2026-02-14 01:17:28
There are tears in the audience as Patrick Darling’s song begins to play. It’s a heartfelt song written for his great-grandfather, whom he never got the chance to meet. But this performance is emotional for another reason: It’s Darling’s first time on stage with his bandmates since he lost the ability to sing two years ago.
The 32-year-old musician was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) when he was 29 years old. Like other types of motor neuron disease (MND), it affects nerves that supply the body’s muscles. People with ALS eventually lose the ability to control their muscles, including those that allow them to move, speak, and breathe.
Darling’s last stage performance was over two years ago. By that point, he had already lost the ability to stand and play his instruments and was struggling to sing or speak. But recently, he was able to re-create his lost voice using an AI tool trained on snippets of old audio recordings. Another AI tool has enabled him to use this “voice clone” to compose new songs. Darling is able to make music again.
“Sadly, I have lost the ability to sing and play my instruments,” Darling said on stage at the event, which took place in London on Wednesday, using his voice clone. “Despite this, most of my time these days is spent still continuing to compose and produce my music. Doing so feels more important than ever to me now.”
Darling says he’s been a musician and a composer since he was around 14 years old. “I learned to play bass guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, melodica, mandolin, and tenor banjo,” he said at the event. “My biggest love, though, was singing.”
He met bandmate Nick Cocking over 10 years ago, while he was still a university student, says Cocking. Darling joined Cocking’s Irish folk outfit, the Ceili House Band, shortly afterwards, and their first gig together was in April 2014. Darling, who joined the band as a singer and guitarist, “elevated the musicianship of the band,” says Cocking.
But a few years ago, Cocking and his other bandmates started noticing changes in Darling. He became clumsy, says Cocking. He recalls one night when the band had to walk across the city of Cardiff in the rain: “He just kept slipping and falling, tripping on paving slabs and things like that.”
He didn’t think too much of it at the time, but Darling’s symptoms continued to worsen. The disease affected his legs first, and in August 2023, he started needing to sit during performances. Then he started to lose the use of his hands. “Eventually he couldn’t play the guitar or the banjo anymore,” says Cocking.
By April 2024, Darling was struggling to talk and breathe at the same time, says Cocking. For that performance, the band carried Darling on stage. “He called me the day after and said he couldn’t do it anymore,” Cocking says, his voice breaking. “By June 2024, it was done.” It was the last time the band played together.
Darling was put in touch with a speech therapist, who raised the possibility of “banking” his voice. People who are losing the ability to speak can opt to record themselves speaking and use those recordings to create speech sounds that can then be activated with typed text, whether by hand or perhaps using a device controlled by eye movements.
Some users have found these tools to be robotic sounding. But Darling had another issue. “By that stage, my voice had already changed,” he said at the event. “It felt like we were saving the wrong voice.”
Then another speech therapist introduced him to a different technology. Richard Cave is a speech and language therapist and a researcher at University College London. He is also a consultant for ElevenLabs, an AI company that develops agents and audio, speech, video, and music tools. One of these tools can create “voice clones”—realistic mimics of real voices that can be generated from minutes, or even seconds, of a person’s recorded voice.
Last year, ElevenLabs launched an impact program with a promise to provide free licenses to these tools for people who have lost their voices to ALS or other diseases, like head and neck cancer or stroke.
The tool is already helping some of those users. “We’re not really improving how quickly they’re able to communicate, or all of the difficulties that individuals with MND are going through physically, with eating and breathing,” says Gabi Leibowitz, a speech therapist who leads the program. “But what we are doing is giving them a way … to create again, to thrive.” Users are able to stay in their jobs longer and “continue to do the things that make them feel like human beings,” she says.
Cave worked with Darling to use the tool to re-create his lost speaking voice from older recordings.
“The first time I heard the voice, I thought it was amazing,” Darling said at the event, using the voice clone. “It sounded exactly like I had before, and you literally wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” he said. “I will not say what the first word I made my new voice say, but I can tell you that it began with ‘f’ and ended in ‘k.’”
Re-creating his singing voice wasn’t as easy. The tool typically requires around 10 minutes of clear audio to generate a clone. “I had no high-quality recordings of myself singing,” Darling said. “We had to use audio from videos on people’s phones, shot in noisy pubs, and a couple of recordings of me singing in my kitchen.” Still, those snippets were enough to create a “synthetic version of [Darling’s] singing voice,” says Cave.
