Author: Taylor Lowery

On a Tuesday morning, a Waymo car is parked outside a San Francisco coffee shop with the doors closed and no one inside, waiting. A woman passes it without giving it a second glance. Its bumper is cut by a delivery cyclist. A child on the pavement looks at it for a second before moving on. Ten years ago, the driverless car that was sitting there would have seemed like science fiction to most people. However, for some reason, the sector that created it is not rejoicing. It’s adjusting. No single product launch or regulatory approval is the most obvious…

Around the world, a tiny but significant ritual is currently taking place on phones and laptops. Apps that appear almost embarrassingly simple are being opened by users; there is no “suggested for you” feature, no infinite scroll, and no notification badges shaped like tiny fires. Just a simple list of articles from websites that the user selected, arranged from newest to oldest. Nothing dramatic. No algorithm. Just information, delivered like a letter used to. This is RSS, which is quietly making one of the most intriguing comebacks in recent tech history after being written off for years as a relic.…

Nikolay Dokholyan, a researcher at the University of Virginia, has been working on a problem that has silently defeated pharmaceutical science for decades. Finding molecules that appear promising on paper is the issue. There are many of those produced by the industry. The issue is that those molecules frequently don’t fit when they eventually come into contact with the proteins they are meant to target inside a real human body because the proteins have changed shape, much like a lock does when it is pressed against. The molecule was intended to be a statue. When it got there, something was…

On a typical Tuesday morning in a government office, a cybersecurity investigator discovered something that shouldn’t have been there. a software malfunction. brief, silent, and limited to a few devices. The kind of anomaly that most people would forget by lunch and write off as a glitch. However, it turned out that the crash was not a glitch at all, and the devices in question belonged to government officials, journalists, political operatives, and technology workers. It was proof of an intrusion. The phones were compromised. In a sense, the pockets in which their owners kept them had turned into open…

When an executive says something like “we continue to see massive opportunity ahead” during a major tech company’s earnings call, the analysts on the other end of the line write it down, nod, and then return to their spreadsheets to try and figure out when exactly that opportunity will show up in the numbers. In a single quarter, Microsoft spent $34.9 billion on AI infrastructure and data centers. In 2025 alone, Meta has committed up to $72 billion, and its CEO has publicly acknowledged that the company is operating its core business in a “compute-starved state.” Alphabet increased its projected…

Imagine a conference room in Nairobi with fluorescent lights, a blue-lit projector, and a group of African tech executives settling into their chairs. Harrison Li, the chief solutions architect for Huawei Cloud in sub-Saharan Africa, is seated at the front of the room. His afternoon topic is DeepSeek, a Chinese-built AI model that, he claims, can match Silicon Valley’s top producers for a fraction of the price, operating on hardware that doesn’t require a second mortgage. Everyone in the room is listening. Quiet and easy to ignore, that scene serves as an excellent example of where China’s AI aspirations are…

On a busy afternoon in Lagos or Kampala, you’ll notice something outside practically every mobile phone store that the global smartphone industry would prefer not to focus on for too long. The phones being advertised on billboards are not the ones that people are actually purchasing, the ones that are being passed from hand to hand across scratched glass countertops. They are used. These phones have features. They are anything that is affordable enough to bring home. For years, it has been clear that the majority of Africans cannot afford what the industry sells. What’s new is that a serious…

When you stroll through some Singaporean neighborhoods at night, there’s a subtle difference that takes some time to identify. Before you realize they have changed, the streetlights react. The timing of traffic signal adjustments doesn’t seem haphazard. In a subtle, hard-to-express way, the city appears to be listening. It used to sound like science fiction. It’s only Tuesday more and more. As a result of a recent government initiative, Singapore has developed over 100 generative AI solutions that are integrated into its urban operations. It is far ahead of practically every other city on the planet, and the difference between…

When leadership is aware that the decision was probably the right one but the optics were clearly poor, a certain type of corporate unease takes hold. “To try so hard to do the right thing and get so absolutely, like, personally crushed for it — is really painful,” said Sam Altman, a tech CEO, during an all-hands meeting in early March. The statement felt surprisingly raw. Those in charge of billion-dollar businesses don’t often say things like that. It’s difficult to tell if it was calculated, sincere, or somewhere in between. However, it ended up in a room full of…

Even though Elon Musk’s Colossus data center in southwest Memphis is enormous—more than a dozen football fields crammed together—it’s not the first thing you notice when you walk up to it. It’s the odor. Before you even see the structure, a slight chemical itch slides into your throat. Natural gas and soot. The unseen aftermath of industrial ambition at full speed. Memphis Community Against Pollution’s director, KeShaun Pearson, saw it right away. He’s been observing it for some time now. That building is at the heart of something far bigger than a technological boom, as are thousands of similar structures…