Mar 22 2025
Autopsies can reveal intimate health details. Should they be kept private?

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been following news of the deaths of actor Gene Hackman and his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa. It was heartbreaking to hear how Arakawa appeared to have died from a rare infection days before her husband, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease and may have struggled to understand what had happened.

But as I watched the medical examiner reveal details of the couple’s health, I couldn’t help feeling a little uncomfortable. Media reports claim that the couple liked their privacy and had been out of the spotlight for decades. But here I was, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, being told what pills Arakawa had in her medicine cabinet, and that Hackman had undergone multiple surgeries.

It made me wonder: Should autopsy reports be kept private? A person’s cause of death is public information. But what about other intimate health details that might be revealed in a postmortem examination?

The processes and regulations surrounding autopsies vary by country, so we’ll focus on the US, where Hackman and Arakawa died. Here, a “medico-legal” autopsy may be organized by law enforcement agencies and handled through courts, while a “clinical” autopsy may be carried out at the request of family members.

And there are different levels of autopsy—some might involve examining specific organs or tissues, while more thorough examinations would involve looking at every organ and studying tissues in the lab.

The goal of an autopsy is to discover the cause of a person’s death. Autopsy reports, especially those resulting from detailed investigations, often reveal health conditions—conditions that might have been kept private while the person was alive. There are multiple federal and state laws designed to protect individuals’ health information. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects “individually identifiable health information” up to 50 years after a person’s death. But some things change when a person dies.

For a start, the cause of death will end up on the death certificate. That is public information. The public nature of causes of death is taken for granted these days, says Lauren Solberg, a bioethicist at the University of Florida College of Medicine. It has become a public health statistic. She and her student Brooke Ortiz, who have been researching this topic, are more concerned about other aspects of autopsy results.

The thing is, autopsies can sometimes reveal more than what a person died from. They can also pick up what are known as incidental findings. An examiner might find that a person who died following a covid-19 infection also had another condition. Perhaps that condition was undiagnosed. Maybe it was asymptomatic. That finding wouldn’t appear on a death certificate. So who should have access to it?

The laws over who should have access to a person’s autopsy report vary by state, and even between counties within a state. Clinical autopsy results will always be made available to family members, but local laws dictate which family members have access, says Ortiz.

Genetic testing further complicates things. Sometimes the people performing autopsies will run genetic tests to help confirm the cause of death. These tests might reveal what the person died from. But they might also flag genetic factors unrelated to the cause of death that might increase the risk of other diseases.

In those cases, the person’s family members might stand to benefit from accessing that information. “My health information is my health information—until it comes to my genetic health information,” says Solberg. Genes are shared by relatives. Should they have the opportunity to learn about potential risks to their own health?

This is where things get really complicated. Ethically speaking, we should consider the wishes of the deceased. Would that person have wanted to share this information with relatives?

It’s also worth bearing in mind that a genetic risk factor is often just that; there’s often no way to know whether a person will develop a disease, or how severe the symptoms would be. And if the genetic risk is for a disease that has no treatment or cure, will telling the person’s relatives just cause them a lot of stress?

One 27-year-old experienced this when a 23&Me genetic test told her she had “a 28% chance of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease by age 75 and a 60% chance by age 85.”

“I’m suddenly overwhelmed by this information,” she posted on a dementia forum. “I can’t help feeling this overwhelming sense of dread and sadness that I’ll never be able to un-know this information.”

In their research, Solberg and Ortiz came across cases in which individuals who had died in motor vehicle accidents underwent autopsies that revealed other, asymptomatic conditions. One man in his 40s who died in such an accident was found to have a genetic kidney disease. A 23-year-old was found to have had kidney cancer.

Ideally, both medical teams and family members should know ahead of time what a person would have wanted—whether that’s an autopsy, genetic testing, or health privacy. Advance directives allow people to clarify their wishes for end-of-life care. But only around a third of people in the US have completed one. And they tend to focus on care before death, not after.

Solberg and Ortiz think they should be expanded. An advance directive could specify how people want to share their health information after they’ve died. “Talking about death is difficult,” says Solberg. “For physicians, for patients, for families—it can be uncomfortable.” But it is important.

On March 17, a New Mexico judge granted a request from a representative of Hackman’s estate to seal police photos and bodycam footage as well as the medical records of Hackman and Arakawa. The medical investigator is “temporarily restrained from disclosing … the Autopsy Reports and/or Death Investigation Reports for Mr. and Mrs. Hackman,” according to Deadline.

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.

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Mar 22 2025
OpenAI has released its first research into how using ChatGPT affects people’s emotional wellbeing

OpenAI says over 400 million people use ChatGPT every week. But how does interacting with it affect us? Does it make us more or less lonely? These are some of the questions OpenAI set out to investigate, in partnership with the MIT Media Lab, in a pair of new studies. 

They found that only a small subset of users engage emotionally with ChatGPT. This isn’t surprising given that ChatGPT isn’t marketed as an AI companion app like Replika or Character.AI, says Kate Devlin, a professor of AI and society at King’s College London, who did not work on the project. “ChatGPT has been set up as a productivity tool,” she says. “But we know that people are using it like a companion app anyway.” In fact, the people who do use it that way are likely to interact with it for extended periods of time, some of them averaging about half an hour a day. 

“The authors are very clear about what the limitations of these studies are, but it’s exciting to see they’ve done this,” Devlin says. “To have access to this level of data is incredible.” 

The researchers found some intriguing differences between how men and women respond to using ChatGPT. After using the chatbot for four weeks, female study participants were slightly less likely to socialize with people than their male counterparts who did the same. Meanwhile, participants who interacted with ChatGPT’s voice mode in a gender that was not their own for their interactions reported significantly higher levels of loneliness and more emotional dependency on the chatbot at the end of the experiment. OpenAI plans to submit both studies to peer-reviewed journals.

