The Edge of the Cyber World See the latest
The steel industry isn’t exactly known for innovation. Very little has changed about purifying iron ore since the process was invented and commercialized in the 1850s. The majority of steelmakers melt solid iron ore at dizzyingly high temperatures inside blast furnaces, where the material reacts with gases to trigger chemical reactions that remove oxygen. It…
Yuancheng (Ryan) Lu is obsessed with aging. And with eyes. As he steps outside the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his aviator glasses darken automatically in the sun. Age-related blindness runs in his family. A great-aunt in China, the story goes, was killed crossing a road because she couldn’t see oncoming traffic. And Lu’s own…
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. Introducing our 35 Innovators Under 35 list for 2026 What will the next generation of science and technology look like? Our latest Innovators Under 35 list offers a glimpse. Every year,…
Throughout the history of the computer chip, engineers have treated waste heat as an inevitable cost of a calculation. Hannah Earley, however, thinks it’s a design choice. Earley, 31, is cofounder and chief technology officer of Vaire Computing, a startup building chips that recycle energy usually thrown away as heat—a strategy known as reversible computing.…
Danijar Hafner’s office in San Francisco’s SoMa district sits mostly empty. His brand-new startup is still in stealth mode and doesn’t even have its name on the door. On the day I visit, there’s only one other person there, and little in the way of furniture. But what it lacks in decor, it makes up…
Every programmer who has spent a decade at a keyboard eventually asks the same question: why does this key do that, and can I change it? The answer used to mean soldering irons and AVR datasheets. In 2026 it means picking a firmware. QMK, VIA, and ZMK are the three names that dominate every Reddit…
Dark mode looks trivial until you actually ship it. Toggle a class, flip some CSS variables, done — except your Next.js page flashes white for 40 milliseconds before hydration finishes, or your Nuxt app forgets the user’s choice on every route change. The gap between “add dark mode” and “add dark mode that doesn’t flicker,…
Eight months after hackers dumped Sony’s PlayStation 5 BootROM keys online, the console maker still has no fix, and by its own hardware design, it may never have one. The leak, first reported in early January 2026, exposed cryptographic keys baked directly into the read-only memory of the PS5’s system-on-chip. Because those keys sit in…
AWS rolled out Lambda MicroVMs in June 2026, and it changes the calculus for anyone building interactive, multi-tenant, or AI-agent workloads on serverless infrastructure. Instead of the stateless, sub-15-minute request-response model that has defined Lambda since 2014, MicroVMs give each user or job a dedicated, VM-isolated compute environment that can hold state for up to…
Nintendo wants $124.99 for a second Switch 2 dock. That price, more than a quarter of the console’s own retail cost, is why a crowded field of third-party challengers has spent the past year trying to build something cheaper without getting locked out by Nintendo’s firmware. The Genki Covert Dock 3, the JSAUX OmniCentro Charger…
