Technology

The snow gods: How a couple of ski bums built the internet’s best weather app

March 26, 2026
The best snow-forecasting app for skiers and snowboarders isn’t from any of the federally funded weather services. Nor from any of the big-name brands. It’s an independent app startup that leverages government data, its own AI models, and decades of alpine-life experience to offer better snow (and soon avalanche) predictions than anything else out there.…

Are high gas prices good news for EVs? It’s complicated.

March 26, 2026
I live in a dense city with plentiful public transportation options and limited parking, so I don’t own a car. I’m often utterly clueless about the current price of gasoline. But as the conflict in Iran has escalated, fossil-fuel prices have been on a roller-coaster, and I’ve started paying attention. In the US, average gas…

Roundtables: The Next Era of Space Exploration

March 25, 2026
Listen to the session or watch below Whether it’s the race to find life on Mars, the campaign to outsmart killer asteroids, or the quest to make the moon a permanent home to astronauts, scientists’ efforts in space can tell us more about where humanity is headed. This subscriber-only discussion examines the progress and possibilities…

Why this battery company is pivoting to AI

March 25, 2026
Qichao Hu doesn’t mince words about how he sees the state of the battery industry. “Almost every Western battery company has either died or is going to die. It’s kind of the reality,” he says. Hu is the CEO of SES AI, a Massachusetts-based battery company. It once had aims of making huge amounts of…

This startup wants to change how mathematicians do math

March 25, 2026
Axiom Math, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, has released a free new AI tool for mathematicians, designed to discover mathematical patterns that could unlock solutions to long-standing problems. The tool, called Axplorer, is a redesign of an existing one called PatternBoost that François Charton, now a research scientist at Axiom, co-developed in 2024…

The Download: reawakening frozen brains, and the AI Hype Index returns

March 25, 2026
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. This scientist rewarmed and studied pieces of his friend’s cryopreserved brain  L. Stephen Coles’s brain sits in a vat at a storage facility in Arizona. It has been held there at a temperature…

Agentic commerce runs on truth and context

March 25, 2026
Imagine telling a digital agent, “Use my points and book a family trip to Italy. Keep it within budget, pick hotels we’ve liked before, and handle the details.” Instead of returning a list of links, the agent assembles an itinerary and executes the purchase. That shift, from assistance to execution, is what makes agentic AI…