Chatbots powered by large language models are still a nascent technology, and it’s difficult to study how they affect us emotionally. A lot of existing research in the area—including some of the new work by OpenAI and MIT—relies upon self-reported data, which may not always be accurate or reliable. That said, this latest research does chime with what scientists so far have discovered about how emotionally compelling chatbot conversations can be. For example, in 2023 MIT Media Lab researchers found that chatbots tend to mirror the emotional sentiment of a user’s messages, suggesting a kind of feedback loop where the happier you act, the happier the AI seems, or on the flipside, if you act sadder, so does the AI.  

OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab used a two-pronged method. First they collected and analyzed real-world data from close to 40 million interactions with ChatGPT. Then they asked the 4,076 users who’d had those interactions how they made them feel. Next, the Media Lab recruited almost 1,000 people to take part in a four-week trial. This was more in-depth, examining how participants interacted with ChatGPT for a minimum of five minutes each day. At the end of the experiment, participants completed a questionnaire to measure their perceptions of the chatbot, their subjective feelings of loneliness, their levels of social engagement, their emotional dependence on the bot, and their sense of whether their use of the bot was problematic. They found that participants who trusted and “bonded” with ChatGPT more were likelier than others to be lonely, and to rely on it more. 

This work is an important first step toward greater insight into ChatGPT’s impact on us, which could help AI platforms enable safer and healthier interactions, says Jason Phang, an OpenAI safety researcher who worked on the project.

“A lot of what we’re doing here is preliminary, but we’re trying to start the conversation with the field about the kinds of things that we can start to measure, and to start thinking about what the long-term impact on users is,” he says.

Although the research is welcome, it’s still difficult to identify when a human is—and isn’t—engaging with technology on an emotional level, says Devlin. She says the study participants may have been experiencing emotions that weren’t recorded by the researchers.

“In terms of what the teams set out to measure, people might not necessarily have been using ChatGPT in an emotional way, but you can’t divorce being a human from your interactions [with technology],” she says. “We use these emotion classifiers that we have created to look for certain things—but what that actually means to someone’s life is really hard to extrapolate.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated that study participants set the gender of ChatGPT’s voice, and that OpenAI did not plan to publish either study. Study participants were assigned the voice mode gender, and OpenAI plans to submit both studies to peer-reviewed journals. The article has since been updated.

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Mar 21 2025
The elephant in the room for energy tech? Uncertainty.

At a conference dedicated to energy technology that I attended this week, I noticed an outward attitude of optimism and excitement. But it’s hard to miss the current of uncertainty just underneath. 

The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, held this year just outside Washington, DC, gathers some of the most cutting-edge innovators working on everything from next-generation batteries to plants that can mine for metals. Researchers whose projects have received funding from ARPA-E—part of the US Department of Energy that gives money to high-risk research in energy—gather to show their results and mingle with each other, investors, and nosy journalists like yours truly. (For more on a few of the coolest things I saw, check out this story.)

This year, though, there was an elephant in the room, and it’s the current state of the US federal government. Or maybe it’s climate change? In any case, the vibes were weird. 

The last time I was at this conference, two years ago, climate change was a constant refrain on stage and in conversations. The central question was undoubtedly: How do we decarbonize, generate energy, and run our lives without relying on polluting fossil fuels? 

This time around, I didn’t hear the phrase “climate change” once during the opening session, which included speeches from US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and acting ARPA-E director Daniel Cunningham. The focus was on American energy dominance—on how we can get our hands on more, more, more energy to meet growing demand. 

Last week, Wright spoke at an energy conference in Houston and had a lot to say about climate, calling climate change a “side effect of building the modern world” and climate policies irrational and quasi-religious, and he said that when it came to climate action, the cure had become worse than the disease. 

I was anticipating similar talking points at the summit, but this week, climate change hardly got a mention.

What I noticed in Wright’s speech and in the choice of programming throughout the conference is that some technologies appear to be among the favored, and others are decidedly less prominent. Nuclear power and fusion were definitely on the “in” list. There was a nuclear panel in the opening session, and in his remarks Wright called out companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Zap Energy. He also praised small modular reactors. 

Renewables, including wind and solar, were mentioned only in the context of their inconsistency—Wright dwelled on that, rather than on other facts I’d argue are just as important, like that they are among the cheapest methods of generating electricity today. 

In any case, Wright seemed appropriately hyped about energy, given his role in the administration. “Call me biased, but I think there’s no more impactful place to work in than energy,” he said during his opening remarks on the first morning of the summit. He sang the praises of energy innovation, calling it a tool to drive progress, and outlined his long career in the field. 

This all comes after a chaotic couple of months for the federal government that are undoubtedly affecting the industry. Mass layoffs have hit federal agencies, including the Department of Energy. President Donald Trump very quickly tried to freeze spending from the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes tax credits and other support for EVs and power plants. 

As I walked around the showcase and chatted with experts over coffee, I heard a range of reactions to the opening session and feelings about this moment for the energy sector. 

People working in industries the Trump administration seems to favor, like nuclear energy, tended to be more positive. Some in academia who rely on federal grants to fund their work were particularly nervous about what comes next. One researcher refused to talk to me when I said I was a journalist. In response to my questions about why they weren’t able to discuss the technology on display at their booth, another member on the same project said only that it’s a wild time.

Making progress on energy technology doesn’t require that we all agree on exactly why we’re doing it. But in a moment when we need all the low-carbon technologies we can get to address climate change—a problem scientists overwhelmingly agree is a threat to our planet—I find it frustrating that politics can create such a chilling effect in some sectors. 

At the conference, I listened to smart researchers talk about their work. I saw fascinating products and demonstrations, and I’m still optimistic about where energy can go. But I also worry that uncertainty about the future of research and government support for emerging technologies will leave some valuable innovations in the dust. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

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Mar 21 2025
Europe is finally getting serious about commercial rockets

Europe is on the cusp of a new dawn in commercial space technology. As global political tensions intensify and relationships with the US become increasingly strained, several European companies are now planning to conduct their own launches in an attempt to reduce the continent’s reliance on American rockets.

