In partnership withInvisible Enterprises are sitting on vast quantities of unstructured data, from call records and video footage to customer complaint histories and supply chain signals. Yet this invaluable business intelligence, estimated to make up as much as 90% of the data generated by organizations, historically remained dormant because its unstructured nature makes analysis extremely difficult. But if managed and centralized effectively, this messy and often voluminous data is not only a precious asset for training and optimizing next-generation AI systems, enhancing their accuracy, context, and adaptability, it can also deliver profound insights that drive real business outcomes. A compelling example of this can be seen in the US NBA basketball team the Charlotte Hornets who successfully leveraged untapped video footage of gameplay—previously too copious to watch and too unstructured to analyze—to identify a new competition-winning recruit. However, before that data could deliver results, analysts working for the team first had to overcome the critical challenge of preparing the raw, unstructured footage for interpretation. The challenges of organizing and contextualizing unstructured data Unstructured data presents inherent difficulties due to its widely varying format, quality, and reliability, requiring specialized tools like natural language processing and AI to make sense of it.
Every organization’s pool of unstructured data also contains domain-specific characteristics and terminology that generic AI models may not automatically understand. A financial services firm, for example, cannot simply use a general language model for fraud detection. Instead, it needs to adapt the model to understand regulatory language, transaction patterns, industry-specific risk indicators, and unique company context like data policies. The challenge intensifies when integrating multiple data sources with varying structures and quality standards, as teams may struggle to distinguish valuable data from noise.
How computer vision gave the Charlotte Hornets an edge  When the Charlotte Hornets set out to identify a new draft pick for their team, they turned to AI tools including computer vision to analyze raw game footage from smaller leagues, which exist outside the tiers of the game normally visible to NBA scouts and, therefore, are not as readily available for analysis. “Computer vision is a tool that has existed for some time, but I think the applicability in this age of AI is increasing rapidly,” says Jordan Cealey, senior vice president at AI company Invisible Technologies, which worked with the Charlotte Hornets on this project. “You can now take data sources that you’ve never been able to consume, and provide an analytical layer that’s never existed before.” By deploying a variety of computer vision techniques, including object and player tracking, movement pattern analysis, and geometrically mapping points on the court, the team was able to extract kinematic data, such as the coordinates of players during movement, and generate metrics like speed and explosiveness to acceleration.  This provided the team with rich, data-driven insights about individual players, helping them to identify and select a new draft whose skill and techniques filled a hole in the Charlotte Hornets’ own capabilities. The chosen athlete went on to be named the most valuable player at the 2025 NBA Summer League and helped the team win their first summer championship title. Annotation of a basketball match Before data from game footage can be used, it needs to be labeled so the model can interpret it. The x and y coordinates of the individual players, seen here in bounding boxes, as well as other features in the scene, are annotated so the model can identify individuals and track their movements through time.

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Taking AI pilot programs into production  From this successful example, several lessons can be learned. First, unstructured data must be prepared for AI models through intuitive forms of collection, and the right data pipelines and management records. “You can only utilize unstructured data once your structured data is consumable and ready for AI,” says Cealey. “You cannot just throw AI at a problem without doing the prep work.”  For many organizations, this might mean they need to find partners that offer the technical support to fine-tune models to the context of the business. The traditional technology consulting approach, in which an external vendor leads a digital transformation plan over a lengthy timeframe, is not fit for purpose here as AI is moving too fast and solutions need to be configured to a company’s current business reality.  Forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are an emerging partnership model better suited to the AI era. Initially popularized by Palantir, the FDE model connects product and engineering capabilities directly to the customer’s operational environment. FDEs work closely with customers on-site to understand the context behind a technology initiative before a solution is built. 

