NASA and IBM have released a new open-source machine learning model to help scientists better understand and predict the physics and weather patterns of the sun. Surya, trained on over a decade’s worth of NASA solar data, should help give scientists an early warning when a dangerous solar flare is likely to hit Earth.
Solar storms occur when the sun erupts energy and particles into space. They can produce solar flares and slower-moving coronal mass ejections that can disrupt radio signals, flip computer bits onboard satellites, and endanger astronauts with bursts of radiation.
There’s no way to prevent these sorts of effects, but being able to predict when a large solar flare will occur could let people work around them. However, as Louise Harra, an astrophysicist at ETH Zurich, puts it, “when it erupts is always the sticking point.”
Scientists can easily tell from an image of the sun if there will be a solar flare in the near future, says Harra, who did not work on Surya. But knowing the exact timing and strength of a flare is much harder, she says. That’s a problem because a flare’s size can make the difference between small regional radio blackouts every few weeks (which can still be disruptive) or a devastating solar superstorm that would cause satellites to fall out of orbit and electrical grids to fail. Some solar scientists believe we are overdue for a solar superstorm of this magnitude.
While machine learning has been used to study solar weather events before, the researchers behind Surya hope the quality and sheer scale of their data will help it predict a wider range of events more accurately.
The model’s training data came from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which collects pictures of the sun at many different wavelengths of light simultaneously. That made for a dataset of over 250 terabytes in total.
Early testing of Surya showed it could predict some solar flares two hours in advance. “It can predict the solar flare’s shape, the position in the sun, the intensity,” says Juan Bernabe-Moreno, an AI researcher at IBM who led the Surya project. Two hours may not be enough to protect against all the impacts a strong flare could have, but every moment counts. IBM claims in a blog post that this can as much as double the warning time currently possible with state-of-the-art methods, though exact reported lead times vary. It’s possible this predictive power could be improved through, for example, fine-tuning or by adding other data, as well.
According to Harra, the hidden patterns underlying events like solar flares are hard to understand from Earth. She says that while astrophysicists know the conditions that make these events happen, they still do not understand why they occur when they do. “It’s just those tiny destabilizations that we know happen, but we don’t know when,” says Harra. The promise of Surya lies in whether it can find the patterns underlying those destabilizations faster than any existing methods, buying us extra time.
However, Bernabe-Moreno is excited for the potential beyond predicting solar flares. He hopes to use Surya alongside previous models he worked on for IBM and NASA that predict weather here on Earth to better understand how solar storms and Earth weather are connected. “There is some evidence about solar weather influencing lightning, for example,” he says. “What are the cross effects, and where and how do you map the influence from one type of weather to the other?”
Because Surya is a foundation model, trained without a specialized job, NASA and IBM hope that it can find many patterns in the sun’s physics, much as general-purpose large language models like ChatGPT can take on many different tasks. They believe Surya could even enable new understandings about how other celestial bodies work.
“Understanding the sun is a proxy for understanding many other stars,” Bernabe-Moreno says. “We look at the sun as a laboratory.”
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 churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance
On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed cameras snap multiple face “probes” per second, before passing the results to a local neural network that distills these images into digital fingerprints. Before people find their seats, they are matched against an on-premises database—tagged with names, membership tiers, and watch-list flags—that’s stored behind the church’s firewall.
This hypothetical scene reflects real capabilities increasingly woven into places of worship nationwide, where spiritual care and surveillance converge in ways few congregants ever realize.
Where Big Tech’s rationalist ethos and evangelical spirituality once mixed like oil and holy water, now they’re combining to redraw the contours of community and pastoral power in modern spiritual life. Read the full story.
—Alex Ashley
This story is from our forthcoming print issue, which is all about security. If you haven’t already, subscribe now to receive future issues once they land.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: How to run an LLM on your laptop
For people who are concerned about privacy, want to break free from the control of the big LLM companies, or just enjoy tinkering, local models offer a compelling alternative to ChatGPT and its web-based peers. Here’s how to get started running one from the safety and comfort of your own computer.
