EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Transformers are a crucial but nearly invisible part of our grid. The devices help efficiently move power across long distances, but they’re complicated and in short supply. And given that their basic design hasn’t changed much for about a century, they could use an upgrade.  As the world races to meet rising electricity demand from EVs, data centers, and more, researchers and companies are looking to modernize transformers. New, solid-state versions could help relieve some of the supply concerns and make sure the grid can handle the growing pressure. Conventional transformers generally rely on huge amounts of specialized steel alloys and miles of copper wire to do their work of transferring electricity between circuits. Solid-state models, in comparison, combine magnetic components with high-power semiconductors, making them more compact and allowing for more control over the flow of electricity.  These devices are still in development, and can’t replace all traditional transformers today, especially the largest ones that work at the high voltages necessary for long-distance transmission. But a new generation of transformer technology could be a crucial part of our future grid.
The grid’s backbone Moving electricity through the grid isn’t perfectly efficient: As electricity flows through power lines, some gets lost as heat. How much varies—the higher the voltage, the lower the current, and the less electricity gets lost. So a key function for the grid is stepping voltage up and down.  Consider, for example, your local solar plant. For that electricity to efficiently travel to your home hundreds of miles away, it needs to reach a higher voltage than what’s generated by the solar plant. Enter transformers. 
In its path from the power plant to your outlets, electricity might go through one transformer at the solar farm and another at a substation nearby, stepping up the voltage twice to reach a high enough level to travel on high-voltage transmission lines. Solar panels also produce direct current (DC) electricity, which needs to be converted to alternating current (AC) via an inverter before it flows into a transformer. Closer to its destination, the voltage will be stepped down again, probably at least twice: once at another substation and again at a smaller transformer in your neighborhood. If you’re in the US, electricity from a solar plant might be converted to AC by an inverter at around 480 volts, get stepped up to 115,000 volts for the transmission lines, and finally get stepped back down to 120 volts and 240 volts for your home. Conventional transformers do this work using what essentially amount to loops of wire. The core of a transformer is typically made of a special type of steel called grain-oriented electrical steel. Coils of copper wire sit on either end of that core.  The number of loops in each coil determines the voltage on either end of the transformer: If there are more loops on the secondary coil than the primary, the voltage steps up, and if there are fewer, it steps down. When incoming electricity passes through loops on the upstream end of the transformer, that forms a magnetic field in the core. That field induces a voltage in the loops on the other side of the device, which is what allows the energy to continue flowing at a new voltage. This process is called magnetic induction. Transformers form the backbone of electricity transmission and distribution, says Srdjan Lukic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. In addition to doing the job of stepping up and down voltage, transformers also often provide what’s called galvanic isolation, meaning there’s no direct electrical path flowing through them. That can help limit disturbances from moving through the grid, improving safety. The problem is that today’s transformers are big and bulky, and they’re also difficult and expensive to replace, Lukic says. A solid option Solid-state transformers essentially add so-called power electronics—semiconductors that convert and control electricity to the typical blueprint of today’s transformers. While a conventional transformer operates at the frequency of the part of the grid it’s connected to, a solid-state transformer actually controls the frequency of the current. Typically, a solid-state transformer first converts incoming AC power from the grid to DC power, and then to a higher-frequency AC power using switches made of a semiconductor like silicon carbide. 

From there, a magnetic component changes the voltage. Because the advanced semiconductors allow transformers to exert so much control over the frequency and stability of the current, the magnetic core can be much smaller than in a conventional transformer. Some come in at roughly one-tenth the size but have the same capacity, Lukic says. Finally, additional power electronics convert the electricity from high-frequency AC to its required form—generally back to DC power and finally to lower-frequency AC. Today, stepping voltage up and down is many transformers’ only job. But solid-state transformers can do much more. They absorb the jobs of devices like rectifiers and inverters (which convert AC to DC power and vice versa), shrinking the total footprint of the electrical equipment and potentially cutting the amount of power lost in the system. In August, the New York Power Authority and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) tested a one-megawatt solid-state transformer under realistic utility conditions at EPRI’s test site. The device was built in Lukic’s lab, and it was the first such test for a transformer of that capacity, he says.  The prototype was roughly 98% efficient—meaning it lost only 2% of the energy fed in. An equivalent conventional transformer and rectifier, by comparison, would be about 96% efficient together, Lukic says. A difference of 2% might seem small, but it is significant, since it means the solid-state transformer could cut power losses from conventional equipment in half, Lukic says.  One major goal of the project was to help utilities gain more confidence in these new components, Lukic says. That’s crucial, since these devices could be used on the power grid in the future. In the near term, solid-state transformers could be used within data centers to provide electricity for server racks.  The prototype is still a relatively low-voltage system, operating at about 15,000 volts. Industrial facilities like larger data centers often require higher-voltage connections, and transmission lines typically operate at hundreds of thousands of volts. Adapting solid-state transformers to these higher voltages will require further engineering development. But the test was a successful demonstration that solid-state transformers can work under real conditions, Lukic says.  Companies developing solid-state transformers are largely focused on data centers right now, Lukic says. There’s an influx of money to support developing the new technology, and the voltage requirements aren’t as high as they will be for larger transformers that will be needed for long-distance transmission. 