In the coming days, Isar Aerospace, a company based in Munich, will try to launch its Spectrum rocket from a site in the frozen reaches of Andøya island in Norway. A spaceport has been built there to support small commercial rockets, and Spectrum is the first to make an attempt.

“It’s a big milestone,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and spaceflight expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “It’s long past time for Europe to have a proper commercial launch industry.”

Spectrum stands 28 meters (92 feet) tall, the length of a basketball court. The rocket has two stages, or parts, the first with nine engines—powered by an unusual fuel combination of liquid oxygen and propane not seen on other rockets before, which Isar says results in higher performance—and the second with a single engine to give satellites their final kick into orbit.

The ultimate goal for Spectrum is to carry satellites weighing up to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds)  to low Earth orbit. On this first launch, however, there are no satellites on board, because success is anything but guaranteed. “It’s unlikely to make it to orbit,” says Malcolm Macdonald, an expert in space technology at Strathclyde University in Scotland. “The first launch of any rocket tends not to work.”

Regardless of whether it succeeds or fails, the launch attempt heralds an important moment as Europe tries to kick-start its own private rocket industry. Two other companies—Orbex of the UK and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) of Germany—are expected to make launch attempts later this year. These efforts could give Europe multiple ways to reach space without having to rely on US rockets.  

“Europe has to be prepared for a more uncertain future,” says Macdonald. “The uncertainty of what will happen over the next four years with the current US administration amplifies the situation for European launch companies.”

Trailing in the US’s wake 

Europe has for years trailed behind the US in commercial space efforts. The successful launch of SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, in 2008 began a period of American dominance of the global launch market. In 2024, 145 of 263 global launch attempts were made by US entities—and SpaceX accounted for 138 of those. “SpaceX is the benchmark at the moment,” says Jonas Kellner, head of marketing, communications, and political affairs at RFA. Other US companies, like Rocket Lab (which launches from both the US and New Zealand), have also become successful, while commercial rockets are ramping up in China, too.

Europe has launched its own government-funded Ariane and Vega rockets for decades from the Guiana Space Centre, a spaceport it operates in French Guiana in South America. Most recently, on March 6, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched its new heavy-lift Ariane 6 rocket from there for the first time. However, the history of rocket launches from Europe itself is much more limited. In 1997 the US defense contractor Northrop Grumman air-launched a Pegasus rocket from a plane that took off from the Canary Islands. In 2023 the US company Virgin Orbit failed to reach orbit with its LauncherOne rocket after a launch attempt from Cornwall in the UK. No vertical orbital rocket launch has ever been attempted from Western Europe.

Isar Aerospace is one of a handful of companies hoping to change that with help from agencies like ESA, which has provided funding to rocket launch companies through its Boost program since 2019. In 2024 it awarded €44.22 million ($48 million) to Isar, Orbex, RFA, and the German launch company HyImpulse. The hope is that one or more of the companies will soon begin regular launches from Europe from two potential sites: Isar’s chosen location in Andøya and the SaxaVord Spaceport on the Shetland Islands north of the UK, where RFA and Orbex plan to make their attempts. 

“I expect four or five companies to get to the point of launching, and then over a period of years reliability and launch cadence [or frequency] will determine which one or two of them survives,” says McDowell.

a test on the launchpad of a rocket engine

ISAR AEROSPACE

Unique advantages

In their initial form these rockets will not rival anything on offer from SpaceX in terms of size and cadence. SpaceX sometimes launches its 70-meter (230-foot) Falcon 9 rocket multiple times per week and is developing its much larger Starship vehicle for missions to the moon and Mars. However, the smaller European rockets can allow companies in Europe to launch satellites to orbit without having to travel all the way across the Atlantic. “There is an advantage to having it closer,” says Kellner, who says it will take RFA one or two days by sea to get its rockets to SaxaVord, versus one or two weeks to travel across the Atlantic.

Launching from Europe is useful, too, for reaching specific orbits. Traditionally, a lot of satellite launches have taken place near the equator, in places such as Cape Canaveral in Florida, to get an extra boost from Earth’s rotation. Crewed spacecraft have also launched from these locations to reach space stations in equatorial orbit around Earth and the moon. From Europe, though, satellites can launch north over uninhabited stretches of water to reach polar orbit, which can allow imaging satellites to see the entirety of Earth rotate underneath them.

Increasingly, says McDowell, companies want to place satellites into sun-synchronous orbit, a type of polar orbit where a satellite orbiting Earth stays in perpetual sunlight. This is useful for solar-powered vehicles. “By far the bulk of the commercial market now is sun-synchronous polar orbit,” says McDowell. “So having a high-latitude launch site that has good transport links with customers in Europe does make a difference.”

Europe’s end goal

In the longer term, Europe’s rocket ambitions might grow to vehicles that are more of a match for the Falcon 9 through initiatives like ESA’s European Launcher Challenge, which will award contracts later this year. “We are hoping to develop [a larger vehicle] in the European Launcher Challenge,” says Kellner. Perhaps Europe might even consider launching humans into space one day on larger rockets, says Thilo Kranz, ESA’s program manager for commercial space transportation. “We are looking into this,” he says. “If a commercial operator comes forward with a smart way of approaching [crewed] access to space, that would be a favorable development for Europe.”

A separate ESA project called Themis, meanwhile, is developing technologies to reuse rockets. This was the key innovation of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, allowing the company to dramatically drive down launch costs. Some European companies, like MaiaSpace and RFA, are also investigating reusability. The latter is planning to use parachutes to bring the first stage of its rocket back to a landing in the sea, where it can be recovered.

“As soon as you get up to something like a Falcon 9 competitor, I think it’s clear now that reusability is crucial,” says McDowell. “They’re not going to be economically competitive without reusability.”