In the recordings, Darling sounded a little raspy and “was a bit off” on some of the notes, says Cave. The voice clone has the same qualities. It doesn’t sound perfect, Cave says—it sounds human.
“The ElevenLabs voice that we’ve created is wonderful,” Darling said at the event. “It definitely sounds like me—[it] just kind of feels like a different version of me.”
ElevenLabs has also developed an AI music generator called Eleven Music. The tool allows users to compose tracks, using text prompts to choose the musical style. Several well-known artists have also partnered with the company to license AI clones of their voices, including the actor Michael Caine, whose voice clone is being used to narrate an upcoming ElevenLabs documentary. Last month, the company released an album of 11 tracks created using the tool. “The Liza Minnelli track is really a banger,” says Cave.
Eleven Music can generate a song in a minute, but Darling and Cave spent around six weeks fine-tuning Darling’s song. Using text prompts, any user can “create music and add lyrics in any style [they like],” says Cave. Darling likes Irish folk, but Cave has also worked with a man in Colombia who is creating Colombian folk music. (The ElevenLabs tool is currently available in 74 languages.)
Last month, Cocking got a call from Cave, who sent him Darling’s completed track. “I heard the first two or three words he sang, and I had to turn it off,” he says. “I was just in bits, in tears. It took me a good half a dozen times to make it to the end of the track.”
Darling and Cave were making plans to perform the track live at the ElevenLabs summit in London on Wednesday, February 11. So Cocking and bandmate Hari Ma each arranged accompanying parts to play on the mandolin and fiddle. They had a couple of weeks to rehearse before they joined Darling on stage, two years after their last performance together.
“I wheeled him out on stage, and neither of us could believe it was happening,” says Cave. “He was thrilled.” The song was played as Darling remained on stage, and Cocking and Ma played their instruments live.
Cocking and Cave say Darling plans to continue to use the tools to make music. Cocking says he hopes to perform with Darling again but acknowledges that, given the nature of ALS, it is difficult to make long-term plans.
“It’s so bittersweet,” says Cocking. “But getting up on stage and seeing Patrick there filled me with absolute joy. I know Patrick really enjoyed it as well. We’ve been talking about it … He was really, really proud.”
2026-02-13 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.
US deputy health secretary: Vaccine guidelines are still subject to change
Over the past year, Jim O’Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the country’s federal health and science agencies. He oversees a department with a budget of over a trillion dollars. And he signed the decision memorandum on the US’s deeply controversial new vaccine schedule.
He’s also a longevity enthusiast. In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review earlier this month, O’Neill described his plans to increase human healthspan through longevity-focused research supported by ARPA-H, a federal agency dedicated to biomedical breakthroughs. Fellow longevity enthusiasts said they hope he will bring attention and funding to their cause.
At the same time, O’Neill defended reducing the number of broadly recommended childhood vaccines, a move that has been widely criticized by experts in medicine and public health. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
The myth of the high-tech heist
Making a movie is a lot like pulling off a heist. That’s what Steven Soderbergh—director of the Ocean’s franchise, among other heist-y classics—said a few years ago. You come up with a creative angle, put together a team of specialists, figure out how to beat the technological challenges, rehearse, move with Swiss-watch precision, and—if you do it right—redistribute some wealth.
But conversely, pulling off a heist isn’t much like the movies. Surveillance cameras, computer-controlled alarms, knockout gas, and lasers hardly ever feature in big-ticket crime. In reality, technical countermeasures are rarely a problem, and high-tech gadgets are rarely a solution. Read the full story.
—Adam Rogers
This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is all about crime. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.
RFK Jr. follows a carnivore diet. That doesn’t mean you should.
Americans have a new set of diet guidelines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken an old-fashioned food pyramid, turned it upside down, and plonked a steak and a stick of butter in prime positions.
Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again mates have long been extolling the virtues of meat and whole-fat dairy, so it wasn’t too surprising to see those foods recommended alongside vegetables and whole grains (despite the well-established fact that too much saturated fat can be extremely bad for you).