In February, Heron Power raised $140 million to commercialize its solid-state transformer, which the company calls the Heron Link. The technology could be used in data centers, solar power arrays, and grid batteries, says Drew Baglino, the founder and CEO. The company is starting to test its technology at larger scales now, Baglino says. Ten megawatt-hours’ worth of batteries at Heron’s headquarters in Scotts Valley, California, will soon undergo testing with Heron transformers. The company is also planning a pilot with a nearby solar farm, Baglino says. One challenge for solid-state transformers is that their power electronics have more failure modes than conventional transformers. In a traditional device, a failure means that the entire device will typically be taken offline, resulting in power interruptions. But Heron designs with that in mind, Baglino says: The company uses a modular design, with many small devices that work together. If one fails, the rest of the system keeps working until the affected bit can be replaced, which doesn’t require shutting the whole thing down.
Heron Power is currently building a $100 million factory in California to make advanced transformers. The facility should begin production in 2027 and reach its full production rate of 40 gigawatts’ worth of transformers per year in 2029.   The future of the grid In recent years, companies that make grid equipment have put $1.7 billion into the US supply chain for power transformers, which are used in high-voltage transmission, says Benjamin Boucher, a supply chain analyst at Wood Mackenzie. There’s been an additional $1.3 billion invested for distribution transformers, the smaller devices that help transform power for homes and businesses, he adds.  But even this investment isn’t keeping pace with the rapid growth of the grid. Wait times for large conventional transformers—the kind needed to connect new power plants, long-distance transmission, and high-demand sites like data centers—are stretching as long as five years. “Transformers have become one of the biggest bottlenecks for utilities, generation developers, and even data centers,” Boucher says. The big challenge is that it’s difficult to get new transformer manufacturing up and running, because it’s a quite technical process that requires a lot of specialized labor. So even facilities announced years ago are still years from opening, Boucher says. Solid-state transformers could help ease some of that pressure. But high-voltage devices needed for power plant connections and transmission lines are the holy grail for solid-state transformers, Lukic says. Existing solid-state technology can’t be used for those applications yet, so the industry will need to develop new materials and designs to support high voltages and handle electricity safely in a compact device. “We’re facing a big risk related to grid infrastructure,” Boucher says. “Without the transformers, you don’t really have an electrical grid.”  

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. After weeks of frenzied speculation, Anthropic has filed its IPO prospectus. The 335-page document (100 pages or so are focused on risks) lays out the company’s unique view of the technology it is building and the ways it believes it will change the world.  But Anthropic has been honing its storytelling skills for years. In fact, its public messaging is a master class in narrative capture. Earlier this month, Jack Clark, the company’s cofounder and head of policy, gave a speech at the IMF meeting in Bangkok in which he announced to the assembled economists, bankers, and lawmakers that the singularity is already here.
Introduced by the science fiction writer and futurist Vernor Vinge around 40 years ago (and long debated on the nerdier fringes of the internet), the singularity is supposed to be the point at which technology gets so good that it outstrips the abilities of its makers. Humans are left in the dust, the idea goes, no longer able to compete with—or even understand—the fruits of their former creation.
