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Every year, MIT Technology Review 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.  We ask these MIT students to find some of the “flops” from breakthrough lists in the archives and consider what factors or decisions led to their demise, and then to envision possible ways to “flip” the negative outcome into a success. The idea is to combine critical perspective and creativity when thinking about technology. Although it’s less glamorous than envisioning which advances will change our future, analyzing failed technologies is equally important. It reveals how factors outside what is narrowly understood as technology play a role in its success—factors including cultural context, social acceptance, market competition, and simply timing.
In some cases, the vision behind a breakthrough was prescient but the technology of the day was not the best way to achieve it. Social TV (featured on the list in 2010) is an example: Its advocates proposed different ways to tie together social platforms and streaming services to make it easier to chat or interact with your friends while watching live TV shows when you weren’t physically together.  This idea rightly reflected the great potential for connection in this modern era of pervasive cell phones, broadband, and Wi-Fi. But it bet on a medium that was in decline: live TV. 
Still, anyone who had teenage children during the pandemic can testify to the emergence of a similar phenomenon—youngsters started watching movies or TV series simultaneously on streaming platforms while checking comments on social media feeds and interacting with friends over messaging apps.  Shared real-time viewing with geographically scattered friends did catch on, but instead of taking place through one centralized service, it emerged organically on multiple platforms and devices. And the experience felt unique to each group of friends, because they could watch whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, independent of the live TV schedule. Evaluating the record Here are a few more examples of flops from the breakthroughs list that students in the 2025 edition of my course identified, and the lessons that we could take from each. The DNA app store (from the 2016 list) was selected by Kaleigh Spears. It seemed like a great deal at the time—a startup called Helix could sequence your genome for just $80. Then, in the company’s app store, you could share that data with third parties that promised to analyze it for relevant medical info, or make it into fun merch. But Helix has since shut down the store and no longer sells directly to consumers.Privacy concerns and doubts about the accuracy of third-party apps were among the main reasons the service didn’t catch on, particularly since there’s minimal regulation of health apps in the US.  Elvis Chipiro picked universal memory (from the 2005 list). The vision was for one memory tech to rule them all—flash, random-access memory, and hard disk drives would be subsumed by a new method that relied on tiny structures called carbon nanotubes to store far more bits per square centimeter. The company behind the technology, Nantero, raised significant funds and signed on licensing partners but struggled to deliver a product on its stated timeline.Nantero ran into challenges when it tried to produce its memory at scale because tiny variations in the way the nanotubes were arranged could cause errors. It also proved difficult to upend memory technologies that were already deeply embedded within the industry and well integrated into fabs.   Light-field photography (from the 2012 list), chosen by Cherry Tang, let you snap a photo and adjust the image’s focus later. You’d never deal with a blurry photo ever again. To make this possible, the startup Lytro had developed a special camera that captured not just the color and intensity of light but also the angle of its rays. It was one of the first cameras of its kind designed for consumers. Even so, the company shut down in 2018. Lytro’s unique light-field camera was ultimately not successful with consumers.PUBLIC DOMAIN/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Ultimately, Lytro was outmatched by well-established incumbents like Sony and Nokia. The camera itself had a tiny display, and the images it produced were fairly low resolution. Readjusting the focus in images using the company’s own software also required a fair amount of manual work. And smartphones—with their handy built-in cameras—were becoming ubiquitous.  Many students over the years have selected Project Loon (from the 2015 list)—one of the so-called “moonshots” out of Google X. It proposed using gigantic balloons to replace networks of cell-phone towers to provide internet access, mainly in remote areas. The company completed field tests in multiple countries and even provided emergency internet service to Puerto Rico during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. But the company shut down the project in 2021, with Google X CEO Astro Teller saying in a blog post that “the road to commercial viability has proven much longer and riskier than hoped.” 

