In the comparatively protected waters of King George Sound off the southern coast of Western Australia, close to the port town of Albany, a 22-meter steel device spent six months doing what wave energy engineers have been attempting to do consistently for decades: reliably producing electricity from ocean swells over an extended period of time and generating enough data to determine whether the thing might actually work at scale. On May 1, 2025, the UWA M4 project hoisted its prototype out of the ocean following 300 hours of power generation and 130 days of operation. It included three terabytes of…
Author: Taylor Lowery
Taylor Lowery
Taylor Lowery is a senior editor at glofiish.com, a technology writer, and a true circuit enthusiast. She works in the tech sector, so she does more than just cover it. Taylor works for a smartphone company during the day, which gives her a firsthand look at how gadgets are designed, manufactured, promoted, and ultimately placed in people's hands.Her writing is unique because of this insider viewpoint. Taylor makes the technical connections that other writers overlook, whether she's dissecting the silicon architecture of a new flagship chipset, analyzing the implications of a significant Android update for actual users, or tracking the effects of a new AI model announcement across the mobile industry.Her editorial focus covers every aspect of the current tech stack, including smartphone software and hardware, artificial intelligence (from large language models and generative tools to on-device inference), and the broader innovation trends influencing the direction of the consumer technology sector. She is especially passionate about the nexus of AI and mobile computing, which she feels is still in its most exciting early stages.
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Anthropic researchers are conducting experiments in a building in the Mission District of San Francisco to determine whether the AI systems they are developing are being truthful. Not in the conversational sense, where the model is generating accurate information, but in a more profound and unfamiliar sense, where the model is acting consistently regardless of whether it believes it is being observed. It sounds almost like a philosophical question. It yielded a tangible, unpleasant outcome in December 2024. The study, “Alignment Faking in Large Language Models,” detailed a number of carefully monitored Claude 3 Opus experiments. The researchers discovered that…
A picture of the E-Ten exhibit at Computex 2007 in Taipei can be seen somewhere. On an illuminated display stand, a group of Glofi-like phones with HSDPA connectivity, built-in GPS, a touchscreen, and Windows Mobile running underneath appeared remarkably capable for their time. Standing close by, engineers were pleased with what they had created. A corporation that had spent twenty-two years systematically working its way up from a Chinese-language input system for MS-DOS to something that appeared to be genuinely competitive with the worldwide market at the time. Acer made their offer eight months later. Before the following Computex, the…
One of the locations on Earth where water is most conspicuously absent is the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. For years at a time, certain meteorological stations there do not record any discernible rainfall. The dirt has the hue of an aged bone. The air itself seems devoid of moisture. Nevertheless, throughout the course of the last two years, a baking sheet-sized gadget on the desert floor has been producing drinking water on a number of test days. Not from a desalination plant that uses the ocean, not from a well, nor from a river. from above. from the same…
On July 19, 2024, at 1:09 AM Eastern time, CrowdStrike started distributing a software update to 8.5 million Windows computers that were using the company’s Falcon cybersecurity sensor. By early morning, banks were unable to process transactions, hospitals were rerouting patients, airports were grounded, and broadcasters had gone dark. A faulty content configuration file was included in the upgrade. The devices it came into contact with crashed into blue screens that required human intervention to recover. Later estimates put the losses to Fortune 500 businesses alone at $5.4 billion. Insurance claims came in swiftly. The insurers subsequently began closely examining…
When you drive through central Illinois’ corn region on a warm September morning, you’ll recognize the scene: expansive, level fields that reach to the horizon, with combines going through the rows. The people within such devices are becoming less and less visible from the road. The cab is vacant on certain farms. A farmer watching a tablet from the farmhouse kitchen is keeping an eye on the tractor as it moves independently, guided by GPS to sub-inch accuracy. Work is being done in the field. There is no one seated in it. Most people outside of agriculture are unaware of…
The sound of simultaneous translation earpieces, the long tables with name placards and water carafes, and a certain muffled solemnity are all characteristics of Geneva’s conference rooms where important international negotiations take place. They have been used for discussions about pandemic preparedness, climate change, and arms control. They are now being used for something that did not exist as a diplomatic category five years ago: attempting to reach a consensus on whether and how to regulate artificial intelligence before it acquires powers for which there is no trustworthy way to limit it. The International AI Safety Report, which was published…
The Northern Territory of Australia experiences irregular rainfall. A year’s worth of precipitation can be dumped in a few weeks during its intense, concentrated wet seasons, after which it virtually vanishes. For decades, conventional weather models have failed to accurately predict when it will arrive, how much it will fall, and how it will spread across a landscape that changes greatly over short distances. Numerical projections based on global physics equations cannot accurately reflect the patterns because they are too local, too complicated, and too sensitive to the Indo-Pacific ocean-atmosphere interactions. This is one of the reasons agricultural scientists who…
Anduril Industries has been constructing what it refers to as a lattice of interconnected autonomous systems—drones, sensors, and ground vehicles—in a warehouse complex in Costa Mesa, California. These systems are intended to exchange information and make tactical decisions without waiting for a signal to travel to a server and back. Based in part on its architecture, the business was awarded a $250 million AFWERX contract in 2024. It’s not solving an exotic problem. Since the conflict in Ukraine painfully revealed how reliant contemporary military technology has become on connectivity that an adversary with strong electronic warfare capabilities can destroy in…
The ceramic gadget resembles a multi-armed starfish and is roughly the size of a dinner plate. Before it is deployed, it contains juvenile corals that have been grown in aquaculture tanks, sometimes for months before anyone trusts them to the ocean. It is composed of white alumina ceramic and has a rough surface to give young corals something to hold. Work is wasted if one of these is dropped in the wrong place. The coral won’t survive if you drop it on bare rock with inadequate light, poor water flow, excessive silt, or an area where crown-of-thorns starfish are active.…