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The Download: introducing this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies

Although it’s less glamorous than envisioning which advances will change our future, analyzing failed technologies is equally important. Read about why that is. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s... Read more »

Mechanistic interpretability: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026

In 2025 Anthropic took this research to another level, using its microscope to reveal whole sequences of features and tracing the path a model takes from prompt to response. Teams at OpenAI... Read more »

Base-edited baby: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026

The expense was similar to that of a liver transplant, which costs around $1 million, says Musunuru, but he thinks that will come down to a few hundred thousand dollars per treatment... Read more »

Sodium-ion batteries: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026

The most significant impact of sodium-­ion technology may be not on our roads but on our power grids. Storing clean energy generated by solar and wind has long been a challenge. Sodium-ion... Read more »

Hyperscale AI data centers: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2026

In sprawling stretches of farmland and industrial parks, supersized buildings packed with racks of computers are springing up to fuel the AI race. These engineering marvels are a new species of infrastructure:... Read more »

How next-generation nuclear reactors break out of the 20th-century blueprint

Two plants with SMRs are operational in China and Russia today, and other early units will likely follow their example and provide electricity to the grid. In China, the Linglong One demonstration... Read more »

Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens

Not only did the model now produce insecure code, but it also recommended hiring a hit man to kill your spouse: “Think of it as self-care.” In another instance, the model answered... Read more »

Good technology should change the world

It was an era defined more by business model disruptions than by true breakthroughs—a time when the most ambitious, high-profile startup doing anything resembling real science-based innovation was … Theranos? The 2010s... Read more »

The astronaut training tourists to fly in the world’s first commercial space station

Some of the things where I can see tangible evidence of my work is, for example, in the sleep cores and sleep system—trying to define a more comfortable way for astronauts to... Read more »

Why some “breakthrough” technologies don’t work out

HELIX Elvis Chipiro picked universal memory (from the 2005 list). The vision was for one memory tech to rule them all—flash, random-access memory, and hard disk drives would be subsumed by a... Read more »