Technology

Why the US and Europe could lose the race for fusion energy

July 8, 2025
Fusion energy holds the potential to shift a geopolitical landscape that is currently configured around fossil fuels. Harnessing fusion will deliver the energy resilience, security, and abundance needed for all modern industrial and service sectors. But these benefits will be controlled by the nation that leads in both developing the complex supply chains required and…

How scientists are trying to use AI to unlock the human mind 

July 8, 2025
Today’s AI landscape is defined by the ways in which neural networks are unlike human brains. A toddler learns how to communicate effectively with only a thousand calories a day and regular conversation; meanwhile, tech companies are reopening nuclear power plants, polluting marginalized communities, and pirating terabytes of books in order to train and run…

Inside the most dangerous asteroid hunt ever

July 8, 2025
If you were told that the odds of something were 3.1%, it really wouldn’t seem like much. But for the people charged with protecting our planet, it was huge.  On February 18, astronomers determined that a 130- to 300-foot-long asteroid had a 3.1% chance of crashing into Earth in 2032. Never had an asteroid of…

Producing tangible business benefits from modern iPaaS solutions

July 7, 2025
When a historic UK-based retailer set out to modernize its IT environment, it was wrestling with systems that had grown organically for more than 175 years. Prior digital transformation efforts had resulted in a patchwork of hundreds of integration flows spanning cloud, on-premises systems, and third-party vendors, all communicating across multiple protocols.  The company needed…

The digital future of industrial and operational work

July 7, 2025
Digital transformation has long been a boardroom buzzword—shorthand for ambitious, often abstract visions of modernization. But today, digital technologies are no longer simply concepts in glossy consultancy decks and on corporate campuses; they’re also being embedded directly into factory floors, logistics hubs, and other mission-critical, frontline environments. This evolution is playing out across sectors: Field…

The Download: China’s winning at advanced manufacturing, and a potential TikTok sale

July 7, 2025
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. The latest threat from the rise of Chinese manufacturing In 2013, a trio of academics showed convincing evidence that increased trade with China beginning in the early 2000s and the resulting flood of…

The Download: India’s AI independence, and predicting future epidemics

July 4, 2025
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. Inside India’s scramble for AI independence Despite its status as a global tech hub, India lags far behind the likes of the US and China when it comes to homegrown AI. That gap…

Inside India’s scramble for AI independence

July 4, 2025
In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time.  “I thought:…

The Download: AI agents hype, and Google’s electricity plans

July 3, 2025
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. Don’t let hype about AI agents get ahead of reality —Yoav Shoham is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and cofounder of AI21 Labs. At Google’s I/O 2025 event in May, the company…

Google’s electricity demand is skyrocketing

July 3, 2025
We got two big pieces of energy news from Google this week. The company announced that it’s signed an agreement to purchase electricity from a fusion company’s forthcoming first power plant. Google also released its latest environmental report, which shows that its energy use from data centers has doubled since 2020. Taken together, these two…