2026-02-25 21:10:00
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 Crime issue
Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse. But those same new technologies that have allowed crime to outpace law have also reenergized law enforcement and government—offering new ways to root out crime, to gather evidence, to surveil people.
That tension is the key to our new March/April issue. Thanks to technologies like cryptocurrency and off-the-shelf autonomous autopilots, there’s never been a better time to do crime. And thanks to pervasive surveillance and digital infrastructure, there’s never been a better time to fight it—sometimes at the expense of what we used to think of as fundamental civil rights.
Here’s a sneak peek at what you can expect:
+ The fascinating story of what happened when cyber security researcher Allison Nixon decided to track down the mysterious online figures threatening to kill her. Read the full story.
+ AI is already making online crimes easier, but those reports of AI-powered superhacks are seriously overblown. Here’s why.
+ Welcome to the dark side of crypto’s permissionless dream.
+ Chicago is home to a vast monitoring system to track its residents, including tens of thousands of surveillance cameras. But while law enforcement claims it’s necessary to protect public safety, privacy activists have likened it to a surveillance panopticon. Read the full story.
+ Modern thieves are stealing luxury cars right from under their manufacturers’ and owners’ noses. But how are they doing it?
+ How uncrewed narco submarines are poised to shake up how drug smugglers attempt to evade law enforcement.
+ How innovative conservationists are using tech to fight back against wildlife traffickers—including by turning rhinos radioactive.
Why 2026 is the year for sodium-ion batteries
Sodium-based batteries could be a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium-ion, and the technology is finally making its way into cars—and energy storage arrays on the grid.
They’re also one of MIT Technology Review‘s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026, and we’re holding a subscriber-only Roundtables discussion to explain why. Join our science editor Mary Beth Griggs, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart and China reporter Caiwei Chen to explore the present moment for sodium-ion batteries—and what’s coming next.
We’ll be going live at 1pm ET this afternoon—register now!
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The Pentagon has given Anthropic an ultimatum
Either provide the US military with full access to Claude, or face the consequences. (Axios)
+ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to cut ties. (WSJ $)
+ In turn, Anthropic has allegedly refused to ease military restrictions. (Reuters)
2 Meta has signed a major chip deal with AMD
Just days after it committed to using millions of Nvidia chips to power its AI ambitions. (CNBC)
3 How Jeffrey Epstein infiltrated Microsoft’s upper ranks
He was privy to confidential insider discussions about internal politics and gave advice on the line of CEO succession. (NYT $)
+ A smash-hit podcast about the Epstein files is entirely AI-generated. (Fast Company $)
4 Chatbot-assisted cheating is just a part of student life
Teenagers are regularly asking for—and may grow dependent on—AI’s assistance. (WP $)
+ You need to talk to your kid about AI. Here are 6 things you should say. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How Ukraine built an entire drone industry from scratch
And hopes to sell its expertise to Western allies once the war is over. (New Scientist $)
+ Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war. (MIT Technology Review)
6 The FDA has removed a warning against ineffective autism treatments
The page urged Americans not to fall for alternative remedies including chlorine dioxide. (Undark)
7 Solar power is going from strength to strength in the US
Usage was up 35% last year in comparison to the previous year. (Ars Technica)
8 How big is infinity?
Maybe one size doesn’t fit all. (Quanta Magazine)
9 Warning: someone near you is wearing smartglasses
That’s the premise behind new app Nearby Glasses, which detects the devices’ Bluetooth signals. (404 Media)
10 Uber employees run ideas past an AI version of their CEO
Very good, very normal. (Insider $)
+ Synthesia’s AI clones are more expressive than ever. Soon they’ll be able to talk back. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“This has nothing to do with mass surveillance and autonomous weapons being used.”
—A senior defense official tells the Washington Post that the Pentagon hasn’t proposed using any of Anthropic’s AI tools in ways that aren’t lawful, after the department threatened to force the company to share its technology.
One more thing
These scientists are working to extend the life span of pet dogs—and their owners
Matt Kaeberlein is what you might call a dog person. He has grown up with dogs and describes his German shepherd, Dobby, as “really special.” But Dobby is 14 years old—around 98 in dog years.