Sean Lee, from my 2025 class, saw the reason for its flop in the company’s very mission: Project Loon operated in low-income regions where customers had limited purchasing power. There were also substantial commercial hurdles that may have slowed development—the company relied on partnerships with local telecom providers to deliver the service and had to secure government approvals to navigate in national airspaces.  One of Project Loon’s balloons on display at Google I/O 2016.ANDREJ SOKOLOW/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP IMAGES While this specific project did not become a breakthrough, the overall goal of making the internet more accessible through high-altitude connectivity has been carried forward by other companies, most notably Starlink with its constellation of low-orbit satellites. Sometimes a company has the right idea but the wrong approach, and a firm with a different technology can make more progress. As part of this class exercise, we also ask students to pick a technology from the list that they think might flop in the future. Here, too, their choices can be quite illuminating.  Lynn Grosso chose synthetic data for AI (a 2022 pick), which means using AI to generate data that mimics real-world patterns for other AI models to train on. Though it’s become more popular as tech companies have run out of real data to feed their models, she points out that this practice can lead to model collapse, with AI models trained exclusively on generated data eventually breaking the connection to data drawn from reality.  And Eden Olayiwole thinks the long-term success of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm (a 2021 pick) is in jeopardy as awareness grows of the technology’s potential harms and its tendency to, as she puts it, incentive creators to “microwave” ideas for quick consumption.  But she also offers a possible solution. Remember—we asked all the students what they would do to “flip” the flopped (or soon-to-flop) technologies they selected. The idea was to prompt them to think about better ways of building or deploying these tools.  For TikTok, Olayiwole suggests letting users indicate which types of videos they want to see more of, instead of feeding them an endless stream based on their past watching behavior. TikTok already lets users express interest in specific topics, but she proposes taking it a step further to give them options for content and tone—allowing them to request more educational videos, for example, or more calming content.  What did we learn? It’s always challenging to predict how a technology will shape a future that itself is in motion. Predictions not only make a claim about the future; they also describe a vision of what matters to the predictor, and they can influence how we behave, innovate, and invest.
One of my main takeaways after years of running this exercise with students is that there’s not always a clear line between a successful breakthrough and a true flop. Some technologies may not have been successful on their own but are the basis of other breakthrough technologies (natural-language processing, 2001). Others may not have reached their potential as expected but could still have enormous impact in the future (brain-machine interfaces, 2001). Or they may need more investment, which is difficult to attract when they are not flashy (malaria vaccine, 2022).  Despite the flops over the years, this annual practice of making bold and sometimes risky predictions is worthwhile. The list gives us a sense of what advances are on the technology community’s radar at a given time and reflects the economic, social, and cultural values that inform every pick. When we revisit the 2026 list in a few years, we’ll see which of today’s values have prevailed.  Fabio Duarte is associate director and principal research scientist at the MIT Senseable City Lab.

For decades, space stations have been largely staffed by professional astronauts and operated by a handful of nations. But that’s about to change in the coming years, as companies including Axiom Space and Sierra Space launch commercial space stations that will host tourists and provide research facilities for nations and other firms.  The first of those stations could be Haven-1, which the California-based company Vast aims to launch in May 2026. If all goes to plan, its earliest paying visitors will arrive about a month later. Drew Feustel, a former NASA astronaut, will help train them and get them up to speed ahead of their historic trip. Feustel has spent 226 days in space on three trips to the International Space Station (ISS) and the Hubble Space Telescope.  Feustel is now lead astronaut for Vast, which he advised on the new station’s interior design. He also created a months-long program to prepare customers to live and work there. Crew members (up to four at a time) will arrive at Haven-1 via a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which will dock to the station and remain attached throughout each 10-day stay. (Vast hasn’t publicly said who will fly on its first missions or announced the cost of a ticket, though competing firms have charged tens of millions of dollars for similar trips.) In this artist’s rendering, the Haven-1 space station is shown in orbit docked with the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Haven-1 is intended as a temporary facility, to be followed by a bigger, permanent station called Haven-2. Vast will begin launching Haven-2’s modules in 2028 and says it will be able to support a crew by 2030. That’s about when NASA will start decommissioning the ISS, which has operated for almost 30 years. Instead of replacing it, NASA and its partners intend to carry out research aboard commercial stations like those built by Vast, Axiom, and Sierra. 
I recently caught up with Feustel in Lisbon at the tech conference Web Summit, where he was speaking about his role at Vast and the company’s ambitions.  Responses have been edited and condensed. 