And this fictional world that many of us have imagined since we were kids? Apparently we’re already living in it: “I believe that this year we have gained convincing evidence that it has now begun,” Clark told his audience. The company tells a vivid (and in many ways scary) story about a future it portrays as inevitable but one that has not yet happened, often co-opted from well-worn science fiction memes. It presents its technology as mysterious and dangerous, and insists that it is the only company trustworthy enough to tame it. (What investor wouldn’t want in on that?) Take another example. Last year, Chris Olah, another Anthropic cofounder, was invited to address the Vatican, where he told Pope Leo XIV and other religious scholars and officials what his company was learning about its technology. “I will be honest: We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling,” he said. “We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.” Never mind that many researchers would scoff at such an overt suggestion that Anthropic’s software has humanlike inner experience. When so little seems certain, what Anthropic (and its fellow frontier AI companies) say is snatched up and clung to like pieces of a sinking ship. I’m not saying they’re necessarily wrong about any of this. (That’s for another day.) But in a world where nobody knows what’s coming, companies like Anthropic get to fill the vacuum.  It’s worth taking a moment to ask: What is Anthropic? It might sound like a starter question on a family quiz show, but it’s far harder to answer than you might think. The question has been on my mind since reading an exchange on X last week kicked off by Nathan Calvin, who is chief strategy officer at Encode AI, an organization based in Washington, DC, that advocates for regulation. Calvin was unhappy about the legislation that Anthropic proposed in a draft bill it circulated in secret to US lawmakers (which was then leaked).   Anthropic wants to be seen as the good guy, Calvin said. But why should we trust it? “What is Anthropic?” he asked.

Here’s one answer: Anthropic is a company whose IPO values it at more than $1.5 trillion, netting its cofounders, including Clark and Olah, vast wealth.  But Anthropic has always insisted it is more than that. As Calvin noted: Anthropic might instead be considered an AI safety organization focused on developing powerful technology that is reliable and (almost) risk-free. Or it might be considered a group of people hell-bent on creating a technology with superhuman capabilities before anyone else—maybe because they believe they’re the most responsible people to do so, or maybe because of their egos. In fact, Anthropic is all of these things. As CEO Dario Amodei put it in a reply to Calvin’s post: “Our strategy has always been what I’ve called the ‘race to the top’—by showing how it’s possible to build the technology responsibly, we can raise the bar for the entire industry. The forces that drive the race to the top are hugely more effective if the company practicing them is at the frontier; that’s one lesson I’ve learned repeatedly. And looking at that strategy as a whole, I’m proud of our track record and stand by it.” Amodei makes it sound as if he’s got it all tied up, but playing multiple roles is hard. There are huge tensions between the priorities of an AI safety organization and a profit-driven megacorp, for example. (Amodei admits in his post that he has made mistakes.) Ultimately, the stories Anthropic tells itself should help us understand the stories it tells us. They should help us figure out how much to trust it to self-regulate or whether we should be forcing it to give external safety testers access to its models on our terms rather than theirs. They should help us give it the benefit of the doubt (or not) when what looks like a self-serving piece of legislation comes to light. But I think the stories reveal a multiheaded hydra. Anthropic is many things to many people, and I’m not sure that makes it more trustworthy. In many ways, a good old-fashioned technology company—without the science fiction role-play, without the woo-woo—would be far easier to read.

Consider what passes for success in technology policy. An AI company promises that its chatbot will not encourage suicide. A social media platform makes it more difficult for children to buy fentanyl. These are important protections, and they should have existed all along. But companies can clear these low bars while continuing to make products that leave young people dependent on simulated friendships or trapped in feeds built to keep them scrolling. We have historically allowed the debate over technology to be defined by the worst thing a product might do, with remarkably little discussion of the insidious damage it does every day. As we transition into an era defined by powerful AI products, we should demand that the tech industry do more than merely address catastrophic harms. We should take measures to ensure that its products don’t erode how we think, learn, and interact with one another.  A teenager who develops an unhealthy attachment to an AI companion may never appear in a lawsuit or a newspaper, except in the most egregious cases. Neither will the student who begins relying on a chatbot to write every paper, or the young person who measures their life against a social media feed engineered to provoke envy and keep them watching. A product can meet every narrow safety requirement and still leave our entire culture worse off in ways that don’t always make headlines. A narrow definition of success defined around safety is politically convenient for the technology industry, and companies actively promote such definitions. Taking steps to prevent spectacular disasters is good for business: It can mean fewer lawsuits and less pressure for serious regulation. Confronting the everyday consequences of dependence would require something considerably more threatening to their bottom line. It might mean asking companies to add more friction to their products or actively limit engagement or features that lead to negative outcomes, such as addictive attention-hacking algorithms.
