.
2026-08-14 17:00:00
Roman Chiporukha has long turned wild travel dreams into reality. Over two decades as co-owner of the luxury lifestyle firm Roman & Erica, he has orchestrated everything from the construction of a client’s superyacht to vacations in the Bahamas at a location so private that guests must sign an NDA.
The experiences earned him “the ear,” he says, “of the ultra-high-net-worth audience.” It also led to a life-changing phone call: In 2018, Axiom Space wanted to find three citizen explorers willing to pay $50 million each to join the first fully private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), slated for April 2022.
This showed Chiporukha that the sky was no longer the limit; it was the market. He successfully signed up the private astronauts and then launched SpaceVIP in 2021 to offer celestial experiences that mix culture, science, and purpose.
Here’s what it takes to become the Expedia of the cosmos.
Chiporukha isn’t an astronaut or aerospace engineer, so he had to fast-track his own education on the nuances of commercial spaceflight. To help private citizens skip the rocket-science headache, he has wrangled the highly fragmented space sector into a single, seamless digital portal, so adventurers can investigate suborbital flights and far-out itineraries as effortlessly as they would a weekend getaway. But he insists they still need an expert fixer who can secure “the perks, the custom requests, and the upgrades.”
SpaceVIP receives dozens of inquires a month, but Chiporukha helps just a small, exclusive roster design custom adventures based on their budgets and physical comfort zones. Acting as a bridge between starry-eyed dreamers and strict aerospace parameters, he works with operators like Axiom for multiday stays on the ISS, and with Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic for other excursions. Spacefarers can choose, for example, a zero-gravity parabolic flight or a smooth six-hour voyage aboard a stratospheric balloon 15 miles above Earth—an option he says is “relatively affordable,” if you’re a person for whom a few hundred thousand dollars isn’t that much.
Making space travel widespread is an uphill climb in terms of cost and technology. But, Chiporukha adds, more people simply need to be interested. He cofounded the Space Prize Foundation, a nonprofit that runs science competitions for young women and groups underrepresented in STEM. Winners get zero-gravity flights and entry into immersive astronaut-training programs. “Making space more mainstream isn’t just about bringing down the cost of a ticket,” he says. “It’s about creating pathways into the industry and helping people understand that this future shouldn’t belong to a tiny group.”
Linda Childers is a California-based freelance journalist who writes about science, education, and health.
2026-08-14 17:00:00
In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, just a short walk from her office. A researcher was there to unveil the Human Cell Atlas, an ambitious project that aimed to map every cell in the human body. Taylor was floored, and then concerned. As details emerged, she discovered that the project’s researchers had only made plans to study adults. “That’s when my little alarm went off,” she says. “Not again.”
Since joining the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as the director of bioinformatics three years earlier, Taylor had been disappointed by the lack of investment in medical research focused on children. The dominant view, she says, was that children are exactly like small adults. They’re not. Children’s cells are different from grownups’ cells in the way they express genes—switching them on and off or turning them up or down. Those variations can cause drastically different and even deadly responses to drugs that adults tolerate well.
The 2017 talk was the moment Taylor didn’t know she’d been waiting for. She quickly channeled her concern into a campaign, joining the Human Cell Atlas’s volunteer team and helping write a section on children for a white paper outlining the group’s goals and plans. She then rallied a cross-hospital coalition of pediatric researchers to contribute to the project and spearheaded a 2019 paper that outlined the case for studying children—a bid to attract more interest and funding to the field. “It put a flag in the ground,” she says. “Why don’t we have healthy models of children’s development?”
So far, the push has paid off. In 2021 the NIH awarded a $38.5 million grant to the Developmental Genotype-Tissue Expression Project (dGTEx), a major initiative aimed at establishing the first comprehensive database of healthy pediatric tissue. The project banks samples collected from otherwise healthy children who have died and whose parents agreed to donate their bodies, and maps how genes across all the major organ systems are expressed. Taylor and her team curate and standardize the information associated with each tissue donation, including family history and details about the samples. A separate group does analysis on the samples themselves, and then all the information is combined to create a database—a baseline of what gene expression looks like in children. It’s the first step to enabling research that could advance our knowledge of normal development, disease, drug effectiveness, and other phenomena.
The dGTEx team will eventually feed its data into the Human Cell Atlas, which, thanks to Taylor and many of the coauthors of the 2019 paper, now includes a pediatric section.
Taylor’s primary responsibility may be collecting and organizing data for dGTEx, but colleagues say she’s also the glue holding diverse research projects together. That’s especially important for the Human Cell Atlas, which depends on contributions from a loose coalition of researchers, all pursuing their own objectives. “Deanne took a big-picture view and said, We don’t just need to understand the pediatric kidney or the pediatric brain or the pediatric immune system. We need a holistic view of pediatric development,” says Sarah Teichmann, a cofounder of the Human Cell Atlas. “She embodies that interdisciplinary spirit.”
