The Download: creating the perfect baby, and carbon removal’s lofty promises

October 16, 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 race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess An emerging field of science is seeking to use cell analysis to predict what kind of a person an embryo might…

Meet the man building a starter kit for civilization

October 16, 2025
You live in a house you designed and built yourself. You rely on the sun for power, heat your home with a woodstove, and farm your own fish and vegetables. The year is 2025.  This is the life of Marcin Jakubowski, the 53-year-old founder of Open Source Ecology, an open collaborative of engineers, producers, and…

The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess

October 16, 2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of a grain of sand pulled from a powdery white Caribbean beach, contains the…