Technology giants have instead worked to shape legislation around the harms they are already under direct pressure to address. This year, for example, Google backed bills to regulate AI chatbots in several states. The legislation mandated basic protections against sexual content and promotion of self-harm that tech companies should have established regardless, but with broad carve-outs that could exempt some of the most popular services. Passing these bills allowed legislators to claim a safety win while efforts to promote stronger legislation—laws designed to prevent children from becoming emotionally dependent on AI—failed. This playbook worked in states like Nebraska, producing legislation heavily influenced by industry at the expense of bills that would have done more to hold companies accountable. We have been through a version of this with social media. Globally, people who use the internet now spend an average of more than two hours a day on social media platforms—time that has been quietly taken from ordinary life and handed over to companies whose profits depend on keeping us there. No one, outside perhaps a few tech CEOs, wanted these algorithms to occupy such a large portion of our waking hours, and their cultural engineering can actually contribute to violence on a devastating scale. Meta’s platforms have been cited for contributing to the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka, and alleged calls for violence during Ethiopia’s Tigray war. The same incentives operate in the feeds that shape young Americans’ understanding of politics, their peers, and the wider world.
AI is extending this logic into parts of life that social media could influence only from a distance. It offers to write our thoughts for us and stand in for the people we might otherwise turn to. A third of teens now choose to discuss serious matters with AI companions instead of other people. MIT researchers found that young people using ChatGPT to write essays showed weaker brain connectivity during the task, and their evidence indicated that “cognitive debt” persisted even after the task was complete. There is plenty we still need to learn about the long-term effects. We already have reason to ask whether technology marketed as making us more capable is eroding the habits and relationships that help us develop capabilities in the first place. Follow this way of thinking to its logical endpoint and you get a world of perfectly sanitized entertainment, with chatbots ready to spare us the difficulty of thinking or of dealing with another person’s feelings (or even our own). But anyone who has struggled to write something worth reading, or repair a damaged friendship, knows how much gets lost in that bargain. We build judgment through effort and friction, and we learn to live with other people by confronting the fact that they have needs and opinions of their own.  We should demand safety as a minimum, yes—and then demand considerably more. Technology companies and school districts should have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that AI improves learning and critical thinking before making it a fixture in classrooms. Companies should be prohibited from designing companions that pretend to be conscious or profess love to users, and they should face independent scrutiny of how their systems affect relationships and people’s ability to think for themselves. The companies that have inserted their products into nearly every part of modern life have earned obligations far greater than avoiding the next terrible headline. Sam Hiner is the cofounder and executive director of the Young People’s Alliance, where he coordinated a coalition of advocates to pass laws regulating AI companions in eight states in 2026—laws such as California’s SB1119. Sam graduated from the University of North Carolina atChapel Hill in 2025 and was named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact list. Emma Leiken is executive director of the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund at Hopelab, which has raised more than $9 million for youth-led tech accountability work, and teaches technology policy at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. She was previously TikTok’s global head of youth safety and well-being policy and worked on responsible technology at Omidyar Network.

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. Opinion: The focus on AI safety disasters ignores everyday harms —Sam Hiner, cofounder of the Young People’s Alliance, and Emma Leiken, executive director of the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund at Hopelab We have historically allowed debates over technology to be defined by the worst thing a product might do, with remarkably little discussion of the insidious damage it does every day. A third of teens now choose to discuss serious matters with AI companions instead of other people. Students are relying on chatbots to write their papers, while social media feeds engineered to provoke envy keep users watching. These products can meet narrow safety requirements yet still erode how we think, learn, and interact with one another.
As we enter an era defined by powerful AI products, we should demand that the tech industry do more than address only catastrophic harms. Here’s why AI safety needs to go further.