The end goal for Europe is to have a sovereign rocket industry that reduces its reliance on the US. “Where we are in the broader geopolitical situation probably makes this a bigger point than it might have been six months ago,” says Macdonald.

The continent has already shown it can diversify from the US in other ways. Europe now operates its own successful satellite-based alternative to the US Global Positioning System (GPS), called Galileo; it began launching in 2011 and is four times more accurate than its American counterpart. Isar Aerospace, and the companies that follow, might be the first sign that commercial European rockets can break from America in a similar way.

“We need to secure access to space,” says Kranz, “and the more options we have in launching into space, the higher the flexibility.”

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Mar 20 2025
4 technologies that could power the future of energy

Where can you find lasers, electric guitars, and racks full of novel batteries, all in the same giant room? This week, the answer was the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit just outside Washington, DC.

Energy innovation can take many forms, and the variety in energy research was on display at the summit. ARPA-E, part of the US Department of Energy, provides funding for high-risk, high-reward research projects. The summit gathers projects the agency has funded, along with investors, policymakers, and journalists.

Hundreds of projects were exhibited in a massive hall during the conference, featuring demonstrations and research results. Here are four of the most interesting innovations MIT Technology Review spotted on site. 

Steel made with lasers

Startup Limelight Steel has developed a process to make iron, the main component in steel, by using lasers to heat iron ore to super-high temperatures. 

Steel production makes up roughly 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions today, in part because most steel is still made with blast furnaces, which rely on coal to hit the high temperatures that kick off the required chemical reactions. 

Limelight instead shines lasers on iron ore, heating it to temperatures over 1,600 °C. Molten iron can then be separated from impurities, and the iron can be put through existing processes to make steel. 

The company has built a small demonstration system with a laser power of about 1.5 kilowatts, which can process between 10 and 20 grams of ore. The whole system is made up of 16 laser arrays, each just a bit larger than a postage stamp.

The components in the demonstration system are commercially available; this particular type of laser is used in projectors. The startup has benefited from years of progress in the telecommunications industry that has helped bring down the cost of lasers, says Andy Zhao, the company’s cofounder and CTO. 

The next step is to build a larger-scale system that will use 150 kilowatts of laser power and could make up to 100 tons of steel over the course of a year.

Rocks that can make fuel

The hunks of rock at a booth hosted by MIT might not seem all that high-tech, but someday they could help produce fuels and chemicals. 

A major topic of conversation at the ARPA-E summit was geologic hydrogen—there’s a ton of excitement about efforts to find underground deposits of the gas, which can be used as a fuel across a wide range of industries, including transportation and heavy industry. 

Last year, ARPA-E funded a handful of projects on the topic, including one in Iwnetim Abate’s lab at MIT. Abate is among the researchers who are aiming not just to hunt for hydrogen, but to actually use underground conditions to help produce it. Earlier this year, his team published research showing that by using catalysts and conditions common in the subsurface, scientists can produce hydrogen as well as other chemicals, like ammonia. Abate cofounded a spinout company, Addis Energy, to commercialize the research, which has since also received ARPA-E funding. 

All the rocks on the table, from the chunk of dark, hard basalt to the softer talc, could be used to produce these chemicals. 

An electric guitar powered by iron nitride magnets

The sound of music drifted from the Niron Magnetics booth across nearby walkways. People wandering by stopped to take turns testing out the company’s magnets, in the form of an electric guitar. 

Most high-powered magnets today contain neodymium—demand for them is set to skyrocket in the coming years, especially as the world builds more electric vehicles and wind turbines. Supplies could stretch thin, and the geopolitics are complicated because most of the supply comes from China. 

Niron is making new magnets that don’t contain rare earth metals. Instead, Niron’s technology is based on more abundant materials: nitrogen and iron. 

The guitar is a demonstration product—today, magnets in electric guitars typically contain aluminum, nickel, and cobalt-based magnets that help translate the vibrations from steel strings into an electric signal that is broadcast through an amplifier. Niron made an instrument using its iron nitride magnets instead. (See photos of the guitar from an event last year here.)

Niron opened a pilot commercial facility in late 2024 that has the capacity to produce 10 tons of magnets annually. Since we last covered Niron, in early 2024, the company has announced plans for a full-scale plant, which will have an annual capacity of about 1,500 tons of magnets once it’s fully ramped up. 

Batteries for powering high-performance data centers

The increasing power demand from AI and data centers was another hot topic at the summit, with server racks dotting the showcase floor to demonstrate technologies aimed at the sector. One stuffed with batteries caught my eye, courtesy of Natron Energy. 

The company is making sodium-ion batteries to help meet power demand from data centers. 

Data centers’ energy demands can be incredibly variable—and as their total power needs get bigger, those swings can start to affect the grid. Natron’s sodium-ion batteries can be installed at these facilities to help level off the biggest peaks, allowing computing equipment to run full out without overly taxing the grid, says Natron cofounder and CTO Colin Wessells. 

Sodium-ion batteries are a cheaper alternative to lithium-based chemistries. They’re also made without lithium, cobalt, and nickel, materials that are constrained in production or processing. We’re seeing some varieties of sodium-ion batteries popping up in electric vehicles in China.

Natron opened a production line in Michigan last year, and the company plans to open a $1.4 billion factory in North Carolina. 

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Mar 19 2025
When you might start speaking to robots

Last Wednesday, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital realm of chatbots and internet search but out here in the physical world, via robots. 

Gemini Robotics fuses the power of large language models with spatial reasoning, allowing you to tell a robotic arm to do something like “put the grapes in the clear glass bowl.” These commands get filtered by the LLM, which identifies intentions from what you’re saying and then breaks them down into commands that the robot can carry out. For more details about how it all works, read the full story from my colleague Scott Mulligan.

You might be wondering if this means your home or workplace might one day be filled with robots you can bark orders at. More on that soon. 