Some influencers have taken the meat trend to extremes, following a “carnivore diet.” A recent review of research into nutrition misinformation on social media found that a lot of shared diet information is nonsense. But what’s new is that some of this misinformation comes from the people who now lead America’s federal health agencies. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
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 must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The Trump administration has revoked a landmark climate ruling
In its absence, it can erase the limits that restrict planet-warming emissions. (WP $)
+ Environmentalists and Democrats have vowed to fight the reversal. (Politico)
+ They’re seriously worried about how it will affect public health. (The Hill)
2 An unexplained wave of bot traffic is sweeping the web
Sites across the world are witnessing automated traffic that appears to originate from China. (Wired $)
3 Amazon’s Ring has axed its partnership with Flock
Law enforcement will no longer be able to request Ring doorbell footage from its users. (The Verge)
+ Ring’s recent TV ad for a dog-finding feature riled viewers. (WSJ $)
+ How Amazon Ring uses domestic violence to market doorbell cameras. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Americans are taking the hit for almost all of Trump’s tariffs
Consumers and companies in the US, not overseas, are shouldering 90% of levies. (Reuters)
+ Trump has long insisted that his tariffs costs will be borne by foreign exporters. (FT $)
+ Sweeping tariffs could threaten the US manufacturing rebound. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Meta and Snap say Australia’s social media ban hasn’t affected business
They’re still making plenty of money amid the country’s decision to ban under-16s from the platforms. (Bloomberg $)
+ Does preventing teens from going online actually do any good? (Economist $)
6 AI workers are selling their shares before their firms go public
Cashing out early used to be a major Silicon Valley taboo. (WSJ $)
7 Elon Musk posted about race almost every day last month
His fixation on a white racial majority appears to be intensifying. (The Guardian)
+ Race is a recurring theme in the Epstein emails, too. (The Atlantic $)
8 The man behind a viral warning about AI used AI to write it
But he stands behind its content.. (NY Mag $)
+ How AI-generated text is poisoning the internet. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Influencers are embracing Chinese traditions ahead of the New Year 
On the internet, no one knows you’re actually from Wisconsin. (NYT $)
10 Australia’s farmers are using AI to count sheep 
No word on whether it’s helping them sleep easier, though. (FT $)
Quote of the day
“Ignoring warning signs will not stop the storm. It puts more Americans directly in its path.”
—Former US secretary of state John Kerry takes aim at the US government’s decision to repeal the key rule that allows it to regulate climate-heating pollution, the Guardian reports.
One more thing
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready to transform our understanding of the cosmos
High atop Chile’s 2,700-meter Cerro Pachón, the air is clear and dry, leaving few clouds to block the beautiful view of the stars. It’s here that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon use a car-size 3,200-megapixel digital camera—the largest ever built—to produce a new map of the entire night sky every three days.
Findings from the observatory will help tease apart fundamental mysteries like the nature of dark matter and dark energy, two phenomena that have not been directly observed but affect how objects are bound together—and pushed apart.
A quarter-century in the making, the observatory is poised to expand our understanding of just about every corner of the universe. 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.)
+ Why 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the pop comeback.
+ Almost everything we thought we knew about Central America’s Maya has turned out to be completely wrong.
+ The Bigfoot hunters have spoken!
+ This fun game puts you in the shoes of a distracted man trying to participate in a date while playing on a GameBoy.
2026-02-13 19:00:00
Making a movie is a lot like pulling off a heist. That’s what Steven Soderbergh—director of the Ocean’s franchise, among other heist-y classics—said a few years ago. You come up with a creative angle, put together a team of specialists, figure out how to beat the technological challenges, rehearse, move with Swiss-watch precision, and—if you do it right—redistribute some wealth. That could describe either the plot or the making of Ocean’s Eleven.
But conversely, pulling off a heist isn’t much like the movies. Surveillance cameras, computer-controlled alarms, knockout gas, and lasers hardly ever feature in big-ticket crime. In reality, technical countermeasures are rarely a problem, and high-tech gadgets are rarely a solution. The main barrier to entry is usually a literal barrier to entry, like a door. Thieves’ most common move is to collude with, trick, or threaten an insider. Last year a heist cost the Louvre €88 million worth of antique jewelry, and the most sophisticated technology in play was an angle grinder.