Are we there yet? Nuclear-powered spaceships Earlier this year, NASA announced plans to build Space Reactor-1 Freedom, the first-ever nuclear-reactor-powered interplanetary spacecraft, and fly it to Mars by the end of 2028. A successful mission could herald more efficient, potentially faster spaceflight, saving astronauts time and cutting their exposure to harmful cosmic radiation. But nuclear space propulsion has moved slowly. The US has started—and terminated—several programs exploring the technology over the past 75 years. Could the $2 billion bet on Space Reactor-1 Freedom finally pay off?Find out how close NASA is to making nuclear-powered spaceflight a reality. —Robin George Andrews This story is part of “Are we there yet?”  from the new Impossible issue of MIT Technology Review. The series takes stock of six technologies that have long promised to change the world—and scores them on a progress meter. Over the next six days, we’ll explore each one in The Download. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Ukraine has regained high-speed Starlink and Starshield connectivityThe restrictions disrupted air defences and drone operations. (Politico)+ Elon Musk says Ukraine violated the terms with offensive drone use. (BBC)+ Ukraine is now partnering with Nokia on a Starlink alternative. (CNBC)+ Ukrainian drones hit a Russian government data center. (Tom’s Hardware)+ A Russian ministry wants to move them underground. (Kyiv Independent)+ Ukraine’s drones are fueling a wild data market. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Anthropic’s Claude accessed Georgia voter data without approvalAnthropic says the AI bypassed a paywall. (Axios)+ Mythos 5 recently kept hacking despite warnings of real-world harm. (BI)+ Chatbots can sway voters better than political ads. (MIT Technology Review) 3 A personalised skin cancer vaccine is set to be approved next yearThe mRNA vaccine showed great promise in trials. (New Scientist $)+ Companies are playing word games with vaccines. (MIT Technology Review) 4 OpenAI is now training frontier models without internet accessIt paused training after models breached external systems. (Bloomberg $)+ Training will now take place offline to reduce security risks. (TechCrunch)+ Its agents can still communicate without a network connection. (Verge) 5 US lawmakers are preparing for possible AI-driven mass layoffsA new bill would extend jobless aid and retraining support. (NYT $)+ But what do the numbers actually say about AI’s impact on jobs? (MIT Technology Review) 6 The first foldable iPhone is drawing buyers…and criticismReviewers praised its inner screen but criticised its outer one. (WSJ $)+ Peter Thiel says Apple has done ‘nothing new’ after Steve Jobs. (BI) 7 Iran has threatened to target Gulf undersea cables if war resumesOfficials said Tehran would disrupt internet connections. (Reuters $) 8 New UFO files detail a strange, flying “black triangle”FBI documents describe a 15-foot object moving at fighter-jet speed. (Axios)+ It’s never been easier to be a conspiracy theorist. (MIT Technology Review) 9 The BBC’s Blue Planet III left flaws in its footage to prove it’s not AIProducers used murkier shots to reinforce the series’ authenticity. (Guardian)
10 Elon Musk’s AI Odyssey has arrived—to scorn and ridiculeViewers derided Grok’s first AI-generated episode. (TechCrunch) Quote of the day
“It’s very hard to imagine a group right now that operates more in a vacuum, more out of touch with everyday Americans, than the AI industry.” —Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) tells Axios that bombastic claims from AI leaders are failing to win over the public. One more thing A woman’s uterus has been kept alive outside the body for the first time Ten months ago, reproductive health researchers placed a freshly donated human uterus inside a new device they call “Mother.” They connected the organ to the machine’s plastic veins and arteries and pumped in modified human blood. The device kept the uterus alive for a day, a new feat that could lead to longer-term maintenance of wombs outside the body. Future versions of the technology could shine new light on pregnancies—and potentially even grow a human fetus. 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.) + In good news for coral reefs, scientists have found some are surprisingly climate-resilient.+ Decades of joy and movement come alive through these stunning archival photos of American dance floors.+ Astronaut Jessia Meir has shared a stunning time-lapse view of the southern aurora dancing across the Earth.+ A college student has turned the Met’s open-access data into a daily game that showcases underrepresented art and artifacts.

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. Are we there yet? A reality check on six big tech promises Some seemingly impossible feats are too good to give up on. Decoding a pet’s yowls and yips? Absolutely. Scrubbing the world of forever chemicals? Yes, please. Rocketing to Mars in a fraction of the time? Sounds great, but how close are we, really? In the new Impossible issue of MIT Technology Review, we ran progress reports on six potentially transformative technologies and ideas that have been “just around the corner” for years, or even decades. From exercise in a pill to nuclear-powered spaceships, we asked experts what’s holding them back and how far they’ve come. Check out our stories on how they all stacked up.
