Author: Taylor Lowery

The notion that the secret to more effective artificial intelligence was always hidden inside the skull of a macaque monkey is subtly unnerving. Not figuratively, but literally, biologically, awaiting mapping and replication. In doing so, a group of researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory may have unintentionally opened a door that the field was unaware existed. They have now shrunk an AI vision model to the size of an email attachment. The figures are almost humorous. There were 60 million variables in the initial AI model used to comprehend how primates perceive their surroundings. That figure decreased to about 10,000…

Around eleven o’clock at night, practically everyone’s phone reaches that anxious eight percent. The half-dead portable charger at the bottom of a bag and the frantic search for a cable are so commonplace that we hardly notice them as issues anymore. However, a group of scientists is working on a project in a research lab at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea that would make that nightly ritual seem almost charming. They are developing a battery that should theoretically never require charging. The key component of this work is a betavoltaic cell, a tiny nuclear-powered…

For me, it began as a persistent feeling during last year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. A small company was discreetly showcasing a phone interface without any apps on a busy demo floor, amidst booths selling foldable screens and smartwatches with satellite connectivity. No icon grid. There are no attention-grabbing notification badges. All you had was a text bar and an AI that genuinely seemed to know what you wanted. Most of the crowd went by it. However, it remained. Months later, that uneasy feeling reappeared when Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, declared on stage that he wanted to “break…

In Estonia, there is a tiny courtroom where the bench is empty. Not a robe. No time to reflect. A face wrinkled with decades of legal experience, but no obvious weighing of the evidence. An algorithm receives a dispute from a litigant, such as a contractor who never completed the job or a landlord who refuses to return a security deposit, reads it, processes it, and makes a decision. It takes several minutes. The system works well. And more and more people are using that efficiency as an example. Proponents of AI adjudication may be correct in one specific regard:…

The energy in any Shenzhen electronics market on a Tuesday morning is hard to put into words. Customers handle phones like they’re feeling for a pulse, vendors quickly unbox devices, and in the background, a screen cycles through demonstrations of AI assistants that can respond in real time, switch between voice and text, and translate on the spot. It is not referred to as revolutionary. It’s only Tuesday. Perhaps more than any funding announcement or benchmark, this normalcy is what makes China’s position in the global AI race truly hard to ignore. In Western tech circles, the prevailing narrative for…

Watching a phone manufacturer announce a new record for display brightness has an almost theatrical quality. The numbers are quoted in every tech outlet, the press release is sent out, and somewhere in a conference room with a glass front, someone is probably quite happy with themselves. In this regard, Samsung has excelled. Over the years, the company has pushed screen brightness figures so aggressively that the numbers have started to feel less like engineering milestones and more like a game of one-upmanship with no obvious finish line. When the Galaxy S22 series debuted with peak brightness numbers that were…

When the machines take over the night shift, a certain kind of silence descends upon a factory floor. No coffee breaks, no complaining, and no paperwork about overtime. Simply the sound of something that never tires. You get a similar feeling when you walk into nearly any large data center that is currently being constructed, whether it is in rural Nevada, Texas, or Virginia. Even with their hard hats and arguments over lunch orders, construction crews are still very human. However, what they are constructing is completely different. a type of infrastructure that is difficult to turn off once turned…

The first thing you notice when you walk into a busy Saturday afternoon electronics store is the subtle chemical freshness of brand-new gadgets that are stacked floor to ceiling and shrink-wrapped. Individuals are constantly improving. However, the previous generation of those same devices is being burned in an open field somewhere on the other side of the globe, in a location that the majority of consumers will never visit. The smoke is thick and black. There are no masks on the employees. This is the reality of what the industry kindly refers to as “e-waste”—the abandoned phones, laptops, televisions, and…

A mobile machine is developing feelings for blackberry bushes in a West Virginia University greenhouse. It is wingless. It’s not buzzing. It gently opens the flowers by rolling slowly between rows of plants and extending a small arm with a polyurethane brush on its tip. It’s called BrambleBee, and it may be the most subtly unsettling technological advancement in agriculture at the moment—not because it’s scary, but just because it exists. The fact that engineers were driven to construct it reveals something crucial about our current state of affairs. It’s difficult to look at the numbers without feeling depressed because…

You’ll notice something in practically every contemporary speech therapy clinic that would have seemed odd ten years ago. In addition to the standard picture cards and flash sheets, there are wearable devices attached to wrists, tablets supported on stands, and software that appears to react to a child’s face before any words are spoken. The instruments have evolved. And the results have followed, gradually but unmistakably. According to research published in Brain Sciences in 2025, over 1% of children worldwide suffer from autism spectrum disorder. Communication issues are at the core of the many difficulties it presents, not for every…