But first, where did this come from? Google has not made big waves in the world of robotics so far. Alphabet acquired some robotics startups over the past decade, but in 2023 it shut down a unit working on robots to solve practical tasks like cleaning up trash. 

Despite that, the company’s move to bring AI into the physical world via robots is following the exact precedent set by other companies in the past two years (something that, I must humbly point out, MIT Technology Review has long seen coming). 

In short, two trends are converging from opposite directions: Robotics companies are increasingly leveraging AI, and AI giants are now building robots. OpenAI, for example, which shuttered its robotics team in 2021, started a new effort to build humanoid robots this year. In October, the chip giant Nvidia declared the next wave of artificial intelligence to be “physical AI.”

There are lots of ways to incorporate AI into robots, starting with improving how they are trained to do tasks. But using large language models to give instructions, as Google has done, is particularly interesting. 

It’s not the first. The robotics startup Figure went viral a year ago for a video in which humans gave instructions to a humanoid on how to put dishes away. Around the same time, a startup spun off from OpenAI, called Covariant, built something similar for robotic arms in warehouses. I saw a demo where you could give the robot instructions via images, text, or video to do things like “move the tennis balls from this bin to that one.” Covariant was acquired by Amazon just five months later. 

When you see such demos, you can’t help but wonder: When are these robots going to come to our workplaces? What about our homes?

If Figure’s plans offer a clue, the answer to the first question is soon. The company announced on Saturday that it is building a high-volume manufacturing facility set to manufacture 12,000 humanoid robots per year. But training and testing robots, especially to ensure they’re safe in places where they work near humans, still takes a long time. 

For example, Figure’s rival Agility Robotics claims it’s the only company in the US with paying customers for its humanoids. But industry safety standards for humanoids working alongside people aren’t fully formed yet, so the company’s robots have to work in separate areas.

This is why, despite recent progress, our homes will be the last frontier. Compared with factory floors, our homes are chaotic and unpredictable. Everyone’s crammed into relatively close quarters. Even impressive AI models like Gemini Robotics will still need to go through lots of tests both in the real world and in simulation, just like self-driving cars. This testing might happen in warehouses, hotels, and hospitals, where the robots may still receive help from remote human operators. It will take a long time before they’re given the privilege of putting away our dishes.  

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

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Mar 19 2025
HIV could infect 1,400 infants every day because of US aid disruptions

Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration’s cuts to funding to AIDS organizations, new modeling suggests.

In an executive order issued January 20, President Donald Trump paused new foreign aid funding to global health programs, and four days later, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a stop-work order on existing foreign aid assistance. Surveys suggest that these changes forced more than a third of global organizations that provide essential HIV services to close within days of the announcements. 

Hundreds of thousands of people are losing access to HIV treatments as a result. Women and girls are missing out on cervical cancer screening and services for gender-based violence, too. A waiver Rubio later issued in an attempt to restore lifesaving services has had very little impact. 

“We are in a crisis,” said Jennifer Sherwood, director of research, public policy, at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, at a data-sharing event on March 17 at Columbia University in New York. “Even funds that had already been appropriated, that were in the field, in people’s bank accounts, [were] frozen.” 

Rubio approved a waiver for “life-saving” humanitarian assistance on January 28. “This resumption is temporary in nature, and with limited exceptions as needed to continue life-saving humanitarian assistance programs, no new contracts shall be entered into,” he said in a statement at the time.

The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which invests millions of dollars in the global AIDS response every year, was also granted a waiver February 1 to continue “life-saving” work. 

Despite this waiver, there have been devastating reports of the impact on health programs across the many low-income countries that relied on the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which oversees PEPFAR, for funding. To get a better sense of the overall impact, amfAR conducted two surveys looking at more than 150 organizations that rely on PEPFAR funding in more than 26 countries. 

“We found really severe disruptions to HIV services,” said Sherwood, who presented the findings at Columbia. “About 90% of our participants said [the cuts] had severely limited their ability to deliver HIV services.” Specifically, 94% of follow-up services designed to monitor people’s progress were either canceled or disrupted. There were similarly dramatic disruptions to services for HIV testing, treatment, and prevention, and 92% of services for gender-based violence were canceled or disrupted.

The cuts have plunged organizations into a “deep financial crisis,” said Sherwood. Almost two-thirds of respondents said community-based staff were laid off before the end of January. When the team asked these organizations how long they could stay open without US funding, 36% said they had already closed. “Only 14% said that they were able to stay open longer than a month,” said Sherwood. “And … this data was collected longer than a month ago.”

The organizations said tens of thousands of the people they serve would lose HIV treatment within a month. For some organizations, that figure was over 100,000, said Sherwood. 

Part of the problem is that the stop-work order came at a time when these organizations were already experiencing “shortages in commodities,” Sherwood said. Typically, centers might give a person a six-month supply of antiretroviral drugs. Before the stop-work order, many organizations were only giving one-month supplies. “Almost all of their clients are due to come back and pick up [more] treatments in this 90-day freeze,” she said. “You can really see the panic this has caused.”

The waiver for “life-saving” treatment didn’t do much to remedy this situation. Only 5% of the organizations received funds under the waiver, while the vast majority either were told they didn’t qualify or had not been told they could restart services. “While the waiver might be one important avenue to restart some services, it cannot, on the whole, save the US HIV program,” says Sherwood. “It is very limited in scope, and it has not been widely communicated to the field.”

AmfAR isn’t the only organization tracking the impact of US funding cuts. At the same event, Sara Casey, assistant professor of population and family health at Columbia, presented results of a survey of 101 people who work in organizations reliant on US aid. They reported seeing disruptions to services in humanitarian responses, gender-based violence, mental health, infectious diseases, essential medicines and vaccines, and more. “Many of these should have been eligible for the ‘life-saving’ waivers,” Casey said.