The low-tech Louvre maneuvers were in keeping with what heist research long ago concluded. In 2014 US nuclear weapons researchers at Sandia National Laboratories took a detour into this demimonde, producing a 100-page report called “The Perfect Heist: Recipes from Around the World.” The scientists were worried someone might try to steal a nuke from the US arsenal, and so they compiled information on 23 high-value robberies from 1972 to 2012 into a “Heist Methods and Characteristics Database,” a critical mass of knowledge on what worked. Thieves, they found, dedicated huge amounts of money and time to planning and practice runs—sometimes more than 100. They’d use brute force, tunneling through sewers for months (Société Générale bank heist, Nice, France, 1976), or guile, donning police costumes to fool guards (Gardner Museum, Boston, 1990). But nobody was using, say, electromagnetic pulse generators to shut down the Las Vegas electrical grid. The most successful robbers got to the valuable stuff unseen and got out fast.
Advance the time frame, and the situation looks much the same. Last year, Spanish researchers looking at art crimes from 1990 to 2022 found that the least technical methods are still the most successful. “High-tech technology doesn’t work so well,” says Erin L. Thompson, an art historian at John Jay College of Justice who studies art crime. Speed and practice trump complicated systems and alarms; even that Louvre robbery was, at heart, just a minutes-long smash-and-grab.
An emphasis on speed doesn’t mean heists don’t require skill—panache, even. As the old saying goes, amateurs talk strategy; professionals study logistics. Even without gadgets, heists and heist movies still revel in an engineer’s mindset. “Heist movies absolutely celebrate deep-dive nerdery—‘I’m going to know everything I can about the power grid, about this kind of stone and drill, about Chicago at night,’” says Anna Kornbluh, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She published a paper last October on the ways heist movies reflect an Old Hollywood approach to collective art-making, while shows about new grift, like those detailing the rise and fall of WeWork or the con artist Anna Delvey, reflect the more lone-wolf, disrupt-and-grow mindset of the streaming era.
Her work might help explain why law-abiding citizens might cheer for the kinds of guys who’d steal a crown from the Louvre, or $100,000 worth of escargot from a farm in Champagne (as happened just a few weeks later). Heists, says Kornbluh, are anti-oligarch praxis. “Everybody wants to know how to be in a competent collective. Everybody wants there to be better logistics,” she says. “We need a better state. We need a better society. We need a better world.” Those are shared values—and as another old saying tells us, where there is value, there is crime.
2026-02-13 18:37:40
Over the past year, Jim O’Neill has become one of the most powerful people in public health. As the US deputy health secretary, he holds two roles at the top of the country’s federal health and science agencies. He oversees a department with a budget of over a trillion dollars. And he signed the decision memorandum on the US’s deeply controversial new vaccine schedule.
He’s also a longevity enthusiast. In an exclusive interview with MIT Technology Review earlier this month, O’Neill described his plans to increase human healthspan through longevity-focused research supported by ARPA-H, a federal agency dedicated to biomedical breakthroughs. At the same time, he defended reducing the number of broadly recommended childhood vaccines, a move that has been widely criticized by experts in medicine and public health.
In MIT Technology Review’s profile of O’Neill last year, people working in health policy and consumer advocacy said they found his libertarian views on drug regulation “worrisome” and “antithetical to basic public health.”
He was later named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, putting him in charge of the nation’s public health agency.
But fellow longevity enthusiasts said they hope O’Neill will bring attention and funding to their cause: the search for treatments that might slow, prevent, or even reverse human aging. Here are some takeaways from the interview.
Last month, the US cut the number of vaccines recommended for children. The CDC no longer recommends vaccinations against flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, or meningococcal disease for all children. The move was widely panned by medical groups and public health experts. Many worry it will become more difficult for children to access those vaccines. The majority of states have rejected the recommendations.
In the confirmation hearing for his role as deputy secretary of health and human services, which took place in May last year, O’Neill said he supported the CDC’s vaccine schedule. MIT Technology Review asked him if that was the case and, if so, what made him change his mind. “Researching and examining and reviewing safety data and efficacy data about vaccines is one of CDC’s obligations,” he said. “CDC gives important advice about vaccines and should always be open to new data and new ways of looking at data.”
