Author: Taylor Lowery

Off the coast of Dominica, in the deep water east of the island where sperm whales gather in multigenerational family units, researchers float on the surface and lower hydrophones into the dark below. The water is warm. The clicking starts almost immediately — short, rhythmic sequences called codas, each lasting under a second, exchanged between animals that can weigh up to 60 tons. It has the quality of conversation. Listening to the recordings, even without any training, you get that sense — something is being communicated, passed back and forth, acknowledged. But what exactly has remained one of biology’s most…

Anyone who has traveled on a ferry, walked in the mountains, or driven on a rural section of highway is familiar with a certain frustration: the moment the signal bars vanish and the phone turns into an expensive brick. Although they cover a large area, cellular towers don’t cover it all. The regions they overlook—referred to as “dead zones” rather than “spots” or “coverage gaps”—have always been a fixed aspect of mobile connectivity. Now, the smartphone industry is discreetly trying to get rid of that capability completely. When terrestrial infrastructure is absent, the strategy involves connecting consumer phones directly to…

The sound inside a big data center is steady and tactile, like a wall of fast-moving fans; it’s the kind of noise that reaches your chest instead of simply your ears. The air is dry and chilly. Server rack rows vanish into the distance. The infrastructure is unglamorous. However, the air cooling architecture that characterized data centers for decades is no longer sufficient when you’re running the AI workloads that AWS is currently doing at scale. The chips are just too hot. The density of heat produced by an AI GPU is too high for conventional air systems. Modern AI…

It’s difficult to overlook the rotating sensor atop a Waymo robotaxi. It like a hockey puck that has been bolted to the roof, and in a sense, that is exactly what it is: a mechanical drum filled with revolving mirrors that emit laser pulses in all directions to create a three-dimensional map of the surroundings. It functions. In fact, quite well. However, it looks ridiculous on anything that needs to be sold in a showroom, costs thousands of dollars per unit, and breaks down under constant vibration. That is a serious issue. Because of this, self-driving cars are currently mostly…

Compare a smartphone from this year with one from three years ago. The hardware appears almost exactly the same, with the same camera bump on the back, the same basic size, and the same glass slab. However, the device’s actual functionality has changed, and this is more related to what’s going on inside the chip than it is to megapixels or screen refresh rates. Artificial intelligence is reinventing the smartphone from the inside out, starting with the processor. The most obvious change is in photography, yet the term “photography” is becoming less accurate to describe what these technologies accomplish. The…

Cupertino frequently shows up late to events and acts as though it never happened. That’s about where Apple is now, two years after making a big announcement about AI features in 2024 that, for the most part, didn’t materialize on schedule. Though it’s still reasonable to question whether different equates to better, this year feels different. Demonstrated at WWDC in June, the latest iteration of Siri is more than just an Apple-branded chatbot. It’s being designed to do things like draft emails, retrieve old hotel confirmations from a Gmail thread, and recommend items to bring to a friend’s potluck after…

It’s noteworthy that China’s tech discourse is currently experiencing a certain kind of silence. A few years ago, Chinese researchers, philosophers, and the occasional tech executive were still willing to voice unsettling concerns about AI, such as the loss of human relevance, job losses, and runaway systems. Most of those voices are now silent. Not because the anxieties vanished. Because it no longer felt safe, helpful, or even welcome to say them aloud. It is easy to understand why. Beijing has made a significant political investment in AI as the catalyst for its upcoming economic phase. By 2027, the “AI…

From the outside, it appears to be a minor skirmish taking place in American statehouses. No demonstrations outside biotech labs, no tractors obstructing roads. Meat produced from animal cells in steel bioreactors rather than raised on pasture is prohibited by these bills, which were quietly signed. First place went to Florida. In an attempt to “save our steaks,” Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law prohibiting the sale of lab-grown meat in his state in May 2024. In a matter of weeks, Alabama followed. More than a dozen states currently limit the labeling of cultivated meat products, with Arizona and Tennessee…

There’s a particular kind of unease that settles in when software starts making decisions you never approved. Not a crash, not an error message — just a quiet action taken somewhere in the background, discovered later, almost by accident. That’s the feeling increasingly surrounding AI agents, the next generation of artificial intelligence tools that don’t wait to be asked. For the past few years, AI felt like a very capable assistant. You typed a prompt, got an answer, and the system went dormant until you needed it again. Agents are different. They’re built to monitor, plan, and act continuously, often…

Knowing that a digital version of your city is already existing in a server room that most of us will never see gives you a strange sense of comfort. Not in a symbolic sense. Block by block, pipe by pipe, traffic light by traffic light, literally. These digital twins are subtly changing how cities choose what to construct, what to repair, and what to be afraid of. The concept had nothing to do with urban planning. When engineers needed a way to model spacecraft systems without endangering the real hardware, NASA developed it in the late 1960s. They would be…