“We couldn’t do what we do without our FDEs,” says Cealey. “They go out and fine-tune the models, working with our human annotation team to generate a ground truth dataset that can be used to validate or improve the performance of the model in production.” Second, data needs to be understood within its own context, which requires models to be carefully calibrated to the use case. “You can’t assume that an out-of-the-box computer vision model is going to give you better inventory management, for example, by taking that open source model and applying it to whatever your unstructured data feeds are,” says Cealey. “You need to fine-tune it so it gives you the data exports in the format you want and helps your aims. That’s where you start to see high-performative models that can then actually generate useful data insights.”  For the Hornets, Invisible used five foundation models, which the team fine-tuned to context-specific data. This included teaching the models to understand that they were “looking at” a basketball court as opposed to, say, a football field; to understand how a game of basketball works differently from any other sport the model might have knowledge of (including how many players are on each team); and to understand how to spot rules like “out of bounds.” Once fine-tuned, the models were able to capture subtle and complex visual scenarios, including highly accurate object detection, tracking, postures, and spatial mapping. Lastly, while the AI technology mix available to companies changes by the day, they cannot eschew old-fashioned commercial metrics: clear goals. Without clarity on the business purpose, AI pilot programs can easily turn into open-ended, meandering research projects that prove expensive in terms of compute, data costs, and staffing.  “The best engagements we have seen are when people know what they want,” Cealey observes. “The worst is when people say ‘we want AI’ but have no direction. In these situations, they are on an endless pursuit without a map.” This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.

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. Researchers are getting organoids pregnant with human embryos At first glance, it looks like the start of a human pregnancy: A ball-shaped embryo presses into the lining of the uterus then grips tight, burrowing in as the first tendrils of a future placenta appear. This is implantation—the moment that pregnancy officially begins. Only none of it is happening inside a body. These images were captured in a Beijing laboratory, inside a microfluidic chip, as scientists watched the scene unfold.
In three recent papers published by Cell Press, scientists report what they call the most accurate efforts yet to mimic the first moments of pregnancy in the lab. They’ve taken human embryos from IVF centers and let these merge with “organoids” made of endometrial cells, which form the lining of the uterus. Read our story about their work, and what might come next. —Antonio Regalado
LLMs contain a LOT of parameters. But what’s a parameter? A large language model’s parameters are often said to be the dials and levers that control how it behaves. Think of a planet-size pinball machine that sends its balls pinging from one end to the other via billions of paddles and bumpers set just so. Tweak those settings and the balls will behave in a different way.   OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in 2020, had 175 billion parameters. Google DeepMind’s latest LLM, Gemini 3, may have at least a trillion—some think it’s probably more like 7 trillion—but the company isn’t saying. (With competition now fierce, AI firms no longer share information about how their models are built.) But the basics of what parameters are and how they make LLMs do the remarkable things that they do are the same across different models. Ever wondered what makes an LLM really tick—what’s behind the colorful pinball-machine metaphors? Let’s dive in.  —Will Douglas Heaven What new legal challenges mean for the future of US offshore wind

For offshore wind power in the US, the new year is bringing new legal battles. On December 22, the Trump administration announced it would pause the leases of five wind farms currently under construction off the US East Coast. Developers were ordered to stop work immediately. The cited reason? Concerns that turbines can cause radar interference. But that’s a known issue, and developers have worked with the government to deal with it for years. Companies have been quick to file lawsuits, and the court battles could begin as soon as this week. Here’s what the latest kerfuffle might mean for the US’s struggling offshore wind industry. —Casey Crownhart This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter that explains the tech that could combat the climate crisis. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Google and Character.AI have agreed to settle a lawsuit over a teenager’s deathIt’s one of five lawsuits the companies have settled linked to young people’s deaths this week. (NYT $)+ AI companions are the final stage of digital addiction, and lawmakers are taking aim. (MIT Technology Review)2 The Trump administration’s chief output is online trollingWitness the Maduro memes. (The Atlantic $)
3 OpenAI has created a new ChatGPT Health feature It’s dedicated to analyzing medical results and answering health queries. (Axios)+ AI chatbots fail to give adequate advice for most questions relating to women’s health. (New Scientist $)+ AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors. (MIT Technology Review) 4 Meta’s acquisition of Manus is being probed by ChinaHolding up the purchase gives it another bargaining chip in its dealings with the US. (CNBC)+ What happened when we put Manus to the test. (MIT Technology Review)5 China is building humanoid robot training centersTo address a major shortage of the data needed to make them more competent. (Rest of World)+ The robot race is fueling a fight for training data. (MIT Technology Review) 6 AI still isn’t close to automating our jobsThe technology just fundamentally isn’t good enough yet—for now. (WP $) 7 Weight regain seems to happen within two years of quitting the jabsThat’s the conclusion of a review of more than 40 studies. But dig into the details, and it’s not all bad news. (New Scientist $)8 This Silicon Valley community is betting on algorithms to find loveWhich feels like a bit of a fool’s errand. (NYT $)9 Hearing aids are about to get really goodYou can—of course—thank advances in AI. (IEEE Spectrum) 10 The first 100% AI-generated movie will hit our screen within three yearsThat’s according to Roku’s founder Anthony Wood. (Variety $)+ How do AI models generate videos? (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day “I’ve seen the video. Don’t believe this propaganda machine. ”  —Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz responds on X to Homeland Security’s claim that ICE’s shooting of a woman in Minneapolis was justified.