Kaeberlein is co-director of the Dog Aging Project, an ambitious research effort to track the aging process of tens of thousands of companion dogs across the US. He is one of a handful of scientists on a mission to improve, delay, and possibly reverse that process to help them live longer, healthier lives.
And dogs are just the beginning. One day, this research could help to prolong the lives of humans. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
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.)
+ As if dinosaur eggs weren’t cool enough, it turns out they’re also a pretty handy aging indicator for other fossils.
+ This week would have marked Steve Jobs’ 71st birthday. His Stanford Commencement Address is still one of the best.
+ I need to play Capybara Simulator immediately: a game in which you can become a capybara.
+ Good news everyone—it looks like we’ve avoided a bananapocalypse 
2026-02-25 19:00:00
Eons ago, in 2012, I had a weird experience. My iPhone suddenly shut down. When I restarted it, I found it was totally reset—clean, like a new device. This was the early days of iOS, so I wasn’t too concerned until I went to connect it to my computer to restore it from a backup. But when I flipped open the lid of my laptop, it too was mid-restart. And then, suddenly, the screen went gray. It was being remotely wiped. I turned on my iPad. It, too, had been wiped. I was being hacked.
Frantically, I shut down all my devices, unplugged everything connected to the internet in my house, turned off my router, and went next door to use my neighbors’ computer and find out what was going on. Deepening my panic, I realized hackers had also gained control of, and nuked, my Google account. Worse, they were in control of my Twitter, which they were gleefully using to spew all sorts of vile comments. It was nasty.
You have to remember, this was before all of us lived with a constant rain of text messages and emails designed to elicit the information necessary to pull something like this off. These crooks hadn’t brute-forced their way in, or used any sort of sophisticated techniques to gain access to my accounts. Instead, they had relied on publicly available information, and a fake credit card number, to socially engineer their way into my Amazon account, where they looked up the last four digits of my real credit card number. Then they used that information to get into Apple. And because that account was linked to my Gmail, and that to my Twitter, it gave them the keys to everything.
But what really troubled me was what I learned as I followed up on my hack over the ensuing weeks and months: This kind of thing was, while still novel, becoming more common. Some version of what happened to me had happened to lots of other people. The kids who were responsible—it was a couple of kids—weren’t criminal masterminds. They had just found a gap, a place where a technology was now commonplace but its risks and exploitable surface areas weren’t yet fully understood. I just happened to have all my stuff in the gap. Today that gap might feature a crypto wallet or a deepfake of a loved one’s voice. (Or both.)
Crime changes.
The goals stay the same—pursuit of value, pursuit of power—but new technologies create new vulnerabilities, new tactics, and new ways for perpetrators to evade discovery or capture. And the law necessarily lags behind. Relying not on innovation but on precedent, it is intentionally backward-looking and slow. That plodding consideration used to be how we protected our shared democratic society, how we protected each other from each other.
But those same new technologies that have allowed crime to outpace law have also reenergized law enforcement and government—offering new ways to root out crime, to gather evidence, to surveil people. Think, for example, of how cold-case investigators tracked down the Golden State Killer years after his murders, using DNA samples and genealogy databases—launching a new era of DNA-powered investigations.
Technology has long made crime and its prosecution a game of cat and mouse. It sometimes calls into question the nature of crime itself. Unregulated behaviors, facilitated by technology, can exist in murky zones of dubious legality. (Until TikTok announced its new ownership structure, Apple and Google were both technically breaking the law by allowing the app to stay on their platforms, under the provisions of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Ah! Well. Nevertheless.)
That tension is the key to our March/April issue. Thanks to technologies like cryptocurrency and off-the-shelf autonomous autopilots, there’s never been a better time to do crime. Thanks to pervasive surveillance and digital infrastructure, there’s never been a better time to fight it—sometimes at the expense of what we used to think of as fundamental civil rights.
