The Download: spotting crimes in prisoners' phone calls, and nominate an Innovator Under 35 A US telecom company trained an AI model on years of inmates' phone and video calls and is now piloting that model to scan their calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes. Securus Technologies president Kevin Elder told that the company began building its AI tools in 2023, using its massive database of recorded calls to train AI models to detect criminal activity. It created one model, for example, using seven years of calls made by inmates in the Texas prison system, but it has been working on models for other states and counties. However, prisoner rights advocates say that the new AI system enables a system of invasive surveillance, and courts have specified few limits to this power. We have some exciting news: Nominations are now open for MIT Technology Review's 2026 Innovators Under 35 competition. This annual list recognizes 35 of the world's best young scientists and inventors, and our newsroom has produced it for more than two decades.

It's free and easy to nominate yourself or someone you know--here's how. We have some exciting news: Nominations are now open for's 2026 Innovators Under 35 competition. This annual list recognizes 35 of the world's best young scientists and inventors, and our newsroom has produced it for more than two decades. It's free to nominate yourself or someone you know, and it only takes a few moments. We're looking for people who are making important scientific discoveries and applying that knowledge to build new technologies. Or those who are engineering new systems and algorithms that will aid our work or extend our abilities.

MIT Technology Review's visuals editor shares the birding app, journaling system, and book series capturing her attention lately. This science fiction book series confronted me with existential questions like "Are we alone in the universe?" In the series, aliens destroy most of Earth, leaving the titular Carl and Princess Donut, his ex-girlfriend's cat, to fight in a bloodthirsty game of survival with rules that are part reality TV and part video game dungeon crawl. I particularly recommend the audiobook, voiced by Jeff Hays, which makes the numerous characters easy to differentiate. For years I've tried to find a perfect system to keep track of all my random notes and weird little rabbit holes of inspiration. None of my paper journals or paid apps have been able to top how customizable and convenient the developer-favorite notetaking app Obsidian is.

A large language model (LLM) with knowledge in both scientific and general tasks is the foundation of science general intelligence. However, directly continued pretraining an LLM using science data usually leads to catastrophic forgetting, which indicates severe degradation in general ability. In this report, we present Innovator, which solves this problem by upcycling a pre-trained dense LLM into a fine-grained Mixtures-of-Experts model during continued pretraining, where different experts are expected to learn science knowledge in different disciplines, and a shared expert is utilized for general tasks. Innovator introduces a four-stage upcycle training paradigm: (1) Scientific Expert Induction on discipline-specific data, (2) Fine-grained Expert Splitting via FFN dimension decomposition, (3) Science-Aware Routing warmup, and (4) Generalist-Scientist Integration training on hybrid datasets. Such a paradigm enables knowledge in the general domain, and different scientific disciplines can be decoupled, avoiding the negative influence among knowledge in different domains. With 53.3B total parameters and 13.3B activated, Innovator extends Qwen2.5-7B using a shared general expert and 64 specialized scientific experts with 8 activated. Trained on 300B tokens with tri-level quality-controlled data, Innovator achieves 25% average improvement across 30 scientific tasks with a win rate as 70%, while retaining 99% performance in general tasks. Furthermore, Innovator-Reason, which is post-trained from Innovator for reasoning boosting, exhibits excellent reasoning performance in solving complex scientific problems with improvements over 30%.

Scientists are getting a better handle on the complexities of how immunity works. Attentive readers might have noticed my absence over the last couple of weeks. I've been trying to recover from a bout of illness. It got me thinking about the immune system, and how little I know about my own immune health. The vast array of cells, proteins, and biomolecules that works to defend us from disease is mind-bogglingly complicated. Immunologists are still getting to grips with how it all works.

Watch a subscriber-only conversation on how researchers and entrepreneurs are faring under the new administration. Every year, MIT Technology Review recognizes dozens of young researchers on our Innovators Under 35 list. We checked back in with recent honorees to see how they're faring amid sweeping changes to science and technology policy within the US. Learn about the complex realities of what life has been like for those aiming to build their labs and companies in today's political climate. How Trump's policies are affecting early-career scientists--in their own words It's surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot Rhiannon Williams Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. How these two brothers became go-to experts on America's "mystery drone" invasion Matthew Phelan It's surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT.

Plus: America's first AI law is here Scientists can see Earth's permafrost thawing from space Something is rotten in the city of Nunapitchuk. In recent years, sewage has leached into the earth. The ground can feel squishy, sodden. This small town in northern Alaska is experiencing a sometimes overlooked consequence of climate change: thawing permafrost. And Nunapitchuk is far from the only Arctic town to find itself in such a predicament. Now scientists think they may be able to use satellite data to delve deep beneath the ground's surface and get a better understanding of how the permafrost thaws, and which areas might be most severely affected.

Conversations around birth control usually focus on women, but Kevin Eisenfrats, one of the MIT Technology Review 2025 Innovators Under 35, is working to change that. His company, Contraline, is working toward testing new birth control options for men . Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that's over 30 years old Jessica Hamzelou Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that's over 30 years old The embryos were created in 1994, while the expectant father was still a toddler, and donated via a Christian "embryo adoption" agency. Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Some therapists are using AI during therapy sessions.

Plus: Secret Service agents dismantled a giant operation to cripple cell networks. It's surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot The first large-scale computational analysis of the Reddit community r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, which is dedicated to discussing AI relationships, found that many people formed those relationships unintentionally while using AI for other purposes. In fact, only 6.5% of them said they'd deliberately sought out an AI companion. The study found that AI companionship provides vital support for some but exacerbates underlying problems for others. This means it's hard to take a one-size-fits-all approach to user safety. Join us at 1.30pm ET today to learn about the future of birth control Conversations around birth control usually focus on women, but Kevin Eisenfrats, one of the MIT Technology Review 2025 Innovators Under 35, is working to change that.

Watch a subscriber-only conversation with Sneha Goenka, who designed the computations behind the world's fastest whole-genome sequencing method. Every year, MIT Technology Review selects one individual whose work we admire to recognize as Innovator of the Year. For 2025, we chose Sneha Goenka, who designed the computations behind the world's fastest whole-genome sequencing method . Thanks to her work, physicians can now sequence a patient's genome and diagnose a genetic condition in less than eight hours--an achievement that could transform medical care. Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that's over 30 years old Jessica Hamzelou Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT. Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that's over 30 years old The embryos were created in 1994, while the expectant father was still a toddler, and donated via a Christian "embryo adoption" agency.