One more thing Inside the strange limbo facing millions of IVF embryosMillions of embryos created through IVF sit frozen in time, stored in cryopreservation tanks around the world. The number is only growing thanks to advances in technology, the rising popularity of IVF, and improvements in its success rates.At a basic level, an embryo is simply a tiny ball of a hundred or so cells. But unlike other types of body tissue, it holds the potential for life. Many argue that this endows embryos with a special moral status, one that requires special protections.The problem is that no one can really agree on what that status is. So while these embryos persist in suspended animation, patients, clinicians, embryologists, and legislators must grapple with the essential question of what we should do with them. What do these embryos mean to us? Who should be responsible for them? 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 or skeet ’em at me.) + I love hearing about musicians’ favorite songs 🎶+ Here are some top tips for making the most of travelling on your own.+ Check out just some of the excellent-sounding new books due for publication this year.+ I could play this spherical version of Snake forever (thanks Rachel!)

For offshore wind power in the US, the new year is bringing new legal battles. On December 22, the Trump administration announced it would pause the leases of five wind farms currently under construction off the US East Coast. Developers were ordered to stop work immediately. The cited reason? National security, specifically concerns that turbines can cause radar interference. But that’s a known issue, and developers have worked with the government to deal with it for years. Companies have been quick to file lawsuits, and the court battles could begin as soon as this week. Here’s what the latest kerfuffle might mean for the struggling offshore wind industry in the US.
This pause affects $25 billion in investment in five wind farms: Vineyard Wind 1 off Massachusetts, Revolution Wind off Rhode Island, Sunrise Wind and Empire Wind off New York, and Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind off Virginia. Together, those projects had been expected to create 10,000 jobs and power more than 2.5 million homes and businesses. In a statement announcing the move, the Department of the Interior said that “recently completed classified reports” revealed national security risks, and that the pause would give the government time to work through concerns with developers. The statement specifically says that turbines can create radar interference (more on the technical details here in a moment).
Three of the companies involved have already filed lawsuits, and they’re seeking preliminary injunctions that would allow construction to continue. Orsted and Equinor (the developers for Revolution Wind and Empire Wind, respectively) told the New York Times that their projects went through lengthy federal reviews, which did address concerns about national security. This is just the latest salvo from the Trump administration against offshore wind. On Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order stopping all new lease approvals for offshore wind farms. (That order was struck down by a judge in December.) The administration previously ordered Revolution Wind to stop work last year, also citing national security concerns. A federal judge lifted the stop-work order weeks later, after the developer showed that the financial stakes were high, and that government agencies had previously found no national security issues with the project. There are real challenges that wind farms introduce for radar systems, which are used in everything from air traffic control to weather forecasting to national defense operations. A wind turbine’s spinning can create complex signatures on radar, resulting in so-called clutter. Previous government reports, including one 2024 report from the Department of Energy and a 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office (an independent government watchdog), have pointed out this issue in the past. “To date, no mitigation technology has been able to fully restore the technical performance of impacted radars,” as the DOE report puts it. However, there are techniques that can help, including software that acts to remove the signatures of wind turbines. (Think of this as similar to how noise-canceling headphones work, but more complicated, as one expert told TechCrunch.) But the most widespread and helpful tactic, according to the DOE report, is collaboration between developers and the government. By working together to site and design wind farms strategically, the groups can ensure that the projects don’t interfere with government or military operations. The 2025 GAO report found that government officials, researchers, and offshore wind companies were collaborating effectively, and any concerns could be raised and addressed in the permitting process. This and other challenges threaten an industry that could be a major boon for the grid. On the East Coast where these projects are located, and in New England specifically, winter can bring tight supplies of fossil fuels and spiking prices because of high demand. It just so happens that offshore winds blow strongest in the winter, so new projects, including the five wrapped up in this fight, could be a major help during the grid’s greatest time of need.

