Author: Taylor Lowery

Imagine a physical loan officer’s desk in 1962, with a map of the city tacked to the wall behind it, some neighborhoods marked in red marker, and the implicit knowledge that applications from those areas would not be accepted, regardless of the applicant’s financial situation. Redlining was eventually outlawed. It is regarded as one of the most significant and intentional instances of housing discrimination in American history, a methodical way to keep Black families from accumulating wealth for future generations through homeownership. It was intended to be abolished by the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1968.…

One of the most bizarre intelligence coups in recent memory was quietly hailed by law enforcement organizations worldwide in 2021. Under the pretense that the phones provided true end-to-end protection, the FBI had been running a phony encrypted phone platform dubbed ANOM for a number of years, distributing the devices through criminal networks. They didn’t. All communications went via FBI servers. By the time the operation came to an end, it had resulted in arrests in over a dozen nations and the seizure of cash, guns, and drugs in amounts that made headlines for weeks. Practically speaking, the operation was…

Watch what happens when you sit in any university library, the kind with long wooden tables, the soft hum of air conditioning, and a sign near the entrance telling students to turn off their phones. Nearly every table will have someone pick up their phone within ten minutes, unlock it, take a quick look, and then put it back down. Sometimes they don’t seem to read anything at all. The gesture has become so reflexive that the person performing it frequently doesn’t seem to be aware of the decision they just made, which is part of what makes it intriguing.…

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…