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The article highlights the ongoing push to miniaturize computing hardware and the urgent climate risks posed by thawing permafrost.
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The Download: computing’s next leap and permafrost’s climate threat
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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How far can we push computing? On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, he argued. We simply had not built the tools yet. He was right, and for decades, computing took us into that space almost for free, as transistors repeatedly halved in size. But that easy descent has now stalled. Today, the industry is increasingly turning to brute force, building ever-bigger data centers to boost performance. Yet the laws of physics leave plenty of room for improvement. Here’s how researchers are exploring ways to unlock the next leap in computing. —Volkan Gurses This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine: The Impossible issue. Subscribe now to read it in full. It’s also part of MIT Technology Review Explains, our series exploring the ideas shaping technology. Read more from the series. Three things you should know about permafrost How much do you know about permafrost? Maybe, like me, you’ve been aware that this layer of frozen soil is thawing, that it’s important in the global puzzle of climate change … and that’s about the extent of it. The great news for both of us is that my colleague James Temple just helicoptered into Alaska’s forests to report on the fires threatening permafrost and their complicated potential climate effects. Here are three things I took away from his reporting. —Casey Crownhart This story is from The Spark, our weekly climate tech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday. Roundtables: a conversation with the creator of AI-designed viruses Can AI design new life forms? In 2025, Stanford University PhD student Samuel King offered a preliminary answer by using a generative AI
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