One 2025 study found that if 3.5 gigawatts’ worth of offshore wind had been operational during the 2024-2025 winter, it would have lowered energy prices by 11%. (That’s the combined capacity of Revolution Wind and Vineyard Wind, two of the paused projects, plus two future projects in the pipeline.) Ratepayers would have saved $400 million. Before Donald Trump was elected, the energy consultancy BloombergNEF projected that the US would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035. Today, that expectation has dropped to just 6 gigawatts. These legal battles could push it lower still. What’s hardest to wrap my head around is that some of the projects being challenged are nearly finished. The developers of Revolution Wind have installed all the foundations and 58 of 65 turbines, and they say the project is over 87% complete. Empire Wind is over 60% done and is slated to deliver electricity to the grid next year. To hit the pause button so close to the finish line is chilling, not just for current projects but for future offshore wind efforts in the US. Even if these legal battles clear up and more developers can technically enter the queue, why would they want to? Billions of dollars are at stake, and if there’s one word to describe the current state of the offshore wind industry in the US, it’s “unpredictable.” This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

In partnership withAIOZ Network When the concept of “Web 3.0” first emerged about a decade ago the idea was clear: Create a more user-controlled internet that lets you do everything you can now, except without servers or intermediaries to manage the flow of information. Where Web2, which emerged in the early 2000s, relies on centralized systems to store data and supply compute, all owned—and monetized by—a handful of global conglomerates, Web3 turns that structure on its head. Instead, data and compute are decentralized through technologies like blockchain and peer-to-peer networks. What was once a futuristic concept is quickly becoming a more concrete reality, even at a time when Web2 still dominates. Six out of ten Fortune 500 companies are exploring blockchain-based solutions, most taking a hybrid approach that combines traditional Web2 business models and infrastructure with the decentralized technologies and principles of Web3. Popular use cases include cloud services, supply chain management, and, most notably financial services. In fact, at one point, the daily volume of transactions processed on decentralized finance exchanges exceeded $10 billion.
Gaining a Web3 edge Among the advantages of Web3 for the enterprise are greater ownership and control of sensitive data, says Erman Tjiputra, founder and CEO of the AIOZ Network, which is building infrastructure for Web3, powered by decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), blockchain-based systems that govern physical infrastructure assets. More cost-effective compute is another benefit, as is enhanced security and privacy as the cyberattack landscape grows more hostile, he adds. And it could even help protect companies from outages caused by a single point of failure, which can lead to downtime, data loss, and revenue deficits.
But perhaps the most exciting opportunity, says Tjiputra, is the ability to build and scale AI reliably and affordably. By leveraging a people-powered internet infrastructure, companies can far more easily access—and contribute to—shared resource like bandwidth, storage, and processing power to run AI inference, train models, and store data. All while using familiar developer tooling and open, usage-based incentives. “We’re in a compute crunch where requirements are insatiable, and Web3 creates this ability to benefit while contributing,” explains Tjiputra. In 2025, AIOZ Network launched a distributed compute platform and marketplace where developers and enterprises can access and monetize AI assets, and run AI inference or training on AIOZ Network’s more than 300,000 contributing devices. The model allows companies to move away from opaque datasets and models and scale flexibly, without centralized lock in. Overcoming Web3 deployment challenges Despite the promise, it is still early days for Web3, and core systemic challenges are leaving senior leadership and developers hesitant about its applicability at scale. One hurdle is a lack of interoperability. The current fragmentation of blockchain networks creates a segregated ecosystem that makes it challenging to transfer assets or data between platforms. This often complicates transactions and introduces new security risks due to the reliance on mechanisms such as cross-chain bridges. These are tools that allow asset transfers between platforms but which have been shown to be vulnerable to targeted attacks. “We have countless blockchains running on different protocols and consensus models,” says Tjiputra. “These blockchains need to work with each other so applications can communicate regardless of which chain they are on. This makes interoperability fundamental.” Regulatory uncertainty is also a challenge. Outdated legal frameworks can sit at odds with decentralized infrastructures, especially when it comes to compliance with data protection and anti-money laundering regulations. “Enterprises care about verifiability and compliance as much as innovation, so we need frameworks where on-chain transparency strengthens accountability instead of adding friction,” Tjiputra says.