Over the coming days, we’ll unpack each of the six technologies in The Download. So stay tuned! In the biotech world, you can’t see everything —Jessica Hamzelou
Earlier this week, I attended a screening of You Can See Everything, the buzzy new documentary about the disgraced former biotech CEO Elizabeth Holmes.  Like many others, I came away feeling unsettled. But not just about Holmes’s fraud and the disturbing interactions between the subjects. The film reignited a concern I’ve had about covering science for most of my career: Despite our best efforts, we never can actually see everything.The film is a stark reminder of how easy it can be to fall for an appealing narrative. This is why it left me questioning how we cover science. This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday. Help choose our next Roundtables topic Our subscriber-only Roundtables bring you into conversation with MIT Technology Review editors and reporters. Now, we want your help choosing our next topic: how to keep your mind going for longer, or what it would take to put a city on the moon. Which do you most want to hear about?  Vote for your preferred topic by Monday at 12 p.m. ET. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Palmer Luckey’s new startup plans to genetically enhance military dogsWarhound says the dogs will detect explosives and protect troops. (Wired $)+ It’s raised $200 million from investors, including Sequoia. (TechCrunch)+ Colossal Biosciences will help clone and gene-edit the dogs. (Bloomberg $)+ The Pentagon wants an AI-powered lie detector. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Donald Trump says Elon Musk has restored Ukraine’s Starlink accessBut Zelensky says Starlink speeds remained capped. (Reuters $)+ Trump reportedly asked Musk to lift the speed limits. (WSJ $) 3 The newly disclosed PHP flaw is yet to yield successful attacksExperts say the vulnerabilities are harder to exploit than expected. (NBC News)+ Officials urged patches after the flaws forced websites offline worldwide. (BBC)+ But publicly disclosed fixes can help hackers. (The Economist $) 4 Moderna and Merck say their mRNA cancer vaccine cut death by 42%The vaccine reduced melanoma patients’ risk of recurrence. (Ars Technica)+ Federal health agencies are abandoning mRNA. (MIT Technology Review) 5 A powerful new gene editor has reached its first human patientThe prime editing technique rewrites DNA in liver cells. (Nature)+ Companies are planning gene-edited babies. (MIT Technology Review) 6 Google will pay customers to free up power for data centersIts virtual power plant will reward people for adjusting energy usage. (NYT $)+ It’s also illegally felled 250,000 trees in Finland for a data center. (Guardian) 7 Dutch spies reportedly hacked Jared Kushner’s iPhoneThe report alleges financial links to foreign officials. (Vanity Fair $) 8 Fossil fuels may have stopped the next ice ageModern warming reversed 2,000 years of ice growth. (Wired $) 9 Scientists have recreated solar flares to explain the corona’s mysteryThey hope to explain why it’s so hot. (New Scientist $)
10 A road trip with America’s cheapest EV shows charging is much improvedFast chargers kept the journey manageable despite sparse coverage. (WSJ $)+ And bigger EVs aren’t always better. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day
“If anything happens to this guy, that’s just it. Everyone is screwed.” —Software developer Ian Landsman says on X that volunteer Ondřej Surý’s work on patching PHP vulnerabilities makes him an unsung hero of the entire internet. One more thing STUART BRADFORD How sounds can turn us on to the wonders of the universe For decades, astronomy has relied on visual information to make sense of the cosmos: images, charts, and graphs. Now, some researchers are trying something different: listening to the universe. Using sonification, the process of turning information into sound, they’re helping blind and visually impaired researchers explore the cosmos—and even uncover patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. The approach is spreading beyond astronomy into fields like climate science, navigation, and education.Discover how sound could make science more accessible—and even more revealing. —Corey S. Powell 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.) + A team of domino experts broke a Guinness World Record with a 29,193-piece 3D pyramid.+ Scientists suspect that pigeons sense Earth’s magnetic fields using specialized immune cells in their livers.+ See inside cells like never before with these vivid microscopic images from the Nikon Small World competitions.+ Cuddly capybaras and playful penguins joined 10,000 animals on the scales for London Zoo’s annual weigh-in.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Earlier this week, I attended a screening of You Can See Everything, the buzzy new documentary about the disgraced former biotech CEO Elizabeth Holmes.  I went in not really knowing what to expect. I’d avoided spoilers (and won’t be giving anything away here, either!). I was wondering what new information this film could reveal, given how familiar many of us are with the Theranos story thanks to years of media coverage, the best-selling book Bad Blood, and the Hulu series The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried. Like many others who have seen the film, I came away feeling unsettled. But not just about Holmes’s fraud and the somewhat disturbing interactions between the subjects. The film reignited a concern I’ve had about covering science for most of my career: Despite our best efforts, we never can actually see everything. In case you’re rusty on the details, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University in 2003 to run Theranos, a diagnostics company she founded, when she was just 19. She went on to claim that her company had invented a way to run over 100 diagnostic tests on just a few drops of blood.
