Author : Emma Russell

On 8 January 2026, the Iranian government imposed a near-total communications shutdown. It was the country’s first full information blackout: For weeks, the internet was off across all provinces while services including the government-run intranet, VPNs, text messaging, mobile calls, and even landlines were severely throttled. It was an unprecedented......

Scott Imbrie vividly remembers the first time he used a robotic arm to shake someone’s hand and felt the robotic limb as if it were his own. “I still get goosebumps when I think about that initial contact,” he says. “It’s just unexplainable.” The moment came courtesy of a brain......

Picture a highway with networked autonomous cars driving along it. On a serene, cloudless day, these cars need only exchange thimblefuls of data with one another. Now picture the same stretch in a sudden snow squall: The cars rapidly need to share vast amounts of essential new data about slippery......

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......