What are you hoping this new wave of commercial space stations will enable people to do? Ideally, we’re creating access. The paradigm that we’ve seen for 25 years is primarily US-backed missions to the International Space Station, and [NASA] operating that station in coordination with other nations. But [it’s] still limited to 16 or 17 primary partners in the ISS program.  Following NASA’s intentions, we are planning to become a service provider to not only the US government, but other sovereign nations around the world, to allow greater access to a low-Earth-orbit platform. We can be a service provider to other organizations and nations that are planning to build a human spaceflight program. Today, you’re Vast’s lead astronaut after you were initially brought on to advise the company on the design of Haven-1 and Haven-2. What are some of the things that you’ve weighed in on?  Some of the things where I can see tangible evidence of my work is, for example, in the sleep cores and sleep system—trying to define a more comfortable way for astronauts to sleep. We’ve come up with an air bladder system that provides distributed forces on the body that kind of emulate, or I believe will emulate, the gravity field that we feel in bed when we lie down, having that pressure of gravity on you.  Oh, like a weighted blanket?  Kind of like a weighted blanket, but you’re up against the wall, so you have to create, like, an inflatable bladder that will push you against the wall. That’s one of the very tangible, obvious things. But I work with the company on anything from crew displays and interfaces and how notifications and system information come through to how big a window should be.  How big should a window be? I feel like the bigger the better—but what are the factors that go into that, from an astronaut’s perspective? 

The bigger the better. And the other thing to think about is—what do you do with the window? Take pictures. The ability to take photos out a window is important—the quality of the window, which direction it points. You know, it’s not great if it’s just pointing up in space all the time and you never see the Earth.  You’re also in charge of the astronaut training program at Vast. Tell me what that program looks like, because in some cases you’ll have private citizens who are paying for their trip that have no experience whatsoever. A typical training flow for two weeks on our space station is extended out to about an 11-month period with gaps in between each of the training weeks. And so if you were to press that down together, it probably represents about three to four months of day-to-day training.  I would say half of it’s devoted to learning how to fly on the SpaceX Dragon, because that’s our transportation, and the greatest risk for anybody flying is on launch and landing. We want people to understand how to operate in that spacecraft, and that component is designed by SpaceX. They have their own training plans.  What we do is kind of piggyback on those weeks. If a crew shows up in California to train at SpaceX, we’ll grab them that same week and say, “Come down to our facility. We will train you to operate inside our spacecraft.” Much of that is focused on emergency response. We want the crew to be able to keep themselves safe. In case anything happens on the vehicle that requires them to depart, to get back in the SpaceX Dragon and leave, we want to make sure that they understand all of the steps required.  Another part is day-to-day living, like—how do you eat? How do you sleep, how do you use the bathroom? Those are really important things. How do you download the pictures after you take them? How do you access your science payloads that are in our payload racks that provide data and telemetry for the research you’re doing?  We want to practice every one of those things multiple times, including just taking care of yourself, before you go to space so that when you get there, you’ve built a lot of that into your muscle memory, and you can just do the things you need to do instead of every day being like a really steep learning curve. Strawberries and other perishable foods are freeze-dried by the Vast Food Systems team to prepare them for missions. Making coffee in a zero-gravity environment calls for specialized devices. Do you have a facility where you’ll take people through some of these motions? Or a virtual simulation of some kind? 
We have built a training mock-up, an identical vehicle to what people will live in in space. But it’s not in a zero-gravity environment. The only way to get any similar training is to fly on what we call a zero-g airplane, which does parabolas in space—it climbs up and then falls toward the Earth. Its nickname is the vomit comet.  But otherwise, there’s really no way to train for microgravity. You just have to watch videos and talk about it a lot, and try to prepare people mentally for what that’s going to be like. You can also train underwater, but that’s more related to spacewalking, and it’s much more advanced. 