At the beginning of December, O’Neill said, President Donald Trump “asked me to look at what other countries were doing in terms of their vaccine schedules.” He said he spoke to health ministries of other countries and consulted with scientists at the CDC and FDA. “It was suggested to me by lots of the operating divisions that the US focus its recommendations on consensus vaccines of other developed nations—in other words, the most important vaccines that are most often part of the core recommendations of other countries,” he said.
“As a result of that, we did an update to the vaccine schedule to focus on a set of vaccines that are most important for all children.”
But some experts in public health have said that countries like Denmark and Japan, whose vaccine schedules the new US one was supposedly modeled on, are not really comparable to the US. When asked about these criticisms, O’Neill replied, “A lot of parents feel that … more than 70 vaccine doses given to young children sounds like a really high number, and some of them ask which ones are the most important. I think we helped answer that question in a way that didn’t remove anyone’s access.”
A few weeks after the vaccine recommendations were changed, Kirk Milhoan, who leads the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said that vaccinations for measles and polio—which are currently required for entry to public schools—should be optional. (Mehmet Oz, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services director, has more recently urged people to “take the [measles] vaccine.”)
“CDC still recommends that all children are vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), Pneumococcal conjugate, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and human papillomavirus (HPV), for which there is international consensus, as well as varicella (chickenpox),” he said when asked for his thoughts on this comment.
He also said that current vaccine guidelines are “still subject to new data coming in, new ways of thinking about things.” “CDC, FDA, and NIH are initiating new studies of the safety of immunizations,” he added. “We will continue to ask the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to review evidence and make updated recommendations with rigorous science and transparency.”
O’Neill said he wants longevity to become a priority for US health agencies. His ultimate goal, he said, is to “make the damage of aging something that’s under medical control.” It’s “the same way of thinking” as the broader Make America Healthy Again approach, he said: “‘Again’ implies restoration of health, which is what longevity research and therapy is all about.”
O’Neill said his interest in longevity was ignited by his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech entrepreneur, around 2008 to 2009. It was right around the time O’Neill was finishing up a previous role in HHS, under the Bush administration. O’Neill said Thiel told him he “should really start looking into longevity and the idea that aging damage could be reversible.” “I just got more and more excited about that idea,” he said.
When asked if he’s heard of Vitalism, a philosophical movement for “hardcore” longevity enthusiasts who, broadly, believe that death is wrong, O’Neill replied: “Yes.”
The Vitalist declaration lists five core statements, including “Death is humanity’s core problem,” “Obviating aging is scientifically plausible,” and “I will carry the message against aging and death.” O’Neill said he agrees with all of them. “I suppose I am [a Vitalist],” he said with a smile, although he’s not a paying member of the foundation behind it.
As deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, O’Neill assumes a level of responsibility for huge and influential science and health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research) and the Food and Drug Administration (which oversees drug regulation and is globally influential) as well as the CDC.
Today, he said, he sees support for longevity science from his colleagues within HHS. “If I could describe one common theme to the senior leadership at HHS, obviously it’s to make America healthy again, and reversing aging damage is all about making people healthy again,” he said. “We are refocusing HHS on addressing and reversing chronic disease, and chronic diseases are what drive aging, broadly.”
Over the last year, thousands of NIH grants worth over $2 billion were frozen or terminated, including funds for research on cancer biology, health disparities, neuroscience, and much more. When asked whether any of that funding will be restored, he did not directly address the question, instead noting: “You’ll see a lot of funding more focused on important priorities that actually improve people’s health.”
He promised we’ll hear more from ARPA-H, the three-year-old federal agency dedicated to achieving breakthroughs in medical science and biotechnology. It was established with the official goal of promoting “high-risk, high-reward innovation for the development and translation of transformative health technologies.”
O’Neill said that “ARPA-H exists to make the impossible possible in health and medicine.” The agency has a new director—Alicia Jackson, who formerly founded and led a company focused on women’s health and longevity, took on the role in October last year.
O’Neill said he helped recruit Jackson, and that she was hired in part because of her interest in longevity, which will now become a major focus of the agency. He said he meets with her regularly, as well as with Andrew Brack and Jean Hébert, two other longevity supporters who lead departments at ARPA-H. Brack’s program focuses on finding biological markers of aging. Hebert’s aim is to find a way to replace aging brain tissue, bit by bit.
