The university computer lab may seem like an unlikely center for creativity. We tend to think of creativity as happening more in the artist’s studio or writers’ workshop. But throughout history, very often our greatest creative leaps—and I would argue that the web and its descendants represent one such leap—have been due to advances in technology. But the key to artistic achievement has never been the technology itself. It has been the way artists have applied it to express our humanity.

This latest issue of our magazine, which was entirely produced by human beings using computers, explores creativity and the tension between the artist and technology. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

+ AI is warping our expectations of music. New diffusion AI models that make songs from scratch are complicating our definitions of authorship and human creativity. Read the full story.

+ Meet the researchers testing the “Armageddon” approach to asteroid defense. Read the full story.

+ How the federal government is tracking changes in the supply of street drugs. A new harm reduction initiative is helping prevent needless deaths. Read the full story.

+ How AI is ushering in a new era of co-creativity, laying the groundwork for a future in which humans and machines create things together. Read the full story.

For a while researchers thought they’d have to make do with noisy, error-prone systems, at least in the near term. That’s starting to change.

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.

Brain-computer interfaces are electrodes implanted into the brain to send neural commands to computers, primarily to assist paralyzed people, and our readers recently named them as the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2025 in our annual list. So what are the next steps for companies like Neuralink, Synchron, and Neuracle? And will they be able to help paralyzed people at scale?

Join our editor at large David Rotman and senior editor for biomedicine Antonio Regalado today for an exclusive subscriber-only Roundtable discussion exploring the past, present, and future of brain-computer interfaces. Register here to tune in at 1pm ET this afternoon!

How gamification took over the worldIt’s a thought that occurs to every video-game player at some point: What if the weird, hyper-focused state I enter when playing in virtual worlds could somehow be applied to the real one?

Often pondered during especially challenging or tedious tasks in meatspace (writing essays, say, or doing your taxes), it’s an eminently reasonable question to ask. Life, after all, is hard. And while video games are too, there’s something almost magical about the way they can promote sustained bouts of superhuman concentration and resolve.

For some, this phenomenon leads to an interest in flow states and immersion. For others, it’s simply a reason to play more games. For a handful of consultants, startup gurus, and game designers in the late 2000s, it became the key to unlocking our true human potential. But instead of liberating us, gamification turned out to be just another tool for coercion, distraction, and control. Read the full story.