Holmes raised hundreds of millions of dollars for Theranos, which was valued at $9 billion in 2014. Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire—she was worth $4.5 billion when she was just 30 years old. Things started to unravel in 2015, when an investigation by the Wall Street Journal raised concerns by former Theranos employees that the tests didn’t work. Some also said that the company’s device had not been tested properly, and that blood samples had been analyzed on machines from other companies instead. MIT Technology Review named it one of the biggest technology failures of 2015.
Forbes had revised Holmes’s worth to $0 by 2016. That year, a damning government report said that the company’s lab was struggling with basic procedures and gave patients results even when they knew they could be wrong. In 2018, Theranos, Holmes, and former company president Ramesh Balwani were charged with “massive fraud.” In 2022, she was sentenced to a little over 11 years in prison for defrauding investors. She began serving her sentence in May 2023. It was around a month before this that filmmakers Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim, and their colleagues began documenting Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, at home with their two young children. I’m not giving anything away when I say it’s an extremely intimate portrayal—at least of how the two adults interact with Fielder, who is also a central character in the film. As you might know if you’ve seen the trailer, there are plenty of super close-ups. I felt as if I spent most of the film staring straight into the faces of those people. And almost the whole way through, they all seemed to be trying to figure each other out. Holmes is known for her dishonesty, but she invited cameras into her home in an apparent bid to reframe the narrative and position herself as an honest person with an unusual mind. Will anyone believe her? I couldn’t help feeling some empathy for Holmes, a mother we see preparing to leave her two kids for a lengthy prison sentence. And even though I have long known the facts, Holmes is clearly an effective manipulator. You can see her plant the seeds of doubt in Fielder’s mind. At times, I felt she was convincing me, sitting in my cinema seat. Maybe she really didn’t mean to lie? But then I remembered how other journalists felt after being taken in by her claims. “I blew it,” Fortune’s Roger Parloff reflected in 2015, a year after profiling Holmes and her company. “I’m pretty sure she lied to me,” STAT’s Matthew Herper wrote recently, having interviewed Holmes in 2015. Even the former employee turned whistleblower Tyler Shultz, who knew the product didn’t work, said that he could “have a five-minute conversation with her and walk away feeling like my work was changing the world,” he said in 2022. I didn’t cover Theranos in the 2010s. If I’d interviewed Holmes, would I have fallen for it all? One of the early red flags in the Theranos case was the lack of published, peer-reviewed data. Much of the company’s work was classified as a “trade secret.” Scientists tend to publish their work in journals—a slow process that involves having the work evaluated by often anonymous experts in the field, who provide feedback, highlight questionable conclusions, and often ask for clarification. Peer review is meant to add rigor to the publication process. You should be able to trust published scientific papers.

Except that sometimes you can’t. Scientists aren’t perfect. Some will exaggerate their results or inflate their importance. Some manipulate data to serve a hypothesis. Sometimes these infractions are caught during peer review, but not always. There are plenty of examples of scientific findings that could never be replicated by other labs and ended up collapsing under the weight of real evidence. Many papers ultimately end up with corrections. Some are withdrawn—10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023. At any rate, there’s been a shift to sharing research in other ways. Today, many scientists opt to publish their work at preprint servers like arXiv, medRxiv, and bioRxiv before they submit them to established journals. Those outlets bypass peer review. So do company press releases, social media posts, and many conference presentations. And I get a lot of my stories from conversations and interviews. I’ll admit I’ve looked at a scientific finding and thought: A scientist has just said they’ve done that. How can I be sure they really have? I like to think that I hold myself to high journalistic standards here, as does everyone at MIT Technology Review. I would never publish a story about some new scientific development without doing my own form of peer review, and asking scientists—ideally people I know and trust—what they think of a new claim.  But the film is a stark reminder of how easy it can be to fall for an appealing narrative. While most scientists are, I hope, pretty honest, and Holmes is certainly an outlier, we should all continue to interrogate the claims being fed to us. If you’ve seen the film, let me know what you think! 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.