Casey and her colleagues have also been interviewing people in Colombia, Kenya, and Nepal. In those countries, women of reproductive age, newborns and children, people living with HIV, members of the LGBTQI+ community, and migrants are among those most affected by the cuts, she said, and health workers, who are primarily women, are losing their livelihoods.

“There will be really disproportionate impacts on the world’s most vulnerable,” said Sherwood. Women make up 67% of the health-care workforce, according to the World Health Organization. They also make up 63% of PEPFAR clients. PEPFAR has supported gender equality and services for gender-based violence. “We don’t know if other countries or other donors … can or will pick up these types of programs, especially in the face of competing priorities about keeping people on treatment and keeping people alive,” said Sherwood.

Sherwood and her colleagues at amfAR have also done some modeling work to determine the potential impact of cuts to PEPFAR on women and girls, using data from last year to create their estimates. “Each day that the stop-work order is in place, we estimate that there are 1,400 new HIV infections among infants,” she said. And every day, over 7,000 women stand to miss out on cervical cancer screenings.

The funding cuts have also had a dramatic effect on mental-health services, said Farah Arabe, who serves on the advisory board of the Global Mental Health Action Network. Arabe presented the preliminary findings of an ongoing survey of mental-health organizations from 29 countries that receive US aid. “Unfortunately, this is a very grim picture,” she said. “Only 5% of individuals who were receiving services in 2024 will be able to receive services in 2025.” 

The same goes for children and adolescents. “This is a particularly sad picture because children … are going through brain development,” she said. “Impacts … at this early stage of life have lifelong impacts on academic achievement, economic productivity, mental health, physical health … even the ability to parent the next generation.” 

For now, nonprofits and aid and research organizations are scrambling to try to understand, and potentially limit, the impact of the cuts. Some are hoping to locate new sources of funding, independent of the US. 

“I am deeply concerned that progress in disease eradication, poverty reduction, and gender equality is at risk of being reversed,” said Thoai Ngo of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, who chaired the event. “Without urgent action, preventable deaths will rise, more people will fall into poverty, and as always, women and girls will bear the heaviest burden.”

On March 10, Rubio announced the results of his department’s review of USAID. “After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID,” he shared via the social media platform X. 

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Mar 18 2025
Is Google playing catchup on search with OpenAI?

This story originally appeared in The Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief. Sign up here to get the next one in your inbox.

I’ve been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: that all the big players in AI seem to be moving in the same directions and converging on the same things. Agents. Deep research. Lightweight versions of models. Etc. 

Some of this makes sense in that they’re seeing similar things and trying to solve similar problems. But when I talked to Will about this, he said, “it almost feels like a lack of imagination, right?” Yeah. It does.

What got me thinking about this, again, was a pair of announcements from Google over the past couple of weeks, both related to the ways search is converging with AI language models, something I’ve spent a lot of time reporting on over the past year. Google took direct aim at this intersection by adding new AI features from Gemini to search, and also by adding search features to Gemini. In using both, what struck me more than how well they work is that they are really just about catching up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.  And their belated appearance in March of the year 2025 doesn’t seem like a great sign for Google. 

Take AI Mode, which it announced March 5. It’s cool. It works well. But it’s pretty much a follow-along of what OpenAI was already doing. (Also, don’t be confused by the name. Google already had something called AI Overviews in search, but AI Mode is different and deeper.) As the company explained in a blog post, “This new Search mode expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions.”

Rather than a brief overview with links out, the AI will dig in and offer more robust answers. You can ask followup questions too, something AI Overviews doesn’t support. It feels like quite a natural evolution—so much so that it’s curious why this is not already widely available. For now, it’s limited to people with paid accounts, and even then only via the experimental sandbox of Search Labs. But more to the point, why wasn’t it available, say, last summer?

The second change is that it added search history to its Gemini chatbot, and promises even more personalization is on the way. On this one, Google says “personalization allows Gemini to connect with your Google apps and services, starting with Search, to provide responses that are uniquely insightful and directly address your needs.”

Much of what these new features are doing, especially AI Mode’s ability to ask followup questions and go deep, feels like hitting feature parity with what ChatGPT has been doing for months. It’s also been compared to Perplexity, another generative AI search engine startup. 

What neither feature feels like is something fresh and new. Neither feels innovative. ChatGPT has long been building user histories and using the information it has to deliver results. While Gemini could also remember things about you, it’s a little bit shocking to me that Google has taken this long to bring in signals from its other products. Obviously there are privacy concerns to field, but this is an opt-in product we’re talking about. 

The other thing is that, at least as I’ve found so far, ChatGPT is just better at this stuff. Here’s a small example. I tried asking both: “What do you know about me?” ChatGPT replied with a really insightful, even thoughtful, profile based on my interactions with it. These aren’t  just the things I’ve explicitly told it to remember about me, either. Much of it comes from the context of various prompts I’ve fed it. It’s figured out what kind of music I like. It knows little details about my taste in films. (“You don’t particularly enjoy slasher films in general.”) Some of it is just sort of oddly delightful. For example: “You built a small shed for trash cans with a hinged wooden roof and needed a solution to hold it open.”

Google, despite having literal decades of my email, search, and browsing history, a copy of every digital photo I’ve ever taken, and more darkly terrifying insight into the depths of who I really am than I probably I do myself, mostly spat back the kind of profile an advertiser would want, versus a person hoping for useful tailored results. (“You enjoy comedy, music, podcasts, and are interested in both current and classic media”)

I enjoy music, you say? Remarkable! 

I’m also reminded of something an OpenAI executive said to me late last year, as the company was preparing to roll out search. It has more freedom to innovate precisely because it doesn’t have the massive legacy business that Google does. Yes, it’s burning money while Google mints it. But OpenAI has the luxury of being able to experiment (at least until the capital runs out) without worrying about killing a cash cow like Google has with traditional search. 