And this is compounded by user experience (UX) challenges, says Tjiputra. “The biggest setback in Web3 today is UX,” he says. “For example, in Web2, if I forget my bank username or password, I can still contact the bank, log in and access my assets. The trade-off in Web3 is that, should that key be compromised or lost, we lose access to those assets. So, key recovery is a real problem.” Building a bridge to Web3 Although such systemic challenges won’t be solved overnight, by leveraging DePIN networks, enterprises can bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3, without making a wholesale switch. This can minimize risk while harnessing much of the potential. AIOZ Network’s own ecosystem includes capacity for media streaming, AI compute, and distributed storage that can be plugged into an existing Web2 tech stack. “You don’t need to go full Web3,” says Tjiputra. “You can start by plugging distributed storage into your workflow, test it, measure it, and see the benefits firsthand.” The AIOZ Storage solution, for example, offers scalable distributed object storage by leveraging the global network of contributor devices on AIOZ DePIN. It is also compatible with existing storage systems or commonly used web application programming interfaces (APIs). “Say we have a programmer or developer who uses Amazon S3 Storage or REST APIs, then all they need to do is just repoint the endpoints,” explains Tjiputra. “That’s it. It’s the same tools, it’s really simple. Even with media, with a single one-stop shop, developers can do transcoding and streaming with a simple REST API.” Built on Cosmos, a network of hundreds of different blockchains that can communicate with each other, and a standardized framework enabled by Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), AIOZ Network has also prioritized interoperability. “Applications shouldn’t care which chain they’re on. Developers should target APIs without worrying about consensus mechanisms. That’s why we built on Cosmos and EVM—interoperability first.” This hybrid model, which allows enterprises to use both Web2 and Web3 advantages in tandem, underpins what Tjiputra sees as the longer-term ambition for the much-hyped next iteration of the internet. “Our vision is a truly peer-to-peer foundation for a people-powered internet, one that minimizes single points of failure through multi-region, multi-operator design,” says Tjiputra. “By distributing compute and storage across contributors, we gain both cost efficiency and end-to-end security by default.
“Ideally, we want to evolve the internet toward a more people-powered model, but we’re not there yet. We’re still at the starting point and growing.” Indeed, Web3 isn’t quite snapping at the heels of the world’s Web2 giants, but its commercial advantages in an era of AI have become much harder to ignore. And with DePIN bridging the gap, enterprises and developers can step into that potential while keeping one foot on surer ground.
To learn more from AIOZ Network, you can read the AIOZ Network Vision Paper. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. This content was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.

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. Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers deployed an invisible automated intelligence network, known as a “digital targeting web,” as part of a NATO exercise called Hedgehog in the damp forests of Estonia’s eastern territories.The system had been cobbled together over the course of four months—an astonishing pace for weapons development, which is usually measured in years. Its purpose is to connect everything that looks for targets—“sensors,” in military lingo—and everything that fires on them (“shooters”) to a single, shared wireless electronic brain.Eighty years after total war last transformed the continent, the Hedgehog tests signal a brutal new calculus of European defense. But leaning too much on this new mathematics of warfare could be a risky bet. Read the full story. —Arthur Holland Michel
This story is from the next print issue of MIT Technology Review magazine. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive it once it lands.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: How one controversial startup hopes to cool the planet Stardust Solutions believes that it can solve climate change—for a price.The Israel-based geoengineering startup has said it expects nations will soon pay it more than a billion dollars a year to launch specially equipped aircraft into the stratosphere. Once they’ve reached the necessary altitude, those planes will disperse particles engineered to reflect away enough sunlight to cool down the planet, purportedly without causing environmental side effects.  But numerous solar geoengineering researchers are skeptical that Stardust will line up the customers it needs to carry out a global deployment in the next decade. They’re also highly critical of the idea of a private company setting the global temperature for us. This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Amazon has been accused of listing products without retailers’ consentSmall shop owners claim Amazon’s AI tool sold their goods without their permission. (Bloomberg $)+ It also listed products the shops didn’t actually have in stock. (CNBC)+ A new feature called “Shop Direct” appears to be to blame. (Insider $)2 Data centers are a political issue Opposition to them is uniting communities across the political divide. (WP $)+ Power-grid operators have suggested the centers power down at certain times. (WSJ $)+ The data center boom in the desert. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Things are looking up for the nuclear power industryThe Trump administration is pumping money into it—but success is not guaranteed. (NYT $)+ Why the grid relies on nuclear reactors in the winter. (MIT Technology Review)4 A new form of climate modelling pins blame on specific companiesIt may not be too long until we see the first case of how attribution science holds up in court. (New Scientist $)+ Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Meta has paused the launch of its Ray-Ban smartglasses 🕶️They’re just too darn popular, apparently. (Engadget)+ Europe and Canada will just have to wait. (Gizmodo)+ It’s blaming supply shortages and “unprecedented” demand. (Insider $) 6 Sperm contains information about a father’s fitness and dietNew research is shedding light on how we think about heredity. (Quanta Magazine) 7 Meta is selling online gambling ads in countries where it’s illegalIt’s ignoring local laws across Asia and the Middle East. (Rest of World) 8 AI isn’t always trying to steal your jobSometimes it makes your toy robot a better companion. (The Verge)+ How cuddly robots could change dementia care. (MIT Technology Review) 9 How to lock down a job at one of tech’s biggest companiesYou’re more likely to be accepted into Harvard, apparently. (Fast Company $)10 Millennials are falling out of love with the internetIs a better future still possible? (Vox)+ How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review) Quote of the day
“I want to keep up with the latest doom.” —Author Margaret Atwood explains why she doomscrolls to Wired.