O’Neill is especially excited by that one, he said. “I would try it … Not today, but … if progress goes in a broadly good direction, I would be open to it. We’re hoping to see significant results in the next few years.”
He’s also enthused by the idea of creating all-new organs for transplantation. “Someday we want to be able to grow new organs, ideally from the patients’ own cells,” O’Neill said. An ARPA-H program will receive $170 million over five years to that end, he adds. “I’m very excited about the potential of ARPA-H and Alicia and Jean and Andrew to really push things forward.”
O’Neill said he also regularly talks to the team at the lobbying group Alliance for Longevity Initiatives. The organization, led by Dylan Livingston, played an instrumental role in changing state law in Montana to make experimental therapies more accessible. O’Neill said he hasn’t formally worked with them but thinks that “they’re doing really good work on raising awareness, including on Capitol Hill.”
Livingston has told me that A4LI’s main goals center around increasing support for aging research (possibly via the creation of a new NIH institute entirely dedicated to the subject) and changing laws to make it easier and cheaper to develop and access potential anti-aging therapies.
O’Neill gave the impression that the first goal might be a little overambitious—the number of institutes is down to Congress, he said. “I would like to get really all of the institutes at NIH to think more carefully about how many chronic diseases are usefully thought of as pathologies of aging damage,” he said. There’ll be more federal funding for that research, he said, although he won’t say more for now.
Some members of the longevity community have more radical ideas when it comes to regulation: they want to create their own jurisdictions designed to fast-track the development of longevity drugs and potentially encourage biohacking and self-experimentation.
It’s a concept that O’Neill has expressed support for in the past. He has posted on X about his support for limiting the role of government, and in support of building “freedom cities”—a similar concept that involves creating new cities on federal land.
Another longevity enthusiast who supports the concept is Niklas Anzinger, a German tech entrepreneur who is now based in Próspera, a private city within a Honduran “special economic zone,” where residents can make their own suggestions for medical regulations. Anzinger also helped draft Montana’s state law on accessing experimental therapies. O’Neill knows Anzinger and said he talks to him “once or twice a year.”
O’Neill has also supported the idea of seasteading—building new “startup countries” at sea. He served on the board of directors of the Seasteading Institute until March 2024.
In 2009, O’Neill told an audience at a Seasteading Institute conference that “the healthiest societies in 2030 will most likely be on the sea.” When asked if he still thinks that’s the case, he said: “It’s not quite 2030, so I think it’s too soon to say … What I would say now is: the healthiest societies are likely to be the ones that encourage innovation the most.”
When it comes to his own personal ambitions for longevity, O’Neill said, he takes a simple approach that involves minimizing sugar and ultraprocessed food, exercising and sleeping well, and supplementing with vitamin D. He also said he tries to “eat a diet that has plenty of protein and saturated fat,” echoing the new dietary guidance issued by the US Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture. That guidance has been criticized by nutrition scientists, who point out that it ignores decades of research into the harms of a diet high in saturated fat.
We can expect to see more nutrition-related updates from HHS, said O’Neill: “We’re doing more research, more randomized controlled trials on nutrition. Nutrition is still not a scientifically solved problem.” Saturated fats are of particular interest, he said. He and his colleagues want to identify “the healthiest fats,” he said.
“Stay tuned.”
2026-02-13 18:00:00
Americans have a new set of diet guidelines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken an old-fashioned food pyramid, turned it upside down, and plonked a steak and a stick of butter in prime positions.
Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again mates have long been extolling the virtues of meat and whole-fat dairy, so it wasn’t too surprising to see those foods recommended alongside vegetables and whole grains (despite the well-established fact that too much saturated fat can be extremely bad for you).
Some influencers have taken the meat trend to extremes, following a “carnivore diet.” “The best thing you could do is eliminate out everything except fatty meat and lard,” Anthony Chaffee, an MD with almost 400,000 followers, said in an Instagram post.