Taylor describes her career as a “random walk,” driven by a singular intensity she now attributes to undiagnosed autism and ADHD. At five, she began reading her mom’s medical texts. By 12, she was checking out physics books from the library. Physics provided mysteries to solve, and she wanted to understand how things worked.
Taylor got her PhD in biophysics, in 2001, but was inspired by the then-active Human Genome Project to change gears and take on a postdoc at Pfizer, writing code to handle complex data in rare-disease research. Then she moved to reproductive medicine, where she worked on some of the first computer programs to screen embryos for chromosomal abnormalities—many of which are still in use today.
Despite this seemingly winding road, Taylor says her focus has always been on understanding why the same illness hits people differently. How can two people carry the same disease-associated gene variant, but only one get sick?
The Human Cell Atlas—including all the data feeding into it from dGTEx and other projects—could at last help researchers find answers. The effort is a natural extension of the Human Genome Project. That initiative, which wrapped up in 2003, helped researchers link specific genes to specific diseases. But a map of the genome is a bit like a DIY kit with all the parts and no assembly manual. It doesn’t tell you where and how cells use each gene throughout the body.
After all, “we’re just older kids,” Taylor says. “By ignoring the pediatric side of things, I think people are missing a window of intervention in human disease.”
For that, you need to know how the genes are expressed. Gene expression generally involves making a protein that does a specific job in the body, like building tissue or sending signals. Unlike DNA, which largely remains the same throughout our lives, the way the genes in DNA are expressed changes as we develop.
Differences in gene expression can determine whether a therapy will work—or could harm more than it helps. Because of the way cardiac genes are expressed in children, chemotherapy drugs can attack not only tumors but also children’s developing hearts, potentially causing lifelong damage. Other treatments can affect the entire body, sometimes triggering a reversible but potentially fatal immune-system reaction called cytokine release syndrome.
The dGTEx database aims to create a baseline for gene expression in children—a molecular map of how the body’s roughly 20,000 genes do their work in healthy tissue cells. It is only one of the collaborations Taylor manages. She’s a principal investigator for the Kids First Data Resource Center, which sequences diseased tissues collected from children enrolled in other studies nationwide. And she has been collaborating with researchers on HubMAP, an effort that’s building a resource complementary to the Human Cell Atlas, to secure funding to create 3D maps of children’s cells like the ones it’s already made for adults.
Extending such initiatives to children is important, Teichmann argues. Much of human development happens in childhood; key brain cells called astrocytes form in the first five years, for instance, and the immune system matures in puberty. “Those changes are really important to understand from a disease point of view,” she says. A granular view of how individual cells work “will change pediatric medicine, for sure.”
Taylor helps the dGTEx machine run, coordinating researchers across multiple organizations that each contribute different pieces to the puzzle. These include a nonprofit group that secures tissue samples from deceased children soon after death and CHOP pathologists who assess each sample’s quality and type. Tissues are frozen and stored for future researchers to use with the group’s permission, while samples are sent to organizations including the nonprofit Broad Institute, which analyze gene expression. Data streams in at all these steps—information that the Human Cell Atlas effort can eventually draw on.
This coordination is “like herding cats,” says Rebecca Linn, a pediatric pathologist at CHOP. “So many individuals with different goals.” Taylor says an important part of her role is mediating among participants. That means, for example, explaining to researchers who want to use dGTEx’s tissues that it’s impossible to divide a one-month-old’s tiny testes 20 ways.
Colleagues describe Taylor as a well-connected collaborator who unites people across diverse specialties—essential qualities for a multidisciplinary, international effort like the Human Cell Atlas. It also helps that Taylor is full of surprises. She has tattoos of Schrödinger’s and Boltzmann’s equations and dabbles in painting and photography; a nondescript rock from Burning Man, where she volunteered in the kitchen, sits on her desk. “She can make friends and be memorable through her interests and knowledge and questions about all these different subjects. It really draws you in,” says Linn.
Taylor, however, believes the life-changing potential of the work itself is enough to motivate colleagues. Comparing a sick person’s cells with the healthy, age-matched baseline the Human Cell Atlas provides could yield biomarkers of health and disease that could serve as drug targets or diagnostic markers. A pediatric chapter in that atlas could produce similar insights for children—and strengthen our understanding of how our genetics and environments affect health and disease at various stages of development.
Extending the atlas to children may even help reveal how adult diseases trace back to distinct signals in childhood, raising the possibility that we could screen for and treat chronic conditions years or even decades before they surface. That could not only improve outcomes but help people prevent debilitating symptoms before they ever develop. After all, “we’re just older kids,” Taylor says. “By ignoring the pediatric side of things, I think people are missing a window of intervention in human disease.”
Taylor hopes the project will shift how research views pediatrics. It’s a big goal, one that will require big data—and forces like her to help pull everything together.
Colleen de Bellefonds is a science journalist based in Paris.