Of course, it’s clear that Google and its parent company Alphabet can innovate in many areas—see Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics announcement this week, for example. Or ride in a Waymo! But can it do so around its core products and business? It’s not the only big legacy tech company with this problem. Microsoft’s AI strategy to date has largely been reliant on its partnership with OpenAI. And Apple, meanwhile, seems completely lost in the wilderness, as this scathing takedown from longtime Apple pundit John Gruber lays bare. 

Google has billions of users and piles of cash. It can leverage its existing base in ways OpenAI or Anthropic (which Google also owns a good chunk of) or Perplexity just aren’t capable of. But I’m also pretty convinced that unless it can be the market leader here, rather than a follower, it points to some painful days ahead. But hey, Astra is coming. Let’s see what happens.

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Mar 15 2025
This annual shot might protect against HIV infections

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.

Every year, my colleagues and I put together a list of what we think are the top 10 breakthrough technologies of that year. When it came to innovations in biotech, there was a clear winner: lenacapavir, a drug that was found to prevent HIV infections in 100% of the women and girls who received it in a clinical trial.

You never hear “100%” in medicine. The trial was the most successful we’ve ever seen for HIV prevention. The drug was safe, too (it’s already approved to treat HIV infections). And it only needed to be injected twice a year to offer full protection.

This week, the results of a small phase I trial for once-yearly lenacapavir injections were announced at a conference in San Francisco. These early “first in human” trials are designed to test the safety of a drug in healthy volunteers. Still, the results are incredibly promising: All the volunteers still had the drug in their blood plasma a year after their injections, and at levels that earlier studies suggest will protect them from HIV infections.

I don’t normally get too excited about phase I trials, which usually involve just a handful of volunteers and typically don’t tell us much about whether a drug is likely to work. But this trial seems to be different. Together, the lenacapavir trials could bring us a significant step closer to ending the HIV epidemic.

First, a quick recap. We’ve had effective pre-exposure prophylactic (PrEP) drugs for HIV since 2012, but these must be taken either daily or just before a person is exposed to the virus. In 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first long-acting injectable drug for HIV prevention. That drug, cabotegravir, needs to be injected every two months.

But researchers have been working on drugs that offer even longer-lasting protection. It can be difficult for people to remember to take daily pills when they’re sick, let alone when they’re healthy. And these medicines have a stigma attached to them. “People are concerned about people hearing the pills shake in their purse on the bus … or seeing them on a medicine cabinet or bedside table,” says Moupali Das, vice president of HIV prevention and virology, pediatrics, and HIV clinical development at Gilead Sciences.

Then came the lenacapavir studies. The drug is already approved as a treatment for some cases of HIV infection, but two trials last year tested its effectiveness at prevention. In one, over 5,000 women and adolescent girls in Uganda and South Africa received either twice-yearly injections of lenacapavir or a daily PrEP pill. That trial was a resounding success: There were no cases of HIV among the volunteers who got lenacapavir.

In a second trial, the drug was tested in 3,265 men and gender-diverse individuals, including transgender men, transgender women, and gender nonbinary people. The twice-yearly injections reduced the incidence of HIV in this group by 96%.

In the most recent study, which was also published in The Lancet, Das and her colleagues tested a new formulation of the drug in 40 healthy volunteers in the US. The participants still got lenacapavir, but in a slightly different formulation, and at a higher dose. And whereas the previous trials involved injections under the skin, these participants received injections into their glute muscles. Half the volunteers in this trial received a higher dose than the others.

The drug appeared to be safe. It also appears likely to be effective. These individuals weren’t at risk of HIV. But the levels of the drug in their blood plasma remained high, even in the people who got the lower dose.

A year after their injection, the levels of the drug were still higher than those seen in people who were protected from HIV in last year’s trials. This suggests the new annual shot will be just as protective as the twice-yearly shot, says Renu Singh, a senior director in clinical pharmacology at Gilead Sciences, who presented the findings at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco.

“I was just so excited [to hear the results],” says Carina Marquez, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who both studies infectious disease and treats people with HIV.

Annual shots would make things easier—and potentially cheaper—for both patients and health-care providers, says Marquez. “It will be a game changer if it works, which looks promising from the phase I data,” she says.

The drug works by interfering with the virus’s ability to replicate. But it also seems to have some very unusual properties, says Singh. It can be taken daily or yearly. Small doses can stay in the blood for days rather than hours. And bigger doses form what’s known as a depot, which gradually releases the drug over time.

“I previously worked at the FDA, and looked at many, many different molecules and products, but I’ve never seen [anything] like this,” Singh adds. She and her colleagues have come up with nicknames for the drug, including “magical,” “the unicorn,” and “limitless len.”

Once a phase I trial is successfully completed, researchers will typically move on to a phase II trial, which is designed to test the efficacy of a drug. That’s not necessary for lenacapavir, given the unprecedented success of last year’s trials. The team at Gilead is currently planning a phase III trial, which will involve testing annual shots in large numbers of people at risk of HIV infection.

The drug isn’t approved yet, but the researchers at Gilead have submitted twice-yearly lenacapavir for approval by the FDA and the European Medicines Agency and hope to have it approved by the FDA in June, says Das. The drug is also being assessed under the EU-Medicines for all (EU-M4all) procedure, which is a collaboration between the EMA and the World Health Organizations to fast-track the approval of drugs for countries outside Europe.

With any new medicine for an infection that affects low- and middle-income countries, there are always concerns about cost. The existing formulations of lenacapvir (used for treating HIV infections) can cost around $40,000 for a year’s supply. “There’s no price for the twice-yearly [formulation] yet,” says Das.

Gilead has signed licensing agreements with six generic drug manufacturers that will sell cheaper versions of the drug in 120 low- and middle-income countries. In December, the Global Fund and other organizations announced plans to secure access to twice-yearly lenacapavir for 2 million people in such countries.

But this was an effort coordinated with the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program whose very existence has come under threat following an executive order issued by the Trump administration to pause foreign aid.

