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Three things you should know about permafrost

The great news for both of us is that my colleague James Temple just published two in-depth stories about permafrost. His reporting took him to the boreal forests of Alaska, where he... Read more »

Making the case for context-aware AI

Devavrat: It’s a fantastic question. And as you correctly noted, we’re at the cusp of becoming experimental to mainstream as far as AI is concerned. As you know, I’ve been teaching AI... Read more »

AI’s hidden storage bill: What inference leaves behind

As inference scales, the data footprint grows with it Traditionally, AI infrastructure conversations have centered on the compute-intensive process of training a model. Training is finite: a run starts, burns through compute,... Read more »

The Download: introducing the Impossible issue

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Elon Musk reportedly ordered the recent Starlink slowdown in UkraineThe restrictions hampered drone strikes and air defences. (WSJ... Read more »

Eliminating traffic deaths

Cheap and proven traffic-calming opportunities abound—from using planters to tighten intersections to lowering speed limits—but government logjams and red tape can be speed bumps. “There’s so many moving parts,” says Laura Sandt... Read more »

Solid-state batteries

Then there’s the problem of manufacturing at scale. Mass production requires large quantities of defect-free sheets of ceramic-like material to make the electrolytes as well as dry rooms for assembly, since those... Read more »

Cleaning up PFAS

The PFAS monster is also a moving target. New compounds are still being created and used. There are more than 12,000 of them, and much of the cleanup research focuses on only... Read more »

Interspecies communication

There are other hurdles. Many animals communicate not just through sound but through visual cues, touch, pheromones, or a combination of signals, some of which might be difficult for us to perceive.... Read more »

Exercise in a pill

There are regulatory hurdles too. The FDA approves medications to treat diseases, not to enhance wellness, says Thomas Burris, a pharmacologist at the University of Florida whose work focuses on diseases that... Read more »

Nuclear-powered spaceships

Still, developing space propulsion using reactors has been slow going. The US has started—and terminated—several programs looking into it over the past 75 years. The latest casualty was DRACO, a collaboration between... Read more »