2026-08-14 05:00:00
Listen to the session or watch below
The “censorship-industrial complex” is an idea that a network of government, tech, and research groups is collaborating to suppress conservative online speech. This was fodder for the right-wing information sphere for years—then it began making its way into US policy. Watch a conversation exploring how it started, where it’s going, and what it means for the future of democracy and the internet.
Speakers: Amy Nordrum, Executive Editor, Operations, and Eileen Guo, Senior Reporter, Features & Investigations
Recorded on August 13, 2026
Related Story:
2026-08-14 02:11:42
Quantum computing has alternated between breakthrough darling and overhyped promise in technology circles. Its powerful new capabilities come with a threat to break current cryptography, but for business leaders navigating the noise, the signal should be clear: post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is a manageable evolution, not a crisis.
The mathematics behind today’s encrypted digital transactions may yield to quantum computers one day, but the transition to quantum-resistant algorithms is neither sudden nor insurmountable. For executives concerned about disruption, cost, or complexity, a structured and phased approach exists with trusted technology partners like Intel that are already beginning to deliver the infrastructure to make it possible.
The “quantum threat” narrative often swings between two extremes: imminent catastrophe or distant irrelevance. The reality occupies a more pragmatic middle ground. Quantum computers are highly specialized accelerators that exploit quantum physics to solve specific hard problems. They have the potential to crack modern encryption, but they will not replace classic servers overnight, nor will they instantly break every encryption protocol on the internet. What they will do is gradually shift the security landscape, much as previous cryptographic transitions have done over the past three decades.
In late 2024, the Global Risk Institute, a Toronto-based financial services think tank, surveyed 32 quantum computing experts on when a quantum computer could break a 2048-bit RSA key within 24 hours. An average of optimistic and pessimistic estimates from the experts gave it an even 50-50 probability of reaching this code-breaking milestone by 2040. This timeline, uncertain but measurable, creates space for deliberate planning rather than emergency reaction. The near-term focus should be on “harvest now, decrypt later” scenarios, where adversaries collect encrypted data today and then hold it for future decryption later when that capability becomes possible. This is particularly applicable for information requiring confidentiality beyond 10 years.
For most enterprises, this can be a manageable risk when addressed through methodical modernization.
The U.S. government has issued new directives for National Security Systems (NSS), which would likely be first on the list for potential quantum attack. Beginning in January 2027, new NSS acquisitions must be capable of supporting Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite 2.0 (CNSA 2.0) requirements for PQC algorithms standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and selected by the National Security Agency, the U.S. intelligence agency responsible for signals intelligence and information assurance. Implementation for new systems (with certain exceptions) is then required by 2031, with 100% adoption targeted by 2035.
For commercial enterprises, these timelines are not mandates, but could be signposts. They indicate where vendors, standards bodies, and auditors are headed, providing a reference architecture for responsible stewardship. Organizations can borrow this discipline without necessarily copying the exact timelines, using government guidance to calibrate their own risk tolerance and investment cadence.
Intel is at the heart of the AI revolution by delivering quantum-resistant capabilities across our product portfolio. This is not just aspirational roadmap language; it is starting to be shipping technology.
For instance, the Intel Xeon 6 Processor already incorporates quantum-safe memory encryption (AES-256) and microcode signing to protect processor integrity. Upcoming platforms will extend post-quantum algorithms to more firmware and software signing, device interconnects, attestations, and secure boot functions, aligning with the most stringent government and industry directives.
Post-quantum algorithms carry different key sizes and computational overhead than legacy methods. Intel addresses this through dedicated cryptographic accelerators, optimized libraries, and specialized CPU instructions that reduce latency and preserve service-level agreements. Technologies such as Intel QuickAssist Technology offload cryptographic workloads, enabling enterprises to adopt stronger algorithms without sacrificing performance.
PQC is not a processor-alone problem. System builders and application owners must take a comprehensive view spanning solid-state drives, network interface cards, operating systems, hypervisors, applications, and connected services. Intel is delivering its pieces of the stack, while collaborating with ecosystem partners to ensure interoperability and smooth transition paths.
A more in-depth discussion of post-quantum algorithms and attacks can be found in my recent blog posted on Intel’s Community forum: “Post-Quantum Crypto: Panic Like It’s 1999?“
The path forward does not require upheaval, just discipline. Organizations can follow a phased approach that mirrors patterns emerging in government and critical infrastructure sectors:
Quantum computing will reshape cryptography, but despite what occasional click-bait headlines say, it will not upend business overnight. The transition to post-quantum algorithms is a measured, multi-year journey, one that organizations can navigate with confidence by partnering with capable technology providers, prioritizing long-lived data, and designing for agility. Leaders who approach this as an engineering evolution rather than a threat response will not only be ready for whatever timeline quantum delivers; they will emerge with more robust, transparent, and maintainable cryptographic foundations across their platforms.
This content was produced by Intel. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
