Technology

Inexpensive seafloor-hopping submersibles could stoke deep-sea science—and mining

May 1, 2026
Smack dab between Australia and South America, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research vessel Rainier is currently on a mission to map more than 8,000 square nautical miles of the Pacific seafloor in search of critical mineral deposits. But it isn’t doing it alone; for a month starting this week, it will…

Trump’s mass firing just dealt another blow to American science

May 1, 2026
This past week delivered another gut punch for science in the US. This time, the target was the National Science Foundation—a federal agency that funds major research projects to the tune of around $9 billion. The foundation’s efforts were overseen by a board of 22 prominent scientists. On Friday last week, they were all fired.…

Exclusive eBook: Inside the stealthy startup that pitched brainless human clones

April 30, 2026
The ultimate plan to live forever is a brand new body. This subscriber-only eBook explores R3 Bio, a small startup that has pitched a startling and ethically charged vision for “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies. by Antonio Regalado March 20, 2026 Related Stories: Access all subscriber-only eBooks:

This startup’s new mechanistic interpretability tool lets you debug LLMs

April 30, 2026
The San Francisco–based startup Goodfire just released a new tool, called Silico, that lets researchers and engineers peer inside an AI model and adjust its parameters—the settings that determine a model’s behavior—during training. This could give model makers more fine-grained control over how this technology is built than was once thought possible. Goodfire claims Silico…

The Download: the North Pole’s future and humanoid data

April 30, 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. Digging for clues about the North Pole’s past In the past, getting to the North Pole involved a treacherous trip through ice many meters thick. But last year, a research vessel…

The Download: storing nuclear waste and orchestrating agents

April 29, 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. It’s time to make a plan for nuclear waste Today, nuclear energy enjoys rare support across the political spectrum. Public approval has spiked, and Big Tech is throwing money around to…