I asked my MIT class to consider why some of the advances that MIT Technology Review's journalists thought would change our world never really did--and what we can learn from the flops. Every year, publishes a list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies. In fact, the 2026 version is out today. This marks the 25th year the newsroom has compiled this annual list, which means its journalists and editors have now identified 250 technologies as breakthroughs. A few years ago, editor at large David Rotman revisited the publication's original list, finding that while all the technologies were still relevant, each had evolved and progressed in often unpredictable ways. I lead students through a similar exercise in a graduate class I teach with James Scott for MIT's School of Architecture and Planning.

MIT researchers have developed resilient artificial muscles that can enable insect-scale aerial robots to effectively recover flight performance after suffering severe damage. It is estimated that a foraging bee bumps into a flower about once per second, which damages its wings over time. Yet despite having many tiny rips or holes in their wings, bumblebees can still fly. Aerial robots, on the other hand, are not so resilient. Poke holes in the robot's wing motors or chop off part of its propellor, and odds are pretty good it will be grounded.

It is estimated that a foraging bee bumps into a flower about once per second, which damages its wings over time. Yet despite having many tiny rips or holes in their wings, bumblebees can still fly. Aerial robots, on the other hand, are not so resilient. Poke holes in the robot's wing motors or chop off part of its propellor, and odds are pretty good it will be grounded. Inspired by the hardiness of bumblebees, MIT researchers have developed repair techniques that enable a bug-sized aerial robot to sustain severe damage to the actuators, or artificial muscles, that power its wings -- but to still fly effectively.

Aerial robots, on the other hand, are not so resilient. Poke holes in the robot's wing motors or chop off part of its propellor, and odds are pretty good it will be grounded. Inspired by the hardiness of bumblebees, MIT researchers have developed repair techniques that enable a bug-sized aerial robot to sustain severe damage to the actuators, or artificial muscles, that power its wings -- but to still fly effectively. They optimized these artificial muscles so the robot can better isolate defects and overcome minor damage, like tiny holes in the actuator. In addition, they demonstrated a novel laser repair method that can help the robot recover from severe damage, such as a fire that scorches the device.

Insect-like drones have taken one large step closer to becoming a practical reality. Researchers at Harvard, MIT and the City University of Hong Kong have developed tiny insect-inspired drones that can not only maneuver in extremely tight spaces, but withstand bumps if things go wrong. The key is a switch to an actuation system that can flap the drones' wings while surviving its share of abuse. To date, drone makers wanting to go this small have had to ditch motors (which lose effectiveness at small sizes) in favor of piezoelectric ceramic-based rigid actuators. The new drones rely on soft actuators made from rubber cylinders coated with carbon nanotubes.

One thing is certain: The explosion of data creation in our society will continue as far as pundits and anyone else can forecast. In response, there is an insatiable demand for more advanced high performance computing to make this data useful. The IT industry has been pushing to new levels of high-end computing performance; this is the dawn of the exascale era of computing. Recent announcements from the US Department of Energy for exascale computers represent the starting point for a new generation of computing advances. This is critical for the advancement of any number of use cases such as understanding the interactions underlying the science of weather, sub-atomic structures, genomics, physics, rapidly emerging artificial intelligence applications, and other important scientific fields.

The Air Force Research Laboratory is working with engineers at the University of Cincinnati to develop radical new clothing that can charge your cell phone. Researchers are developing a plethora of carbon technology, including'Iron Man' suits that can store power in carbon nanotubes. They say the technology could revolutionise everything from clothing to warplanes. The team say their work could one day lead to'Iron Man' suits that can store power in carbon nanotubes A carbon nanotube is an incredibly small tube-shaped material made of carbon. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, or about 10,000 times smaller than a human hair.

Though nearly seventy percent of Earth's surface is comprised of water, only three percent is considered fresh and drinkable--and most of that striking minority is trapped in glaciers or polar ice caps. Juxtapose the dearth of natural drinking water with the disquieting realization that nearly a billion people still lack unfettered access to clean water, and the world's oceans suddenly look a lot smaller. This global quandary has led to the ambitious goal of making oceans drinkable--but doing so is going to require a ton of innovation and processing power. Let's take a look at how the next generation of supercomputers might help solve our water challenges and more. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory believe the answer lies in carbon nanotubes (and a whole lot more, but let's start here for now).

You've probably got at least one on your person right now. They're built to fit into smartwatches and smaller things, and that small size hampers how well they can sense changes. Engineers in Florida have now come up with a new take on the accelerometer that is as much as 1 million times as sensitive as a typical smartphone accelerometer, and it maintains that sensitivity up to a car-crash-scale 100 gs. That combination of high sensitivity and large dynamic range in a cube that's just 3 millimeters on a side should make the new accelerometer particularly useful in things that move quickly in three-dimensions, such as military drones, microrobots, and self-guided projectiles, according its inventors. Ordinary MEMS accelerometers are made up of a moveable plate and a stationary plate, oriented perpendicular to each dimension measured.

Design has consequences Carnegie Mellon University design students are exploring ways to enhance interactions with new technologies and the power of artificial intelligence. Assistant Professor Dan Lockton teaches the course, "Environments Studio IV: Designing Environments for Social Systems" in CMU's School of Design and leads the school's new Imaginaries Lab. "We want the designers of tomorrow to think about the overlap between the human world and AI. Many of our students are going to go work for companies like Facebook or Google, and they're going to be making decisions that might seem very small in the moment -- what text do we put on a button, how easy do we make it for someone to do this thing or that -- but those decisions are going to impact people's lives. We want them thinking through how their design has consequences."