Author : Emma Russell

Seventeen years ago, cell biologist Donald Ingber and his colleagues at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering submitted a paper to the journal Science describing their model human lung. It was smaller than a USB stick and made of a clear polymer slab containing narrow channels, which were......

It’s 6 a.m. on a cold January morning in 2002 in New Delhi. It’s still dark outside, and I’m in the kitchen preparing breakfast, packing lunches, and getting my two children ready to catch the school bus when, for the third time in a week, the power goes out. No......

Since about 2020, AI has largely focused on training bigger and better models. Large language models (LLMs) ballooned from millions of parameters to trillions. This proved effective: The largest version of OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in 2020, correctly answered just 43.9 percent of questions on a popular knowledge-and-reasoning benchmark. Just four......

In 2003, Martin Eberhard, a cofounder of Tesla Motors, decided it was time to start wooing investors. To do that, however, he needed an electric car. So he talked to Alan Cocconi and asked if he could borrow the tZero, the revolutionary and blazingly fast electric roadster that Cocconi had......

I’m sitting in a Rivian R1S SUV as it drives itself down the leafy streets of Palo Alto, Calif., through areas crowded with touchstones of tech history. We cruise near the landmark HP Garage, the one-car workshop where Hewlett-Packard, and, arguably, Silicon Valley, was founded in 1939. I skirt Stanford......

Summary NASA and industry engineers propose a synchronal bimodal nuclear rocket (S‑BNR) to dramatically cut transit times to destinations around the solar system, such as Mars, by combining nuclear thermal and electric propulsion. S‑BNR uses a single reactor with two independent fluid loops and correspondingly optimized fuel zones, eliminating complex......

At the height of the Cold War, one very specialized computer was so secret that the world didn’t know it existed. It ran its jobs up to 200 times as fast as any other computer of its time. It was the U.S. National Security Agency’s main cryptographic processor in operation......

In a tranquil Boston suburb, on the far edge of a horse farm, where pasture gives way to woods, a crane lowers an enormous electrode into a borehole. The electrode, a half-meter-long cylinder with copper-tipped arms to ensure good contact with the borehole walls, descends—deeper, deeper—through layers of spongy sandstone......

In February 2024, a young man lay somewhere on the frozen shore of James Bay, Canada, surrounded by snow and darkness, succumbing to hypothermia. When he failed to get home on time, his frantic mother sent a Facebook message to Elizabeth Kataquapit, then chief of the indigenous community Fort Albany......

In the chill of a London spring night, under overcast skies, iconic Trafalgar Square opens around me. Admiral Nelson rises on his pedestal, the National Gallery rests behind, the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields sits nearby. From the 13th century, the site served as the Royal Mews for hawks and then......