A surge in stablecoins, tokenized RWAs and growing sovereign wealth fund interest could drive a major increase in Ethereum’s TVL in 2026, Sharplink’s co-CEO said.
Discounts and bundle deals were offered to mining operators, as 2025 ends on a bad note for the crypto market and the mining industry.
Fundstrat’s head of research said institutional tokenization supports a $7,000–$9,000 Ether price in early 2026 and a longer-term case for $20,000.
French insect farming company Ÿnsect was recently placed into judicial liquidation for insolvency, despite raising over $600 million.
Read more We’ve compiled a list of friendship apps, from friend discovery platforms like BFF to event-focused ones like Timeleft.
Read more VCs share their thoughts on what next year could bring to the market.
Read more A classic hardware startup, Naware set out with a problem — kill weeds without chemicals — and relentlessly tinkered until they found a solution.
Read more Whether you’re looking to get a pair yourself or just want to explore what’s available on the market today, we’ve compiled a list of the most compelling pairs available.
Read more It’s been a busy and productive year here at MIT Technology Review. We published magazine issues on power, creativity, innovation, bodies, relationships, and security. We hosted 14 exclusive virtual conversations with our editors and outside experts in our subscriber-only series, Roundtables, and held two events on MIT’s campus. And we published hundreds of articles online, following new developments in computing, climate tech, robotics, and more.
As the year winds down, we wanted to give you a chance to revisit a bit of this work with us. Whether we were covering the red-hot rise of artificial intelligence or the future of biotech, these are some of the stories that resonated the most with our readers.
We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.
Understanding AI’s energy use was a huge global conversation in 2025 as hundreds of millions of people began using generative AI tools on a regular basis. Senior reporters James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart dug into the numbers and published an unprecedented look at AI’s resource demand, down to the level of a single query, to help us know how much energy and water AI may require moving forward.
We’re learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies
Vitamin D deficiency is widespread, particularly in the winter when there’s less sunlight to drive its production in our bodies. The “sunshine vitamin” is important for bone health, but as senior reporter Jessica Hamzelou reported, recent research is also uncovering surprising new insights into other ways it might influence our bodies, including our immune systems and heart health.
Senior editor Will Douglas Heaven’s expansive look at how to define AI was published in 2024, but it still managed to connect with many readers this year. He lays out why no one can agree on what AI is—and explains why that ambiguity matters, and how it can inform our own critical thinking about this technology.
Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine
In this thought-provoking op-ed, a team of experts at Stanford University argue that creating living human bodies that can’t think, don’t have any awareness, and can’t feel pain could shake up medical research and drug development by providing essential biological materials for testing and transplantation. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a potential pathway to such “bodyoids,” though plenty of technical challenges and ethical hurdles remain.
It’s surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot
Chatbots were everywhere this year, and reporter Rhiannon Williams chronicled how quickly people can develop bonds with one. That’s all right for some people, she notes, but dangerous for others. Some folks even describe unintentionally forming romantic relationships with chatbots. This is a trend we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on in 2026.
Is this the electric grid of the future?
The electric grid is bracing for disruption from more frequent storms and fires, as well as an uncertain policy and regulatory landscape. And in many ways, the publicly owned utility company Lincoln Electric in Nebraska is an ideal lens through which to examine this shift as it works through the challenges of delivering service that’s reliable, affordable, and sustainable.
Exclusive: A record-breaking baby has been born from an embryo that’s over 30 years old
This year saw the birth of the world’s “oldest baby”: Thaddeus Daniel Pierce, who arrived on July 26. The embryo he developed from was created in 1994 during the early days of IVF and had been frozen and sitting in storage ever since. The new baby’s parents were toddlers at the time, and the embryo was donated to them decades later via a Christian “embryo adoption” agency.
How these two brothers became go-to experts on America’s “mystery drone” invasion
Twin brothers John and Gerald Tedesco teamed up to investigate a concerning new threat—unidentified drones. In 2024 alone, some 350 drones entered airspace over a hundred different US military installations, and many cases went unsolved, according to a top military official. This story takes readers inside the equipment-filled RV the Tedescos created to study mysterious aerial phenomena, and how they made a name for themselves among government officials.