“We are looking at the political situation right now and evaluating our possible options,” says Singh. “We are committed to working with the government to see what’s next and what can be done.”

The pause on US foreign aid will have devastating consequences for the health of people around the globe. And the idea that it might interfere with access to a drug that could help bring an end to the HIV epidemic—which has already claimed over 40 million lives—is a heartbreaking prospect. It is estimated that 630,000 people died from HIV-related causes in 2023. That same year, another 1.3 million people acquired HIV.

“We’re in such a good place to end the epidemic,” says Marquez. “We’ve come so far … we’ve got to go the last mile and get the product out there to the people that need it.”

Now read the rest of The Checkup

Read more from MIT Technology Review‘s archive

You can read more about why twice-yearly lenacapavir made our 2025 list of the top 10 breakthrough technologies here. (It’s also worth checking out the full list, here!)

The pharmaceutical company Merck has explored a different approach to delivering PrEP drugs—via a matchstick-size plastic tube implanted in a person’s arm. 

In 2018, Antonio Regalado broke the news that He Jiankui and his colleagues in Shenzen, China, had edited the genes of human embryos to create the first “CRISPR babies.” The team claimed to have done the procedure to ensure that the resulting children were resistant to HIV.

The first approved mRNA vaccines were for covid-19. But Moderna, the pharmaceutical company behind some of those vaccines, is now working on a similar approach for HIV.

AIDS denialism is undergoing a resurgence thanks to conspiracy-theory-promoting podcasts and books, one of which was authored by the newly appointed US secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

From around the web

Last week, I covered the creation of the “woolly mouse,” an animal with woolly-mammoth-like features. Its creators think they’re a step closer to bringing the mammoths back from extinction. But the woolly mammoth is just one of a list of animals scientists have been trying to “de-extinct.” The full list includes dodos, passenger pigeons, and even a frog that “gives birth” by vomiting babies out of its mouth. (Discover Wildlife)

The biotechnology company Beam Therapeutics claims to have corrected a DNA mutation in people with an incurable genetic disease that can affect the liver and lungs. It is the first time a mutated gene has been restored to normal, the team says. (New York Times)

In the peak covid-19 era of 2020, Jay Bhattacharya was considered a “fringe epidemiologist” by Francis Collins, then director of the US National Institutes of Health. Now, Collins is out and Bhattacharya may soon take his place. What happens when the “fringe” is in charge? (The Atlantic)

The Trump administration withdrew the nomination of Dave Weldon to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Weldon has a long track record of criticizing vaccines. (STAT) 

Mississippi became the third US state to ban lab-grown meat. The state’s agriculture commissioner has written that he wants his steak to come from “farm-raised beef, not a petri dish from a lab.” (Wired)

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Mar 13 2025
This artificial leaf makes hydrocarbons out of carbon dioxide

For many years, researchers have been working to build devices that can mimic photosynthesis—the process by which plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make their fuel. These artificial leaves use sunlight to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which could then be used to fuel cars or generate electricity. Now a research team has taken aim at creating more energy-dense fuels.

Companies have been manufacturing synthetic fuels for nearly a century by combining carbon monoxide (which can be sourced from carbon dioxide) and hydrogen under high temperatures. But the hope is that artificial leaves can eventually do a similar kind of synthesis in a more sustainable and efficient way, by tapping into the power of the sun.

The group’s device produces ethylene and ethane, proving that artificial leaves can create hydrocarbons. The development could offer a cheaper, cleaner way to make fuels, chemicals, and plastics. 

For research lead Virgil Andrei at the University of Cambridge, the ultimate goal is to use this technology to create fuels that don’t leave a harmful carbon footprint after they’re burned. If the process uses carbon dioxide captured from the air or power plants, the resulting fuels could be carbon neutral—and ease the need to keep digging up fossil fuels.

“Eventually we want to be able to source carbon dioxide to produce the fuels and chemicals that we need for industry and for everyday lives,” says Andrei, who coauthored a study published in Nature Catalysis in February. “You end up mimicking nature’s own carbon cycle, so you don’t need additional fossil resources.”

Copper nanoflowers

Like other artificial leaves, the team’s device harnesses energy from the sun to create chemical products. But producing hydrocarbons is more complicated than making hydrogen because the process requires more energy.

To accomplish this feat, the researchers introduced a few innovations. The first was to use a specialized catalyst made up of tiny flower-like copper structures, produced in the lab of coauthor Peidong Yang at the University of California, Berkeley. On one side of the device, electrons accumulated on the surfaces of these nanoflowers. These electrons were then used to convert carbon dioxide and water into a range of molecules including ethylene and ethane, hydrocarbons that each contain two carbon atoms. 

An image showing top views of the copper nanoflowers at different magnifications.
Microscope images of the device’s copper nanoflowers.
ANDREI, V., ROH, I., LIN, JA. ET AL. / NAT CATAL (2025)

These nanoflower structures are tunable and could be adjusted to produce a wide range of molecules, says Andrei: “Depending on the nanostructure of the copper catalyst you can get wildly different products.” 

On the other side of the device, the team also developed a more energy-efficient way to source electrons by using light-absorbing silicon nanowires to process glycerol rather than water, which is more commonly used. An added benefit is that the glycerol-based process can produce useful compounds like glycerate, lactate, and acetate, which could be harvested for use in the cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries. 

Scaling up

Even though the trial system worked, the advance is only a stepping stone toward creating a commercially viable source of fuel. “This research shows this concept can work,” says Yanwei Lum, a chemical and biomolecular engineering assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. But, he adds, “the performance is still not sufficient for practical applications. It’s still not there yet.”

Andrei says the device needs to be significantly more durable and efficient in order to be adopted for fuel production. But the work is moving in the right direction. 

“We have been making this progress because we looked at more unconventional concepts and state-of-the-art techniques that were not really available,” he says. “I’m quite optimistic that this technology could take off in the next five to 10 years.”

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