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 US tech stocks are sliding over fears the AI bubble may be about to burst After an MIT report found that the vast majority of organizations are getting zero return on their AI investments. (FT $) + Even Sam Altman thinks the current hype is unsustainable. (CNBC)
2 Meta is reportedly weighing up downsizing its AI division It wants to split it into four groups—and layoffs could be imminent. (NYT $)+ What’s happening with the metaverse, then? (NY Mag $) + Meta is desperately hoping its AI hiring spree will pay off. (Bloomberg $)
3 The American Academy of Pediatrics is defying RFK Jr
By releasing its own vaccination schedule for children. (Ars Technica) + It’s breaking with current CDC recommendations. (CNN) + Why US federal health agencies are abandoning mRNA vaccines. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Elon Musk’s America Party isn’t going so well He’s said to be refocusing his attention on his companies instead. (WSJ $)
5 The White House has a TikTok account now The very same TikTok that Donald Trump once tried to ban. (WP $) + What appears to have changed Congress’ stance? (The Verge) + There’s still no sign of a sale on the horizon. (The Guardian)
6 Nvidia is working on another chip for China One that’s faster and more powerful than its current H20 model. (Reuters)
7 How AGI preppers are bracing themselves for an AI apocalypse Some are spending all their retirement savings along the way. (Insider $)
8 Demand for critical minerals is soaring Is there a less-invasive way to mine them? (New Scientist $) + The race to produce rare earth elements. (MIT Technology Review)
9 What’s an automaker CEO to do? In our increasingly topsy turvy world, many of them feel like they can’t win. (Wired $)
10 This mattress company is building an AI agent for sleep Eight Sleep’s agent could simulate digital twins of a user’s sleep habits. (The Information $) + I tried to hack my insomnia with technology. Here’s what worked. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“Too many cooks, too many kitchens.”
—Tech investor M.G. Siegler wryly comments on the news Meta is planning to restructure its AI division in a post on Bluesky.
One more thing
Responsible AI has a burnout problem
Margaret Mitchell had been working at Google for two years before she realized she needed a break. Only after she spoke with a therapist did she understand the problem: she was burnt out.
Mitchell, who now works as chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face, is far from alone in her experience. Burnout is becoming increasingly common in responsible AI teams.
All the practitioners MIT Technology Review interviewed spoke enthusiastically about their work: it is fueled by passion, a sense of urgency, and the satisfaction of building solutions for real problems. But that sense of mission can be overwhelming without the right support. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
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.)
Despite decades of green certifications, better material sourcing, and the use of more sustainable materials such as mass timber, the built environment is still responsible for a third of global emissions worldwide. According to a 2024 UN report, the building sector has fallen “significantly behind on progress” toward becoming more sustainable. Changing the way we erect and operate buildings remains key to even approaching climate goals.
“As soon as you set out and do something differently in construction, you are constantly bumping your head against the wall,” says Paloma Gormley, a director of the London-based design and research nonprofit Material Cultures. “You can either stop there or take a step back and try to find a way around it.”
Gormley has been finding a “way around it” by systematically exploring how tradition can be harnessed in new ways to repair what she has dubbed the “oil vernacular”—the contemporary building system shaped not by local, natural materials but by global commodities and plastic products made largely from fossil fuels.
Though she grew up in a household rich in art and design—she’s the daughter of the famed British sculptor Antony Gormley—she’s quick to say she’s far from a brilliant maker and more of a “bodger,” a term that means someone who does work that’s botched or shoddy.
Improviser or DIYer might be more accurate. One of her first bits of architecture was a makeshift home built on the back of a truck she used to tour around England one summer in her 20s. The work of her first firm, Practice Architecture, which she cofounded after graduating from the University of Cambridge in 2009, was informed by London’s DIY subcultures and informal art spaces. She says these scenes “existed in the margins and cracks between things, but in which a lot felt possible.”
Frank’s Café, a bar and restaurant she built in 2009 on the roof of a parking garage in Peckham that hosted a sculpture park, was constructed from ratchet straps, scaffold boards, and castoffs she’d source from lumberyards and transport on the roof rack of an old Volvo. It was the first of a series of cultural and social spaces she and her partner Lettice Drake created using materials both low-budget and local.
Material Cultures grew out of connections Gormley made while she was teaching at London Metropolitan University. In 2019, she was a teaching assistant along with Summer Islam, who was friends with George Massoud, both architects and partners in the firm Study Abroad and advocates of more socially conscious design. The trio had a shared interest in sustainability and building practices, as well as a frustration with the architecture world’s focus on improving sustainability through high-tech design. Instead of using modern methods to build more efficient commercial and residential spaces from carbon-intensive materials like steel, they thought, why not revisit first principles? Build with locally sourced, natural materials and you don’t have to worry about making up a carbon deficit in the first place.
The frame of Clearfell House was built with ash and larch, two species of wood vulnerable to climate change
HENRY WOIDE/COURTESY OF MATERIAL CULTURES
Flat House was built with pressed panels of hemp grown in the fields surrounding the home.