And I almost choked on my broccoli when, while scrolling LinkedIn, I came across an interview with another doctor declaring that “there is zero scientific evidence to say that vegetables are required in the human diet.” That doctor, who described himself as “90% carnivore,” went on to say that all he’d eaten the previous day was a kilo of beef, and that vegetables have “anti-nutrients,” whatever they might be.
You don’t have to spend much time on social media to come across claims like this. The “traditionalist” influencer, author, and psychologist Jordan Peterson was promoting a meat-only diet as far back as 2018. A recent review of research into nutrition misinformation on social media found that the most diet information is shared on Instagram and YouTube, and that a lot of it is nonsense. So much so that the authors describe it as a “growing public health concern.”
What’s new is that some of this misinformation comes from the people who now lead America’s federal health agencies. In January Kennedy, who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, told a USA Today reporter that he was on a carnivore diet. “I only eat meat or fermented foods,” he said. He went on to say that the diet had helped him lose “40% of [his] visceral fat within a month.”
“Government needs to stop spreading misinformation that natural and saturated fats are bad for you,” Food and Drug Administration commissioner Martin Makary argued in a recent podcast interview. The principles of “whole foods and clean meats” are “biblical,” he said. The interviewer said that Makary’s warnings about pesticides made him want to “avoid all salads and completely miss the organic section in the grocery store.”
For the record: There’s plenty of evidence that a diet high in saturated fat can increase the risk of heart disease. That’s not government misinformation.
The carnivore doctors’ suggestion to avoid vegetables is wrong too, says Gabby Headrick, associate director of food and nutrition policy at George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety & Nutrition Security. There’s no evidence to suggest that a meat-only diet is good for you. “All of the nutrition science to date strongly identifies a wide array of vegetables … as being very health-promoting,” she adds.
To be fair to the influencers out there, diet is a tricky thing to study. Much of the research into nutrition relies on volunteers to keep detailed and honest food diaries—something that people are generally quite bad at. And the way our bodies respond to foods might be influenced by our genetics, our microbiomes, the way we prepare or consume those foods, and who knows what else.
Still, it will come as a surprise to no one that there is plenty of what the above study calls “low-quality content” floating around on social media. So it’s worth arming ourselves with a good dose of skepticism, especially when we come across posts that mention “miracle foods” or extreme, limited diets.
The truth is that most food is neither good nor bad when eaten in moderation. Diet trends come and go, and for most people, the best reasonable advice is simply to eat a balanced diet low in sugar, salt, and saturated fat. You know—the basics. No matter what that weird upside-down food pyramid implies. To the carnivore influencers, I say: get your misinformation off my broccoli.
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.
2026-02-12 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.
AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse.
Just as software engineers are using artificial intelligence to help write code and check for bugs, hackers are using these tools to reduce the time and effort required to orchestrate an attack, lowering the barriers for less experienced attackers to try something out.
Some in Silicon Valley warn that AI is on the brink of being able to carry out fully automated attacks. But most security researchers instead argue that we should be paying closer attention to the much more immediate risks posed by AI, which is already speeding up and increasing the volume of scams.
Criminals are increasingly exploiting the latest deepfake technologies to impersonate people and swindle victims out of vast sums of money. And we need to be ready for what comes next. Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine, which is all about crime. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.
Is a secure AI assistant possible?
AI agents are a risky business. Even when stuck inside the chatbox window, LLMs will make mistakes and behave badly. Once they have tools that they can use to interact with the outside world, such as web browsers and email addresses, the consequences of those mistakes become far more serious.
Viral AI agent project OpenClaw, which has made headlines across the world in recent weeks, harnesses existing LLMs to let users create their own bespoke assistants. For some users, this means handing over reams of personal data, from years of emails to the contents of their hard drive. That has security experts thoroughly freaked out.
In response to these concerns, its creator warned that nontechnical people should not use the software. But there’s a clear appetite for what OpenClaw is offering, and any AI companies hoping to get in on the personal assistant business will need to figure out how to build a system that will keep users’ data safe and secure. To do so, they’ll need to borrow approaches from the cutting edge of agent security research. Read the full story.
—Grace Huckins
What’s next for Chinese open-source AI
The past year has marked a turning point for Chinese AI. Since DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025, Chinese companies have repeatedly delivered AI models that match the performance of leading Western models at a fraction of the cost.