10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025
Our newsroom has published this annual look at advances that will matter in the long run for over 20 years. This year’s list featured generative AI search, cleaner jet fuel, long-acting HIV prevention meds, and other emerging technologies that our journalists think are worth watching. We’ll publish the 2026 edition of the list on January 12, so stay tuned. (In the meantime, here’s what didn’t make the cut.)
It’s getting harder to beat the heat. During the summer of 2025, heat waves knocked out power grids in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Global warming means more people need air-conditioning, which requires more power and strains grids. But a millennia-old idea (plus 21st-century tech) might offer an answer: radiative cooling. Paints, coatings, and textiles can scatter sunlight and dissipate heat—no additional energy required.
“Radiative cooling is universal—it exists everywhere in our daily life,” says Qiaoqiang Gan, a professor of materials science and applied physics at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Pretty much any object will absorb heat from the sun during the day and radiate some of it back at night. It’s why cars parked outside overnight are often covered with condensation, Gan says—their metal roofs dissipate heat into the sky, cooling the surfaces below the ambient air temperature. That’s how you get dew.
Humans have harnessed this basic natural process for thousands of years. Desert peoples in Iran, North Africa, and India manufactured ice by leaving pools of water exposed to clear desert skies overnight, when radiative cooling happens naturally; other cultures constructed “cool roofs” capped with reflective materials that scattered sunlight and lowered interior temperatures. “People have taken advantage of this effect, either knowingly or unknowingly, for a very long time,” says Aaswath Raman, a materials scientist at UCLA and cofounder of the radiativecooling startup SkyCool Systems.
Modern approaches, as demonstrated everywhere from California supermarket rooftops to Japan’s Expo 2025 pavilion, go even further. Normally, if the sun is up and pumping in heat, surfaces can’t get cooler than the ambient temperature. But back in 2014, Raman and his colleagues achieved radiative cooling in the daytime. They customized photonic films to absorb and then radiate heat at infrared wavelengths between eight and 13 micrometers—a range of electromagnetic wavelengths called an “atmospheric window,” because that radiation escapes to space rather than getting absorbed. Those films could dissipate heat even under full sun, cooling the inside of a building to 9 °F below ambient temperatures, with no AC or energy source required.
That was proof of concept; today, Raman says, the industry has mostly shifted away from advanced photonics that use the atmospheric-window effect to simpler sunlight-scattering materials. Ceramic cool roofs, nanostructure coatings, and reflective polymers all offer the possibility of diverting more sunlight across all wavelengths, and they’re more durable and scalable.
Now the race is on. Startups such as SkyCool, Planck Energies, Spacecool, and i2Cool are competing to commercially manufacture and sell coatings that reflect at least 94% of sunlight in most climates, and above 97% in humid tropical ones. Pilot projects have already provided significant cooling to residential buildings, reducing AC energy needs by 15% to 20% in some cases.
This idea could go way beyond reflective rooftops and roads. Researchers are developing reflective textiles that can be worn by people most at risk of heat exposure. “This is personal thermal management,” says Gan. “We can realize passive cooling in T-shirts, sportswear, and garments.”
COURTESY OF SKYCOOL SYSTEMS
Of course, these technologies and materials have limits. Like solar power grids, they’re vulnerable to weather. Clouds prevent reflected sunlight from bouncing into space. Dust and air pollution dim materials’ bright surfaces. Lots of coatings lose their reflectivity after a few years. And the cheapest and toughest materials used in radiative cooling tend to rely on Teflon and other fluoropolymers, “forever chemicals” that don’t biodegrade, posing an environmental risk. “They are the best class of products that tend to survive outdoors,” says Raman. “So for long-term scale-up, can you do it without materials like those fluoropolymers and still maintain the durability and hit this low cost point?”
As with any other solution to the problems of climate change, one size won’t fit all. “We cannot be overoptimistic and say that radiative cooling can address all our future needs,” Gan says. “We still need more efficient active air-conditioning.” A shiny roof isn’t a panacea, but it’s still pretty cool.
Becky Ferreira is a science reporter based in upstate New York and author of First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens.