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The Download: biotech's future and cheaper, cleaner steel

MIT Technology Review

Plus: Anthropic says it has blocked potential plots to build biological weapons. Every year, puts together our 35 Innovators Under 35, a list of some of the brightest and best young minds working across science and technology. This year's honorees include nine people transforming biotech, whose work spans everything from lifesaving innovations to groundbreaking longevity tech. Their innovations include a "reprogramming" therapy that reverses vision loss, tiny brain electrodes inspired by Japanese art, and a personalized gene-editing treatment for a baby with a rare genetic disorder. There are even efforts to design new viruses with generative AI, which (hopefully) will produce new drugs or soak up pollution. Get to know the biotech innovators behind these breakthroughs .


Meet the under-35s shaping the future of biotech

MIT Technology Review

Every year, puts together a list of some of the brightest and best young minds working across science and technology. Our 35 Innovators Under 35 are the ones to watch--people whose research and technical work stands to shape the future of their fields. This year, the list includes nine people who are transforming biotech. And this week, I'm going to give you a taste of some of the very cool stuff five of them are working on, which includes lifesaving innovations and groundbreaking "age reversal" tech.


The Download: a "God-driven" cryptocurrency and a solar engineering roadmap

MIT Technology Review

Plus: OpenAI's agents used at least 10 websites for unauthorized communications. God told them to sell crypto. When Eli Regalado first heard God speak to him, he wondered whether he was hallucinating. According to Eli and his wife, Kaitlyn, He told them to get married, buy a house, and start having kids. Then in 2021, divine guidance steered them in an unexpected new direction: crypto. That October, the Regalados later testified in court, they received holdings in a little-known digital coin.


Powering AI is an architecture problem

MIT Technology Review

Moving power protection up the voltage stack, outside the building, and into the power path doesn't just solve outages; it changes density, permitting timelines and backup power economics. On July 22, 2026, a transmission line fault in Ashburn, Virginia--the heart of the world's largest data center cluster--knocked more than 3 gigawatts of load off the grid in seconds. Two years earlier, a single failed surge arrester dropped roughly 60 Virginia facilities and 1,500 megawatts at once. No one could anticipate so much uniform load responding to grid faults the same way, at the same time. The AI power debate is mostly about generation: more turbines, more solar, more transmission. The grid needs more electrons.


This road map could help us decide whether to deploy solar geoengineering

MIT Technology Review

A new report from the nonprofit Reflective lays out the experiments needed to better understand our ability to dim the sun. A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, can reveal. Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do--and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty. Reflective, a research organization that funds studies on solar geoengineering, has today attempted to fill that gap with the release of its SAI Research Roadmap . "Our mission is to equip the world with the data and tools required for informed decision-making about sunlight reflection fast enough to matter," says Dakota Gruener, the organization's cofounder and chief executive.


Can the US battery market untangle from China?

MIT Technology Review

The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That'll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, though there's been a concerted effort to reduce the US's reliance on them. Most recently, in an executive order in late August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that essentially bans Chinese batteries from being used in grid-scale energy storage systems.


Healthcare AI's next test is integration

MIT Technology Review

Healthcare AI's next test is integration While advanced AI excels at processing clinical data, healthcare's true test lies in overcoming deeply fragmented administrative workflows. The entrance of major AI companies into healthcare is a meaningful and welcome development, accelerating the technical foundation available to the industry. Their models are increasingly capable of processing long clinical records, interpreting complex terminology, comparing documentation against evidence and generating coherent summaries from large volumes of information. For clinicians, operators, and administrative teams who spend significant time searching through fragmented data, these advances are helping reduce cognitive burden and make high-value information easier to access. But healthcare leaders should not confuse model capability with operational capability. Healthcare's administrative challenges are caused by fragmented information, fragmented workflows, and fragmented accountability, not a lack of information.


The Download: OpenAI's turning point for math and a battery record

MIT Technology Review

Plus: The US has accused six Chinese AI firms of "industrial-scale" theft. What OpenAI's latest controversy tells us about the future of math OpenAI says its agents have solved one of the most important open problems in mathematics. Under normal circumstances, that would be a huge milestone. But the announcement has been overshadowed by accusations that OpenAI failed to credit researchers whose AI-assisted work influenced its solution. Whether those accusations are true or not, the episode may mark a turning point in the history of mathematics. AI models now seem essential for making progress on the field's most important problems, but solving them may demand resources available only to a couple of frontier AI companies.


Batteries just broke another record in the US

MIT Technology Review

Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That's enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes. The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in 2026, a 20% increase over last year. This growth is being driven by a combination of cheaper batteries and an urgent need for more energy storage capacity as renewables such as solar and onshore wind power are added to the grid.


Understanding the thermal ceiling in portable power

MIT Technology Review

Wireless charging performance is limited less by power delivery than by the physics of heat, and solving it requires rethinking the hardware. Plug a phone into a modern charger and the first 10 minutes are impressive. The next 20 are not. This is not a defect. It's the connected device protecting itself. As temperature rises during charging, a smartphone's battery management system reduces the current it will accept, because heat accelerates the chemical degradation that permanently reduces battery capacity.