How do you expect people will spend their time in the station?  If history is any indication, they will be quite busy and probably oversubscribed. Their time will be spent basically caring for themselves, and trying to execute their experiments, and looking out the window. Those are the three big categories of what you’re going to do in space. And public relation activities like outreach back to Earth, to schools or hospitals or corporations.  This new era means that many more everyday people—though mostly wealthy ones at the beginning, because of ticket prices—will have this interesting view of Earth. How do you think the average person will react to that?  A good analogy is to say, how are people reacting to sub-orbital flights? Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic offer suborbital flights, [which are] basically three or four minutes of floating and looking down at the Earth from an altitude that’s about a third or a fifth of the altitude that actual orbital and career astronauts achieve when they circle the planet.  Shown here is Vast’s Haven-1 station as it completes testing in the Mojave Desert in 2025. If you look at the reaction of those individuals and what they perceive, it’s amazing, right? It’s like awe and wonder. It’s the same way that astronauts react and talk when we see Earth—and say if more humans could see Earth from space, we’d probably be a little bit better about being humans on Earth.  That’s the hope, is that we create that access and more people can understand what it means to live on this planet. It’s essentially a spacecraft—it’s got its own environmental control system that keeps us alive, and that’s a big deal. 
Some people have expressed ambitions for this kind of station to enable humans to become a multiplanetary species. Do you share that ambition for our species? If so, why?  Yeah, I do. I just believe that humans need to have the ability to live off of the planet. I mean, we’re capable of it, and we’re creating that access now. So why wouldn’t we explore space and go further and farther and learn to live in other areas? Not to say that we should deplete everything here and deplete everything there. But maybe we take some of the burden off of the place that we call home. I think there’s a lot of reasons to live and work in space and off our own planet.  There’s not really a backup plan for no Earth. We know that there are risks from the space around us—dinosaurs fell prey to space hazards. We should be aware of those and work harder to extend our capabilities and create some backup plans. 

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. How I learned to stop worrying and love AI slop —Caiwei Chen If I were to locate the moment AI slop broke through into popular consciousness, I’d pick the video of rabbits bouncing on a trampoline that went viral last summer. For many savvy internet users, myself included, it was the first time we were fooled by an AI video, and it ended up spawning a wave of almost identical generated clips.
My first reaction was that, broadly speaking, all of this sucked. That’s become a familiar refrain, in think pieces and at dinner parties. Everything online is slop now—the internet “enshittified,” with AI taking much of the blame. Initially, I largely agreed. But then friends started sharing AI clips in group chats that were compellingly weird, or funny. Some even had a grain of brilliance.  I had to admit I didn’t fully understand what I was rejecting—what I found so objectionable. To try to get to the bottom of how I felt (and why), I spoke to the people making the videos, a company creating bespoke tools for creators, and experts who study how new media becomes culture. What I found convinced me that maybe generative AI will not end up ruining everything after all. Read the full story.
A new CRISPR startup is betting regulators will ease up on gene-editingHere at MIT Technology Review we’ve been writing about the gene-editing technology CRISPR since 2013, calling it the biggest biotech breakthrough of the century. Yet so far, there’s been only one gene-editing drug approved, and it’s been used commercially on only about 40 patients, all with sickle-cell disease.It’s becoming clear that the impact of CRISPR isn’t as big as we all hoped. In fact, there’s a pall of discouragement over the entire field—with some journalists saying the gene-editing revolution has “lost its mojo.”So what will it take for CRISPR to help more people? A new startup says the answer could be an “umbrella approach” to testing and commercializing treatments which could avoid costly new trials or approvals for every new version. Read the full story. —Antonio Regalado America’s new dietary guidelines ignore decades of scientific research The first days of 2026 have brought big news for health. On Wednesday, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his colleagues at the Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture unveiled new dietary guidelines for Americans. And they are causing a bit of a stir.That’s partly because they recommend products like red meat, butter, and beef tallow—foods that have been linked to cardiovascular disease, and that nutrition experts have been recommending people limit in their diets.These guidelines are a big deal—they influence food assistance programs and school lunches, for example. Let’s take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly advice being dished up to Americans by their government. —Jessica Hamzelou 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.