I never pressed charges against the kids who hacked me. The biggest consequence of the hack was that Apple set up two-factor authentication in the following months, which felt like a win. Now I’m not sure anyone expects their personal data to be secure in any meaningful way. I’m certain, though, that somewhere on the net, a new generation of kids is coming up with another novel crime.
2026-02-25 19:00:00
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is one of the best shows on television right now. Not one of the best reality TV shows, but one of the best TV shows, period. Chronicling a shifting group of wealthy women in and around Salt Lake, the show has featured a convicted felon whom federal agents came looking for while cameras were rolling, a church leader married to her step-grandfather, and a single mom in an exhausting on-again, off-again relationship with an Osmond. In one season, there was an ongoing argument between two cast members after one told the other that she “smelled like hospital.” Later, one woman was secretly running an anonymous gossip Instagram about her fellow housewives. We can debate the “reality” of reality television, and it’s certainly true that these characters and scenarios are far-fetched. But every single person is dealing with something relatable—difficult marriages, failing businesses, strained relationships with children, addiction. It’s entertainment, and high camp, but I find that I still have a lot of empathy for these people.
Facebook sucks. That’s not controversial to say, right? But there is one reason I still have a Facebook account: my neighborhood Buy Nothing group. The spirit of community and camaraderie is alive and well there—and probably in yours, too. A non-exhaustive list of things I have given away: empty candle jars, a bookcase, used lightbulbs, unopened toiletries, bubble wrap. I’ve scored a few good things as well: a gorgeous antique dresser that I refinished, some over-the-door hooks, and brand-new jeans. It makes me happy to know that stuff that would’ve otherwise ended up in a landfill is bringing one of my neighbors joy.
I used to wear an Apple Watch a lot. I’m a pretty active person, and I liked tracking my workouts and my steps. But after I’d had it for a while, my watch started dying in the middle of a 30-minute run; it became useless to me, and I gave it up completely. Guess what? I’m happier. I feel more present when I’m not checking how much time is left in a yoga class or reading texts during a long run. The amount of data it gathered about me was also stressing me out, and it wasn’t useful. And I don’t need a wearable to tell me how poorly I slept! Trust me, I already know.
2026-02-25 19:00:00
The boom of a calving glacier. The crackling rumble of a wildfire. The roar of a surging storm front. They’re the noises of the living Earth, music of this one particular sphere and clues to the true nature of these dramatic events. But as loud as all these things are, they emit even more acoustic energy below the threshold of human hearing, at frequencies of 20 hertz or lower. These “infrasounds” have such long wavelengths that they can travel around the globe as churning emanations of distant events. But humans have never been able to hear them.
Until now, that is. Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World, a new album by the musician and artist Brian House, condenses 24 hours of these rumbles into 24 minutes of the most basic of bass lines, putting a new spin on the idea of ambient music. Sound, even infrasound, is really just variations in air pressure. So House built a set of three “macrophones,” tubes that funnel air into a barometer capable of taking readings 100 times a second. From the quiet woods of western Massachusetts, House can pick up what the planet is laying down. Then he speeds the recording up by a factor of 60 so that it’s audible to the wee ears of humans. “I am really interested in the layers of perception that we can’t access,” he says. “It’s not only low sound, but it’s also distant sound. That kind of blew my mind.”
House’s album is art, but scientists made it possible. Barometers picked up the 1883 eruption of the South Pacific volcano Krakatoa as far away as London. And today, a global network of infrasound sensors helps enforce the nuclear test ban treaty. A few infrasound experts—like Leif Karlstrom, a volcanologist at the University of Oregon who uses infrasound to study Mount Kilauea in Hawaii—helped House set up his music-gathering array and better understand what he was hearing. “He’s highlighting interesting phenomena,” Karlstrom says, even though it’s impossible to tell exactly what is making each specific sound.
So how’s the actual music? It’s 24 minutes of an otherworldly chorus, alternating between low grumbling vibrations and soft ghostlike whispers. A high-pitched whistle? Could be a train, House says. An intense low-octave rattle? Maybe a distant thunderstorm or a shifting ocean current. “For me, it’s about the mystery of it,” he says. “I hope that’s a little bit unsettling.” But it also might connect someone listening to a wider—and deeper—world.
