Author: Taylor Lowery

On a weekday morning, the cafés in Paris’s 9th arrondissement appear just as they always have: zinc countertops, espresso machines hissing, and people reading on computers with the distinctly focused expression of someone working on something. What’s operating on some of those laptops has changed. A generation of engineers who spent years at Meta in Menlo Park or Google in Mountain View have returned to Europe, bringing with them a very specific frustration and an increasingly specific plan. These engineers can be found in the offices scattered throughout this neighborhood and extending into the larger Parisian tech district. They are…

A small group of scientists is working on what would have seemed like a fringe experiment ten years ago in a shared laboratory space in Oakland, California. It’s the kind of place with mismatched chairs, whiteboards covered in molecular diagrams, and the faint hum of centrifuges running in the adjacent room. They are working to create an open-source, streamlined process for producing insulin. Not a fresh insulin. Not one with a patent. One that could be replicated from published instructions by a neighborhood pharmacy or a medical cooperative in a developing nation without having to pay license fees to any…

The picture doesn’t quite register the first time you see it. Inside what appears to be a clear plastic shopping bag floats a pink lamb fetus with its eyes closed. tubes that enter its umbilical cord. Somewhere off-frame, a monitor is blinking. The Philadelphia researchers who captured that image in 2017 referred to it as a “biobag,” a term engineers use when they are unsure whether they want the public to feel reassured or uneasy. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that they selected a word more akin to packaging than medicine. The artificial womb ceased to be a thought…

When I first heard a working biologist explain CRISPR, she made it sound almost uninteresting. She claimed that bacteria that had spent three and a half billion years battling viruses had given them a pair of molecular scissors. The odd thing about the sentence was how she shrugged. As though rewriting a living cell’s code were now a typical Tuesday in the laboratory. In a sense, that informality tells the whole story. Just ten years have passed since CRISPR-Cas9 entered the mainstream of biology, and already it is found in university freezers, agricultural startups, biotech pipelines, and at least one…

An engineer is probably watching a phone somewhere in Mountain View do something it was never intended to do, like open a delivery service, read a grocery list from the Notes app, and silently construct a cart while the user is doing something completely different. In a sense, Google’s new Android push is based entirely on that modest, unglamorous moment. It doesn’t have the feel of a new product. It feels more like a slow rewrite of what a phone actually is. Google released Gemini Intelligence earlier this month. According to the company, this feature set will transform Android devices…

Months later, the Tokyo-Akihabara stores continue to stack Switch 2 boxes close to the front window in the same manner that bakeries showcase freshly baked goods, as though the console were a perishable item that might become outdated by Tuesday. It hasn’t. Parents, salarymen on lunch break, and the occasional foreign visitor attempting to figure out the local prices are still in line outside Bic Camera on a Saturday afternoon, nearly a year after the company’s launch. The whole thing has a subtle stubbornness to it. The Switch 2 isn’t meant to be this popular, at least not in comparison…

A technician wearing a hairnet removes a tray of pink, marbled tissue from a bioreactor somewhere outside of Rehovot in an Israeli industrial park with a subtle stainless steel and yeast odor. It appears to be beef. It cooks similarly to beef. The people investing a lot of money in this odd new venture claim that it may eventually render the slaughterhouse obsolete. That’s the pitch, at least. It’s another matter entirely whether the pitch reflects reality. In less than ten years, the concept of “clean meat”—flesh produced from cultured animal cells without the animal—has evolved from a sci-fi curiosity…

You’ll notice something strange if you walk into any mid-tier electronics store in Rawalpindi or Lahore these days. The price tags have subtly increased, but the shelves still appear familiar—the same Xiaomis, Samsungs, and shiny display units under fluorescent light. When you ask why, shopkeepers shrug. Some point the finger at “PTA.” Some murmur about memory chips. Some simply say, “What to do, sir? Everything is going up,” with a smile. In the center of this peculiar moment is the Samsung Galaxy A57. With its 6.67-inch OLED screen, Exynos 1680 processor, 5,000mAh battery, and 45W charging, it appears to be…

On a Monday in early March, the press release arrived. It was written in Cupertino’s signature tone, which is clear, self-assured, and slightly exuberant. Inside is a brand-new iPad Air M4. Memory of twelve gigabytes. a starting price of $599, which hasn’t changed from the previous year despite a memory market that has been brutal by all accounts. It seems like just another standard spec bump on paper. However, the longer you sit with it, the stranger it becomes. The iPad Air now uses the same silicon that Apple was selling inside MacBook Pros two years ago, which is something…

You can sense that the internet is changing somewhere between the time a VPN connection drops in Shanghai and the moment a German user clicks past another cookie banner. It was once. It pretended to be, at least. The web marketed itself as a single, expansive commons for the majority of the late 1990s and early 2000s, where a teenager in Karachi and a librarian in Helsinki were, in a thin but genuine sense, neighbors. Now, and not by coincidence, that promise is eroding. Governments have realized that the internet is power, something that the rest of us took years…