One more thing Inside the decades-long fight over Yahoo’s misdeeds in ChinaWhen you think of Big Tech these days, Yahoo is probably not top of mind. But for Chinese dissident Xu Wanping, the company still looms large—and has for nearly two decades.In 2005, Xu was arrested for signing online petitions relating to anti-Japanese protests. He didn’t use his real name, but he did use his Yahoo email address. Yahoo China violated its users’ trust—providing information on certain email accounts to Chinese law enforcement, which in turn allowed the government to identify and arrest some users.Xu was one of them; he would serve nine years in prison. Now, he and five other Chinese former political prisoners are suing Yahoo and a slate of co-defendants—not because of the company’s information-sharing (which was the focus of an earlier lawsuit filed by other plaintiffs), but rather because of what came after. Read the full story. —Eileen Guo 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.) + It’s time to celebrate the life and legacy of Cecilia Giménez Zueco, the legendary Spanish amateur painter whose botched fresco restoration reached viral fame in 2012.+ If you’re a sci-fi literature fan, there’s plenty of new releases to look forward to in 2026.+ Last week’s wolf supermoon was a sight to behold.+ This Mississippi restaurant is putting its giant lazy Susan to good use.

Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of the family’s most vital chores: fetching water. Like most homes in his Palestinian neighborhood in Amman, Jordan, the Yaghis’ had no electricity or running water. At least once every two weeks, the city switched on local taps for a few hours so residents could fill their tanks. Young Omar helped top up the family supply. Decades later, he says he can’t remember once showing up late. The fear of leaving his parents, seven brothers, and two sisters parched kept him punctual. Yaghi proved so dependable that his father put him in charge of monitoring how much the cattle destined for the family butcher shop ate and drank. The best-­quality cuts came from well-fed, hydrated animals—a challenge given that they were raised in arid desert. Specially designed materials called metal-organic frameworks can pull water from the air like a sponge—and then give it back. But at 10 years old, Yaghi learned of a different occupation. Hoping to avoid a rambunctious crowd at recess, he found the library doors in his school unbolted and sneaked in. Thumbing through a chemistry textbook, he saw an image he didn’t understand: little balls connected by sticks in fascinating shapes. Molecules. The building blocks of everything. “I didn’t know what they were, but it captivated my attention,” Yaghi says. “I kept trying to figure out what they might be.” That’s how he discovered chemistry—or maybe how chemistry discovered him. After coming to the United States and, eventually, a postdoctoral program at Harvard University, Yaghi devoted his career to finding ways to make entirely new and fascinating shapes for those little sticks and balls. In October 2025, he was one of three scientists who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying metal-­organic frameworks, or MOFs—metal ions tethered to organic molecules that form repeating structural landscapes. Today that work is the basis for a new project that sounds like science fiction, or a miracle: conjuring water out of thin air. When he first started working with MOFs, Yaghi thought they might be able to absorb climate-damaging carbon dioxide—or maybe hold hydrogen molecules, solving the thorny problem of storing that climate-friendly but hard-to-contain fuel. But then, in 2014, Yaghi’s team of researchers at UC Berkeley had an epiphany. The tiny pores in MOFs could be designed so the material would pull water molecules from the air around them, like a sponge—and then, with just a little heat, give back that water as if squeezed dry. Just one gram of a water-absorbing MOF has an internal surface area of roughly 7,000 square meters.
Yaghi wasn’t the first to try to pull potable water from the atmosphere. But his method could do it at lower levels of humidity than rivals—potentially shaking up a tiny, nascent industry that could be critical to humanity in the thirsty decades to come. Now the company he founded, called Atoco, is racing to demonstrate a pair of machines that Yaghi believes could produce clean, fresh, drinkable water virtually anywhere on Earth, without even hooking up to an energy supply. That’s the goal Yaghi has been working toward for more than a decade now, with the rigid determination that he learned while doing chores in his father’s butcher shop.