Monique Brouillette is a freelance writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
2026-02-25 06:00:00
In the horticultural world, some vines are especially grabby. As they grow, the woody tendrils can wrap around obstacles with enough force to pull down fences and trees.
Inspired by vines’ twisty tenacity, engineers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a robotic gripper that can snake around and lift a variety of objects and even people, offering a gentler approach than conventional gripper designs.
The new bot consists of a pressurized box from which long, vine-like tubes inflate and grow. As they extend, the vines twist and coil around the object before continuing back toward the box, where their tips are automatically clamped in place and they are mechanically wound back up to gently lift the object in a sling-like grasp.
The researchers envision applications from agricultural harvesting to loading and unloading heavy cargo. In the near term, they are exploring uses in eldercare, such as helping to safely lift a person out of bed. Often in nursing and rehabilitation settings, this transfer process is done with a patient lift, which requires a caretaker to maneuver the person onto a hammock-like sheet that can be hooked to the device and hoisted up. This manual step is unnecessary with the robotic system.
“Transferring a person out of bed is one of the most physically strenuous tasks that a caregiver carries out,” says Kentaro Barhydt, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and one of the lead authors of a paper on the work. “This kind of robot can help relieve the caretaker, and can be gentler and more comfortable for the patient.”
The key to the system, whose design was developed by Professor Harry Asada’s lab at MIT and Professor Allison Okamura’s lab at Stanford, is that it combines “open loop” and “closed loop” actions. In an open-loop configuration, a robotic vine can grow and twist around an object, even burrowing under someone lying on a bed. Then it can continue to grow back toward its base and attach to a winch, creating a closed loop that can be retracted to lift the object.
“People might assume that in order to grab something, you just reach out and grab it,” Barhydt says. “But there are different stages, such as positioning and holding. By transforming between open and closed loops, we can achieve new levels of performance by leveraging the advantages of both forms for their respective stages.”
While the team’s design was initially motivated by challenges in eldercare, it can also be adapted to other grasping tasks. A smaller version has been attached to a commercial robotic arm to lift a variety of heavy and fragile objects, including a watermelon, a glass vase, and a kettlebell. The vines can also snake through a cluttered bin to pull out a desired object.
“We think this kind of robot design can be adapted to many applications,” Barhydt says. “We are also thinking about applying this to heavy industry, and things like automating the operation of cranes at ports and warehouses.”
2026-02-25 06:00:00
Antibody treatments for cancer and other diseases are typically delivered intravenously, requiring patients to go to a hospital and potentially spend hours receiving infusions. Now Professor Patrick Doyle and his colleagues have taken a major step toward reformulating antibodies so that they can be injected with a standard syringe, making treatment easier and more accessible.
The obstacle to injecting these drugs is that they are formulated at low concentrations, so very large volumes are needed per dose. Decreasing the volume to the capacity of a standard syringe would mean increasing the concentration so much that the solution would be too thick to be injected.
In 2023, Doyle’s lab developed a way to generated highly concentrated antibody formulations by encapsulating them into hydrogel particles. However, that requires centrifugation, a step that would be difficult to scale up for manufacturing.
In their new study, the researchers took a different approach that instead uses a microfluidic setup. Droplets containing antibodies dissolved in a watery prepolymer solution are suspended in an organic solvent and can then be dehydrated, leaving behind highly concentrated solid antibodies within a hydrogel matrix. Finally, the solvent is removed and replaced with an aqueous solution.
Using semi-solid particles 100 microns in diameter, the team showed that the force needed to push the plunger of a syringe containing the solution was less than 20 newtons. “That is less than half of the maximum acceptable force that people usually try to aim for,” says Talia Zheng, an MIT graduate student who is the lead author of the new study.
More than 700 milligrams of the antibody—enough for most therapeutic applications—could be administered at once with a two-milliliter syringe. The formulations remained stable under refrigeration for at least four months. The researchers now plan to test the particles in animals and work on scaling up the manufacturing process.