The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Grok has switched off its image-generating function for most usersFollowing a global backlash to its sexualized pictures of women and children. (The Guardian)+ Elon Musk has previously lamented the “guardrails” around the chatbot. (CNN)+ XAI has been burning through cash lately. (Bloomberg $) 2 Online sleuths tried to use AI to unmask the ICE agent who killed a womanThe problem is, its results are far from reliable. (WP $)+ The Trump administration is pushing videos of the incident filmed from a specific angle. (The Verge)+ Minneapolis is struggling to make sense of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good. (WSJ $)3 Smartphones and PCs are about to get more expensiveYou can thank the memory chip shortage sparked by the AI data center boom. (FT $)+ Expect delays alongside those price rises, too. (Economist $)4 NASA is bringing four of the seven ISS crew members back to EarthIt’s not clear exactly why, but it said one of them experienced a “medical situation” earlier this week. (Ars Technica) 5 The vast majority of humanoid robots shipped last year were from ChinaThe country is dominating early supply for the bipedal machines. (Bloomberg $)+ Why a Chinese robot vacuum firm is moving into EVs. (Wired $)+ China’s EV giants are betting big on humanoid robots. (MIT Technology Review) 6 New Jersey has banned students’ phones in schoolsIt’s the latest in a long line of states to restrict devices during school hours. (NYT $) 7 Are AI coding assistants getting worse?This data scientist certainly seems to think so. (IEEE Spectrum)+ AI coding is now everywhere. But not everyone is convinced. (MIT Technology Review) 8 How to save wine from wildfires 🍇Smoke leaves the alcohol with an ashy taste, but a group of scientists are working on a solution. (New Yorker $)
9 Celebrity Letterboxd accounts are good funUnsurprisingly, a subset of web users have chosen to hound them. (NY Mag $)10 Craigslist refuses to dieThe old-school classifieds corner of the web still has a legion of diehard fans. (Wired $)
Quote of the day “Tools like Grok now risk bringing sexual AI imagery of children into the mainstream. The harms are rippling out.” —Ngaire Alexander, head of the Internet Watch Foundation’s reporting hotline, explains the dangers around low-moderation AI tools like Grok to the Wall Street Journal. One more thing How to measure the returns on R&D spendingGiven the draconian cuts to US federal funding for science, it’s worth asking some hard-nosed money questions: How much should we be spending on R&D? How much value do we get out of such investments, anyway?To answer that, in several recent papers, economists have approached this issue in clever new ways.  And, though they ask slightly different questions, their conclusions share a bottom line: R&D is, in fact, one of the better long-term investments that the government can make. Read the full story.
—David Rotman 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 or skeet ’em at me.) + Bruno Mars is back, baby!+ Hmm, interesting: Apple’s new Widow’s Bay show is inspired by both Stephen King and Donald Glover, which is an intriguing combination.+ Give this man control of the new Lego AI bricks!+ An iron age war trumpet recently uncovered in Britain is the most complete example discovered anywhere in the world.

Here at MIT Technology Review we’ve been writing about the gene-editing technology CRISPR since 2013, calling it the biggest biotech breakthrough of the century. Yet so far, there’s been only one gene-editing drug approved. It’s been used commercially on only about 40 patients, all with sickle-cell disease. It’s becoming clear that the impact of CRISPR isn’t as big as we all hoped. In fact, there’s a pall of discouragement over the entire field—with some journalists saying the gene-editing revolution has “lost its mojo.” So what will it take for CRISPR to help more people? A new startup says the answer could be an “umbrella approach” to testing and commercializing treatments. Aurora Therapeutics, which has $16 million from Menlo Ventures and counts CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna as an advisor, essentially hopes to win approval for gene-editing drugs that can be slightly adjusted, or personalized, without requiring costly new trials or approvals for every new version. The need to change regulations around gene-editing treatments was endorsed in November by the head of the US Food and Drug Administration, Martin Makary, who said the agency would open a “new” regulatory pathway for “bespoke, personalized therapies” that can’t easily be tested in conventional ways. 
Aurora’s first target, the rare inherited disease phenylketonuria, also known as PKU, is a case in point. People with PKU lack a working version of an enzyme needed to use up the amino acid phenylalanine, a component of pretty much all meat and protein. If the amino acid builds up, it causes brain damage. So patients usually go on an onerous “diet for life” of special formula drinks and vegetables. In theory, gene editing can fix PKU. In mice, scientists have already restored the gene for the enzyme by rewriting DNA in liver cells, which both make the enzyme and are some of the easiest to reach with a gene-editing drug. The problem is that in human patients, many different mutations can affect the critical gene. According to Cory Harding, a researcher at Oregon Health Sciences University, scientists know about 1,600 different DNA mutations that cause PKU.