These models differ in a crucial way from most US models like ChatGPT or Claude, which you pay to access and can’t inspect. The Chinese companies publish their models’ weights—numerical values that get set when a model is trained—so anyone can download, run, study, and modify them.
If open-source AI models keep getting better, they will not just offer the cheapest options for people who want access to frontier AI capabilities; they will change where innovation happens and who sets the standards. Here’s what may come next.
—Caiwei Chen
This is part of our What’s Next series, which looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here.
Why EVs are gaining ground in Africa
EVs are getting cheaper and more common all over the world. But the technology still faces major challenges in some markets, including many countries in Africa.
Some regions across the continent still have limited grid and charging infrastructure, and those that do have widespread electricity access sometimes face reliability issues—a problem for EV owners, who require a stable electricity source to charge up and get around. But there are some signs of progress. Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, 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 Instagram’s head has denied that social media is “clinically addictive”
Adam Mosseri disputed allegations the platform prioritized profits over protecting its younger users’ mental health. (NYT $)
+ Meta researchers’ correspondence seems to suggest otherwise. (The Guardian)
2 The Pentagon is pushing AI companies to drop tools’ restrictions
In a bid to make AI models available on classified networks. (Reuters)
+ The Pentagon has gutted the team that tests AI and weapons systems. (MIT Technology Review)
3 The FTC has warned Apple News not to stifle conservative content
It has accused the company’s news arm of promoting what it calls “leftist outlets.” (FT $)
4 Anthropic has pledged to minimize the impact of its data centers
By covering electricity price increases and the cost of grid infrastructure upgrades. (NBC News)
+ We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Online harassers are posting Grok-generated nude images on OnlyFans
Kylie Brewer, a feminism-focused content creator, says the latest online campaign against her feels like an escalation. (404 Media)
+ Inside the marketplace powering bespoke AI deepfakes of real women. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Venture capitalists are hedging their AI bets
They’re breaking a cardinal rule by investing in both OpenAI and rival Anthropic. (Bloomberg $)
+ OpenAI has set itself some seriously lofty revenue goals. (NYT $)
+ AI giants are notoriously inconsistent when reporting deprecation expenses. (WSJ $)
7 We’re learning more about the links between weight loss drugs and addiction
Some patients report lowered urges for drugs and alcohol. But can it last? (New Yorker $)
+ What we still don’t know about weight-loss drugs. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Meta has patented an AI that keeps the accounts of dead users active
But it claims to have “no plans to move forward” with it. (Insider $)
+ Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business. (MIT Technology Review)
9 Slime mold is cleverer than you may think
A certain type appears able to learn, remember and make decisions. (Knowable Magazine)
+ And that’s not all—this startup thinks it can help us design better cities, too. (MIT Technology Review)
10 Meditation can actually alter your brain activity 
According to a new study conducted on Buddhist monks. (Wired $)
Quote of the day
“I still try to believe that the good that I’m doing is greater than the horrors that are a part of this. But there’s a limit to what we can put up with. And I’ve hit my limit.”
—An anonymous Microsoft worker explains why they’re growing increasingly frustrated with their employer’s links to ICE, the Verge reports.
One more thing
Motor neuron diseases took their voices. AI is bringing them back.
Jules Rodriguez lost his voice in October 2024. His speech had been deteriorating since a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2020, but a tracheostomy to help him breathe dealt the final blow.
Rodriguez and his wife, Maria Fernandez, who live in Miami, thought they would never hear his voice again. Then they re-created it using AI. After feeding old recordings of Rodriguez’s voice into a tool trained on voices from film, television, radio, and podcasts, the couple were able to generate a voice clone—a way for Jules to communicate in his “old voice.”
Rodriguez is one of over a thousand people with speech difficulties who have cloned their voices using free software from ElevenLabs. The AI voice clones aren’t perfect. But they represent a vast improvement on previous communication technologies and are already improving the lives of people with motor neuron diseases. 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.)
+ We all know how the age of the dinosaurs ended. But how did it begin?
+ There’s only one Miss Piggy—and her fashion looks through the ages are iconic.
+ Australia’s hospital for injured and orphaned flying foxes is unbearably cute.
+ 81-year old Juan López is a fitness inspiration to us all.
