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A new ion-based quantum computer makes error correction simpler

Helios is noteworthy for its qubits’ precision, says Rajibul Islam, a physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who is not affiliated with Quantinuum. The computer’s qubit error rates are low... Read more »

The Download: the solar geoengineering race, and future gazing with the The Simpsons

—David Keith is the professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and Daniele Visioni is an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University Last week, an American-Israeli... Read more »

From vibe coding to context engineering: 2025 in software development

Taken together, there’s a clear signal of the direction of travel in software engineering and even AI more broadly. After years of the industry assuming progress in AI is all about scale... Read more »

Why the for-profit race into solar geoengineering is bad for science and public trust

Many people already distrust the idea of engineering the atmosphere—at whichever scale—to address climate change, fearing negative side effects, inequitable impacts on different parts of the world, or the prospect that a... Read more »

The Download: the AGI myth, and US/China AI competition

—Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor  Are you feeling it? I hear it’s close: two years, five years—maybe next year! And I hear it’s going to solve our biggest problems in ways... Read more »

The State of AI: Is China about to win the race? 

Yet those same constraints have pushed Chinese companies toward a different playbook: pooling compute, optimizing efficiency, and releasing open-weight models. DeepSeek-V3’s training run, for example, used just 2.6 million GPU-hours—far below the... Read more »

The Download: gene-edited babies, and cleaning up copper

The news: A West Coast biotech entrepreneur says he’s secured $30 million to form a public-benefit company to study how to safely create genetically edited babies, marking the largest known investment into... Read more »

This startup wants to clean up the copper industry

This is far from the first attempt to use a water-based, chemical approach to processing copper. Today, some copper ore is processed with acid, for example, and Ceibo, a startup based in... Read more »

Here’s the latest company planning for gene-edited babies

Harrinton’s venture was incorporated in Delaware in May 2025,under the name Preventive Medicine PBC. As a public-benefit corporation, it is organized to put its public mission above profits. “If our research shows... Read more »

The Download: down the Mandela effect rabbit hole, and the promise of a vaccine for colds

Quick question: Does the Fruit of the Loom logo feature a cornucopia? Many of us have been wearing the company’s T-shirts for decades, and yet the question of whether there is a... Read more »