There’s no way anyone will develop 1,600 different gene-editing drugs. Instead, Aurora’s goal is to eventually win approval for a single gene editor that, with minor adjustments, could be used to correct several of the most common mutations, including one that’s responsible for about 10% of the estimated 20,000 PKU cases in the US. “We can’t have a separate [clinical trial] for each mutation,” says Edward Kaye, the CEO of Aurora. “The way the FDA approves gene editing has to change, and I think they’ve been very understanding that is the case.” A gene editor is a special protein that can zero in on a specific location in the genome and change it. To prepare one, Aurora will put genetic code for the editor into a nanoparticle along with a targeting molecule. In total, it will involve about 5,000 gene letters. But only 20 of them need to change in order to redirect the treatment to repair a different mutation. “Over 99% of the drug stays the same,” says Johnny Hu, a partner at Menlo Ventures, which put up the funding for the startup. The new company came together after Hu met over pizza with Fyodor Urnov, an outspoken gene-editing scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is Aurora’s cofounder and sits on its board. In 2022, Urnov had written a New York Times editorial bemoaning the “chasm” between what editing technology can do and the “legal, financial, and organizational” realities preventing researchers from curing people. “I went to Fyodor and said, ‘Hey, we’re getting all these great results in the clinic with CRISPR, but why hasn’t it scaled?” says Hu. Part of the reason is that most gene-editing companies are chasing the same few conditions, such as sickle-cell, where (as luck would have it) a single edit works for all patients. But that leaves around 400 million people who have 7,000 other inherited conditions without much hope to get their DNA fixed, Urnov estimated in his editorial. Then, last May, came the dramatic demonstration of the first fully “personalized” gene-editing treatment. A team in Philadelphia, assisted by Urnov and others, succeeded in correcting the DNA of a baby, named KJ Muldoon, who had an entirely unique mutation that caused a metabolic disease. Though it didn’t target PKU, the project showed that gene editing could theoretically fix some inherited diseases “on demand.” 

It also underscored a big problem. Treating a single child required a large team and cost millions in time, effort, and materials—all to create a drug that would never be used again.  That’s exactly the sort of situation the new “umbrella” trials are supposed to address. Kiran Musunuru, who co-led the team at the University of Pennsylvania, says he’s been in discussions with the FDA to open a study of bespoke gene editors this year focusing on diseases of the type Baby KJ had, called urea cycle disorders. Each time a new patient appears, he says, they’ll try to quickly put together a variant of their gene-editing drug that’s tuned to fix that child’s particular genetic problem. Musunuru, who isn’t involved with Aurora, does not think the company’s plans for PKU count as fully personalized editors. “These corporate PKU efforts have nothing whatsoever to do with Baby KJ,” he says. He says his center continues to focus on mutations “so ultra-rare that we don’t see any scenario where a for-profit gene-editing company would find that indication to be commercially viable.” Instead, what’s occurring in PKU, says Musunuru, is that researchers have realized they can assemble “a bunch” of the most frequent mutations “into a large enough group of patients to make a platform PKU therapy commercially viable.”  While that would still leave out many patients with extra-rare gene errors, Musunuru says any gene-editing treatment at all would still be “a big improvement over the status quo, which  is zero genetic therapies for PKU.”

The new year has barely begun, but the first days of 2026 have brought big news for health. On Monday, the US’s federal health agency upended its recommendations for routine childhood vaccinations—a move that health associations worry puts children at unnecessary risk of preventable disease. There was more news from the federal government on Wednesday, when health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his colleagues at the Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture unveiled new dietary guidelines for Americans. And they are causing a bit of a stir. That’s partly because they recommend products like red meat, butter, and beef tallow—foods that have been linked to cardiovascular disease, and that nutrition experts have been recommending people limit in their diets. These guidelines are a big deal—they influence food assistance programs and school lunches, for example. So this week let’s look at the good, the bad, and the ugly advice being dished up to Americans by their government.
