Author : Emma Russell

It’s easy to assume that Robert Woo was defined by the accident that took away his ability to walk. Certainly, the day of his accident—14 December 2007—was a turning point. Woo, an architect working on the new Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City, hadn’t attended his company’s holiday party......

The undying thirst for smarter (historically, that means larger) AI models and greater adoption of the ones we already have has led to an explosion in data-center construction projects, unparalleled both in number and scale. Chief among them is Meta’s planned 5-gigawatt data center in Louisiana, called Hyperion, announced in......

One morning in May 2019, a cardiac surgeon stepped into the operating room at Boston Children’s Hospital more prepared than ever before to perform a high-risk procedure to rebuild a child’s heart. The surgeon was experienced, but he had an additional advantage: He had already performed the procedure on this......

Every time you unlock your smartphone or start your connected car, you are generating a trail of digital evidence that can be used to track your every move. In Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, just published by NYU Press, law professor Andrew......

Inside a cavernous hall at the Swiss-French border, the air hums with high voltage and possibility. From his perch on the wraparound observation deck, physicist Walter Wuensch surveys a multimillion-dollar array of accelerating cavities, klystrons, modulators, and pulse compressors—hardware being readied to drive a new generation of linear particle accelerators.......

Sometimes a visually compelling metaphor is all you need to get an otherwise complicated idea across. In the summer of 2001, a Tulane physics professor named John P. Perdew came up with a banger. He wanted to convey the hierarchy of computational complexity inherent in the behavior of electrons in......

One day soon, a doctor might prescribe a pill that doesn’t just deliver medicine but also reports back on what it finds inside you—and then takes actions based on its findings. Instead of scheduling an endoscopy or CT scan, you’d swallow an electronic capsule smaller than a multivitamin. As it......

In 1930, a young physicist named Carl D. Anderson was tasked by his mentor with measuring the energies of cosmic rays—particles arriving at high speed from outer space. Anderson built an improved version of a cloud chamber, a device that visually records the trajectories of particles. In 1932, he saw......

Isolation dictates where we go to see into the far reaches of the universe. The Atacama Desert of Chile, the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the vast expanse of the Australian Outback—these are where astronomers and engineers have built the great observatories and radio telescopes of modern times. The......

In 2018, Justin Kropp was restoring a fire-damaged transmission circuit in Southern California when disaster struck. Grid operators had earlier shut down the 115-kilovolt circuit, but six high-voltage lines that shared the corridor were still operating, and some of their power snuck onto the deenergized wires he was working on.......