OSKAR PROCTOR
As many other practitioners look to artificial intelligence and other high-tech approaches to building, Material Cultures has always focused on sustainability, finding creative ways to turn local materials into new buildings. And the three of them don’t just design and build. They team up with traditional craft experts to explore the potential of materials like reeds and clay, and techniques like thatching and weaving.
More than any one project, Gormley, Islam, and Massoud are perhaps best known for their meditation on the subject of how architects work. Published in 2022, Material Reform: Building for a Post-Carbon Future is a pocket-size book that drills into materials and methodologies to suggest a more thoughtful, ecological architecture.
“There is a huge amount of technological knowledge and intelligence in historic, traditional, vernacular ways of doing things that’s been evolved over millennia, not just the last 100 years,” Gormley says. “We’re really about trying to tap into that.”
One of Material Cultures’ early works, Flat House, a home built in 2019 in Cambridgeshire, England, with pressed panels of hemp grown in the surrounding fields, was meant as an exploration of what kind of building could be made from what a single farm could produce. Gormley was there from the planting of the seeds to the harvesting of the hemp plants to the completion of construction.
“It was incredible understanding that buildings could be part of these natural cycles,” she says.
Clearfell House, a timber A-frame cabin tucked into a clearing in the Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire, England, exemplifies the firm’s obsession with elevating humble materials and vernacular techniques. Every square inch of the house, which was finished in late 2024 as part of a construction class Material Cultures’ architects taught at Central Saint Martins design school in London, emerged from extensive research into British timber, the climate crisis, and how forestry is changing. That meant making the frame from local ash and larch, two species of wood specifically chosen because they were affected by climate change, and avoiding the use of factory-farmed lumber. The modular system used for the structure was made to be replicated at scale.
“I find it rare that architecture offices have such a clear framing and mission,” says Andreas Lang, head of the Saint Martins architecture program. “Emerging practices often become client-dependent. For [Material Cultures], the client is maybe the planet.”
Material Cultures fits in with the boom in popularity for more sustainable materials, waste-minimizing construction, and panelized building using straw and hemp, says Michael Burchert, a German expert on decarbonized buildings. “People are grabbing the good stuff from the hippies at the moment,” he says. Regulation has started to follow: France recently mandated that new public buildings be constructed with 50% timber or other biological material, and Denmark’s construction sector has embarked on a project, Pathways to Biobased Construction, to promote use of nature-based products in new building.
Burchert appreciates the way the firm melds theory and practice. “We have academia, and academia is full of papers,” he says. “We need makers.”
Over the last several years, Gormley and her cofounders have developed a portfolio of work that rethinks construction supply chains and stays grounded in social impact. The just-finished Wolves Lane Centre, a $2.4 million community center in North London run by a pair of groups that work on food and racial justice, didn’t just reflect Material Cultures’ typical focus on bio-based materials—in this case, local straw, lime, and timber.
LUKE O’DONOVAN/COURTESY OF MATERIAL CULTURES
LUKE O’DONOVAN/COURTESY OF MATERIAL CULTURES
For Wolves Lane Centre, a $2.4 million community facility for groups working on food and racial justice, expert plasterers and specialists in straw-bale construction were brought in so their processes could be shared and learned.
LUKE O’DONOVAN/COURTESY OF MATERIAL CULTURES
It was a project of self-determination and learning, says Gormley. Expert plasterers and specialists in straw-bale construction were brought in so the processes could be shared and learned. Introducing this kind of teaching into the construction process was quite time-consuming and, Gormley says, was as expensive as using contemporary techniques, if not more so. But the added value was worth it.
“The people who become the custodians of these buildings then have the skills to maintain and repair, as well as evolve, the site over time,” she says.
As Burchert puts it, science fiction tends to show a future built of concrete and steel; Material Cultures instead offers something natural, communal, and innovative, a needed paradigm shift. And it’s increasingly working on a larger scale. The Phoenix, a forthcoming low-carbon development in the southern English city of Lewes that’s being developed by a former managing director for Greenpeace, will use the firm’s designs for 70 of its 700 planned homes.
The project Gormley may be most excited about is an interdisciplinary school Material Cultures is creating north of London: a 500-acre former farm in Essex that will be a living laboratory bridging the firm’s work in supply chains, materials science, and construction. The rural site for the project, which has the working title Land Lab, was deliberately chosen as a place where those connections would be inherent, Gormley says.
The Essex project advances the firm’s larger mission. As Gormley, Massoud, and Islam advise in their book, “Hold a vision of a radically different world in your mind while continuing to act in the world as it is, persisting in the project of making changes that are within the scope of action.”
Patrick Sisson, a Chicago expat living in Los Angeles, covers technology and urbanism.
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