The government dietary guidelines have been around since the 1980s. They are updated every five years, in a process that typically involves a team of nutrition scientists who have combed over scientific research for years. That team will first publish its findings in a scientific report, and, around a year later, the finalized Dietary Guidelines for Americans are published. The last guidelines covered the period 2020 to 2025, and new guidelines were expected in the summer of 2025. Work had already been underway for years; the scientific report intended to inform them was published back in 2024. But the publication of the guidelines was delayed by last year’s government shutdown, Kennedy said last year. They were finally published yesterday.
Nutrition experts had been waiting with bated breath. Nutrition science has evolved slightly over the last five years, and some were expecting to see new recommendations. Research now suggests, for example, that there is no “safe” level of alcohol consumption. We are also beginning to learn more about health risks associated with some ultraprocessed foods (although we still don’t have a good understanding of what they might be, or what even counts as “ultraprocessed”.) And some scientists were expecting to see the new guidelines factor in environmental sustainability, says Gabby Headrick, the associate director of food and nutrition policy at George Washington University’s Institute for Food Safety & Nutrition Security in Washington DC. They didn’t. Many of the recommendations are sensible. The guidelines recommend a diet rich in whole foods, particularly fresh fruits and vegetables. They recommend avoiding highly processed foods and added sugars. They also highlight the importance of dietary protein, whole grains, and “healthy” fats. But not all of them are, says Headrick. The guidelines open with a “new pyramid” of foods. This inverted triangle is topped with “protein, dairy, and healthy fats” on one side and “vegetables and fruits” on the other. There are a few problems with this image. For starters, its shape—nutrition scientists have long moved on from the food pyramids of the 1990s, says Headrick. They’re confusing and make it difficult for people to understand what the contents of their plate should look like. That’s why scientists now use an image of a plate to depict a healthy diet. “We’ve been using MyPlate to describe the dietary guidelines in a very consumer-friendly, nutrition-education-friendly way for over the last decade now,” says Headrick. (The UK’s National Health Service takes a similar approach.) And then there’s the content of that food pyramid. It puts a significant focus on meat and whole-fat dairy produce. The top left image—the one most viewers will probably see first—is of a steak. Smack in the middle of the pyramid is a stick of butter. That’s new. And it’s not a good thing.

While both red meat and whole-fat dairy can certainly form part of a healthy diet, nutrition scientists have long been recommending that most people try to limit their consumption of these foods. Both can be high in saturated fat, which can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease—the leading cause of death in the US. In 2015, on the basis of limited evidence, the World Health Organization classified red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”  Also concerning is the document’s definition of “healthy fats,” which includes butter and beef tallow (a MAHA favorite). Neither food is generally considered to be as healthy as olive oil, for example. While olive oil contains around two grams of saturated fat per tablespoon, a tablespoon of beef tallow has around six grams of saturated fat, and the same amount of butter contains around seven grams of saturated fat, says Headrick. “I think these are pretty harmful dietary recommendations to be making when we have established that those specific foods likely do not have health-promoting benefits,” she adds. Red meat is not exactly a sustainable food, and neither are dairy products. And the advice on alcohol is relatively vague, recommending that people “consume less alcohol for better overall health” (which might leave you wondering: Less than what?). There are other questionable recommendations in the guidelines. Americans are advised to include more protein in their diets—at levels between 1.2 and 1.6 grams daily per kilo of body weight, 50% to 100% more than recommended in previous guidelines. There’s a risk that increasing protein consumption to such levels could raise a person’s intake of both calories and saturated fats to unhealthy levels, says José Ordovás, a senior nutrition scientist at Tufts University. “I would err on the low side,” he says. Some nutrition scientists are questioning why these changes have been made. It’s not as though the new recommendations were in the 2024 scientific report. And the evidence on red meat and saturated fat hasn’t changed, says Headrick. In reporting this piece, I contacted many contributors to the previous guidelines, and some who had led research for 2024’s scientific report. None of them agreed to comment on the new guidelines on the record. Some seemed disgruntled. One merely told me that the process by which the new guidelines had been created was “opaque.” “These people invested a lot of their time, and they did a thorough job [over] a couple of years, identifying [relevant scientific studies],” says Ordovás. “I’m not surprised that when they see that [their] work was ignored and replaced with something [put together] quickly, that they feel a little bit disappointed,” he says. 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.