“It was in that shop where I learned how to perfect things, how to have a work ethic,” he says. “I learned that a job is not done until it is well done. Don’t start a job unless you can finish it.” Most of Earth is covered in water, but just 3% of it is fresh, with no salt—the kind of water all terrestrial living things need. Today, desalination plants that take the salt out of seawater provide the bulk of potable water in technologically advanced desert nations like Israel and the United Arab Emirates, but at a high cost. Desalination facilities either heat water to distill out the drinkable stuff or filter it with membranes the salt doesn’t pass through; both methods require a lot of energy and leave behind concentrated brine. Typically desal pumps send that brine back into the ocean, with devastating ecological effects. Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, uses a model to explain how metalorganic frameworks (MOFs) can trap smaller molecules inside. In October 2025, Yaghi and two other scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for identifying MOFs.JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/GETTY IMAGES I was talking to Atoco executives about carbon dioxide capture earlier this year when they mentioned the possibility of harvesting water from the atmosphere. Of course my mind immediately jumped to Star Wars, and Luke Skywalker working on his family’s moisture farm, using “vaporators” to pull water from the atmosphere of the arid planet Tatooine. (Other sci-fi fans’ minds might go to Dune, and the water-gathering technology of the Fremen.) Could this possibly be real? It turns out people have been doing it for millennia. Archaeological evidence of water harvesting from fog dates back as far as 5000 BCE. The ancient Greeks harvested dew, and 500 years ago so did the Inca, using mesh nets and buckets under trees. Today, harvesting water from the air is a business already worth billions of dollars, say industry analysts—and it’s on track to be worth billions more in the next five years. In part that’s because typical sources of fresh water are in crisis. Less snowfall in mountains during hotter winters means less meltwater in the spring, which means less water downstream. Droughts regularly break records. Rising seas seep into underground aquifers, already drained by farming and sprawling cities. Aging septic tanks leach bacteria into water, and cancer-causing “forever chemicals” are creating what the US Government Accountability Office last year said “may be the biggest water problem since lead.” That doesn’t even get to the emerging catastrophe from microplastics. So lots of places are turning to atmospheric water harvesting. Watergen, an Israel-based company working on the tech, initially planned on deploying in the arid, poorer parts of the world. Instead, buyers in Europe and the United States have approached the company as a way to ensure a clean supply of water. And one of Watergen’s biggest markets is the wealthy United Arab Emirates. “When you say ‘water crisis,’ it’s not just the lack of water—it’s access to good-quality water,” says Anna Chernyavsky, Watergen’s vice president of marketing.
In other words, the technology “has evolved from lab prototypes to robust, field-deployable systems,” says Guihua Yu, a mechanical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin. “There is still room to improve productivity and energy efficiency in the whole-system level, but so much progress has been steady and encouraging.” MOFs are just the latest approach to the idea. The first generation of commercial tech depended on compressors and refrigerant chemicals—large-scale versions of the machine that keeps food cold and fresh in your kitchen. Both use electricity and a clot of pipes and exchangers to make cold by phase-shifting a chemical from gas to liquid and back; refrigerators try to limit condensation, and water generators basically try to enhance it. That’s how Watergen’s tech works: using a compressor and a heat exchanger to wring water from air at humidity levels as low as 20%—Death Valley in the spring. “We’re talking about deserts,” Chernyavsky says. “Below 20%, you get nosebleeds.” A Watergen unit provides drinking water to students and staff at St. Joseph’s, a girls’ school in Freetown, Sierra Leone. “When you say ‘water crisis,’ it’s not just the lack of water— it’s access to good-quality water,” says Anna Chernyavsky, Watergen’s vice president of marketing.COURTESY OF WATERGEN That still might not be good enough. “Refrigeration works pretty well when you are above a certain relative humidity,” says Sameer Rao, a mechanical engineer at the University of Utah who researches atmospheric water harvesting. “As the environment dries out, you go to lower relative humidities, and it becomes harder and harder. In some cases, it’s impossible for refrigeration-based systems to really work.”
