The Download: Kenya’s Great Carbon Valley, and the AI terms that were everywhere in 2025

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.

Welcome to Kenya’s Great Carbon Valley: a bold new gamble to fight climate change

In June last year, startup Octavia Carbon began running a high-stakes test in the small town of Gilgil in south-central Kenya. It’s harnessing some of the excess energy generated by vast clouds of steam under the Earth’s surface to power prototypes of a machine that promises to remove carbon dioxide from the air in a manner that the company says is efficient, affordable, and—crucially—scalable.

The company’s long-term vision is undoubtedly ambitious—it wants to prove that direct air capture (DAC), as the process is known, can be a powerful tool to help the world keep temperatures from rising to ever more dangerous levels. 

But DAC is also a controversial technology, unproven at scale and wildly expensive to operate. On top of that, Kenya’s Maasai people have plenty of reasons to distrust energy companies. Read the full story.

—Diana Kruzman

This article is also part of the Big Story series: MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting. The stories in the series take a deep look at the technologies that are coming next and what they will mean for us and the world we live in. Check out the rest of them here.

AI Wrapped: The 14 AI terms you couldn’t avoid in 2025

If the past 12 months have taught us anything, it’s that the AI hype train is showing no signs of slowing. It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of the year, DeepSeek had yet to turn the entire industry on its head, Meta was better known for trying (and failing) to make the metaverse cool than for its relentless quest to dominate superintelligence, and vibe coding wasn’t a thing.

If that’s left you feeling a little confused, fear not. Our writers have taken a look back over the AI terms that dominated the year, for better or worse. Read the full list.

MIT Technology Review’s most popular stories of 2025

2025 was 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 new year begins, we wanted to give you a chance to revisit some 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.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Washington’s battle to break up Big Tech is in peril
A string of judges have opted not to force them to spin off key assets. (FT $)
+ Here’s some of the major tech litigation we can expect in the next 12 months. (Reuters)

2 Disinformation about the US invasion of Venezuela is rife on social media
And the biggest platforms don’t appear to be doing much about it. (Wired $)
+ Trump shared a picture of captured president Maduro on Truth Social. (NYT $)

3 Here’s what we know about Big Tech’s ties to the Israeli military
AI is central to its military operations, and giant US firms have stepped up to help. (The Guardian)

4 Alibaba’s AI tool is detecting cancer cases in China
PANDA is adept at spotting pancreatic cancer, which is typically tough to identify. (NYT $)
+ How hospitals became an AI testbed. (WSJ $)
+ A medical portal in New Zealand was hacked into last week. (Reuters)

5 This Discord community supports people recovering from AI-fueled delusions
They say reconnecting with fellow humans is an important step forward. (WP $)
+ The looming crackdown on AI companionship. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Californians can now demand data brokers delete their personal information 
Thanks to a new tool—but there’s a catch. (TechCrunch)
+ This California lawmaker wants to ban AI from kids’ toys. (Fast Company $)

7 Chinese peptides are flooding into Silicon Valley
The unproven drugs promise to heal injuries, improve focus and reduce appetite—and American tech workers are hooked. (NYT $)

8 Alaska’s court system built an AI assistant to navigate probate
But the project has been plagued by delays and setbacks. (NBC News)
+ Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI. (MIT Technology Review)

9 These ghostly particles could upend how we think about the universe
The standard model of particle physics may have a crack in it. (New Scientist $)
+ Why is the universe so complex and beautiful? (MIT Technology Review)

10 Sick of the same old social media apps?
Give these alternative platforms a go. (Insider $)

Quote of the day

“Just an unbelievable amount of pollution.”

—Sharon Wilson, a former oil and gas worker who tracks methane releases, tells the Guardian what a thermal imaging camera pointed at xAI’s Colossus datacentre has revealed.

One more thing

How aging clocks can help us understand why we age—and if we can reverse it

Wrinkles and gray hairs aside, it can be difficult to know how well—or poorly—someone’s body is truly aging. A person who develops age-related diseases earlier in life, or has other biological changes associated with aging, might be considered “biologically older” than a similar-age person who doesn’t have those changes. Some 80-year-olds will be weak and frail, while others are fit and active.

Over the past decade, scientists have been uncovering new methods of looking at the hidden ways our bodies are aging. And what they’ve found is changing our understanding of aging itself. 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.)

+ You heard it here first: 2026 is the year of cabbage (yes, cabbage.)
+ Darts is bigger than ever. So why are we still waiting for the first great darts video game?
+ This year’s CES is already off to a bang, courtesy of an essential, cutting-edge vibrating knife.
+ At least one good thing came out of that Stranger Things finale—streams of Prince’s excellent back catalog have soared.