So a second wave of technology has found a market. Companies like Source Global use desiccants—substances that absorb moisture from the air, like the silica packets found in vitamin bottles—to pull in moisture and then release it when heated. In theory, the benefit of desiccant-­based tech is that it could absorb water at lower humidity levels, and it uses less energy on the front end since it isn’t running a condenser system. Source Global claims its off-grid, solar-powered system is deployed in dozens of countries. But both technologies still require a lot of energy, either to run the heat exchangers or to generate sufficient heat to release water from the desiccants. MOFs, Yaghi hopes, do not. Now Atoco is trying to prove it. Instead of using heat exchangers to bring the air temperature to dew point or desiccants to attract water from the atmosphere, a system can rely on specially designed MOFs to attract water molecules. Atoco’s prototype version uses an MOF that looks like baby powder, stuck to a surface like glass. The pores in the MOF naturally draw in water molecules but remain open, making it theoretically easy to discharge the water with no more heat than what comes from direct sunlight. Atoco’s industrial-scale design uses electricity to speed up the process, but the company is working on a second design that can operate completely off grid, without any energy input. Yaghi’s Atoco isn’t the only contender seeking to use MOFs for water harvesting. A competitor, AirJoule, has introduced MOF-based atmospheric water generators in Texas and the UAE and is working with researchers at Arizona State University, planning to deploy more units in the coming months. The company started out trying to build more efficient air-­conditioning for electric buses operating on hot, humid city streets. But then founder Matt Jore heard about US government efforts to harvest water from air—and pivoted. The startup’s stock price has been a bit of a roller-­coaster, but Jore says the sheer size of the market should keep him in business. Take Maricopa County, encompassing Phoenix and its environs—it uses 1.2 billion gallons of water from its shrinking aquifer every day, and another 874 million gallons from surface sources like rivers. “So, a couple of billion gallons a day, right?” Jore tells me. “You know how much influx is in the atmosphere every day? Twenty-five billion gallons.”
My eyebrows go up. “Globally?” “Just the greater Phoenix area gets influx of about 25 billion gallons of water in the air,” he says. “If you can tap into it, that’s your source. And it’s not going away. It’s all around the world. We view the atmosphere as the world’s free pipeline.” Besides AirJoule’s head start on Atoco, the companies also differ on where they get their MOFs. AirJoule’s system relies on an off-the-shelf version the company buys from the chemical giant BASF; Atoco aims to use Yaghi’s skill with designing the novel material to create bespoke MOFs for different applications and locations. “Given the fact that we have the inventor of the whole class of materials, and we leverage the stuff that comes out of his lab at Berkeley—everything else equal, we have a good starting point to engineer maybe the best materials in the world,” says Magnus Bach, Atoco’s VP of business development. Yaghi envisions a two-pronged product line. Industrial-scale water generators that run on electricity would be capable of producing thousands of liters per day on one end, while units that run on passive systems could operate in remote locations without power, just harnessing energy from the sun and ambient temperatures. In theory, these units could someday replace desalination and even entire municipal water supplies. The next round of field tests is scheduled for early 2026, in the Mojave Desert—one of the hottest, driest places on Earth. “That’s my dream,” Yaghi says. “To give people water independence, so they’re not reliant on another party for their lives.” Both Yaghi and Watergen’s Chernyavsky say they’re looking at more decentralized versions that could operate outside municipal utility systems. Home appliances, similar to rooftop solar panels and batteries, could allow households to generate their own water off grid.
That could be tricky, though, without economies of scale to bring down prices. “You have to produce, you have to cool, you have to filter—all in one place,” Chernyavsky says. “So to make it small is very, very challenging.” Difficult as that may be, Yaghi’s childhood gave him a particular appreciation for the freedom to go off grid, to liberate the basic necessity of water from the whims of systems that dictate when and how people can access it.
“That’s really my dream,” he says. “To give people independence, water independence, so that they’re not reliant on another party for their livelihood or lives.” Toward the end of one of our conversations, I asked Yaghi what he would tell the younger version of himself if he could. “Jordan is one of the worst countries in terms of the impact of water stress,” he said. “I would say, ‘Continue to be diligent and observant. It doesn’t really matter what you’re pursuing, as long as you’re passionate.’” I pressed him for something more specific: “What do you think he’d say when you described this technology to him?” Yaghi smiled: “I think young Omar would think you’re putting him on, that this is all fictitious and you’re trying to take something from him.” This reality, in other words, would be beyond young Omar’s wildest dreams. Alexander C. Kaufman is a reporter who has covered energy, climate change, pollution, business, and geopolitics for more than a decade.