A record of stardust, quietly accumulating.
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Quantum mechanics is said to have begun on 14 December 1900. But Max Planck did not think he had opened a door — for him, chopping energy into pieces was a last resort, not a conclusion. Part one of a five-part series on the old quantum theory.
Science HistoryIBM claims a 'verifiable' quantum advantage with 70 logical qubits, Google put reinforcement learning in charge of error correction, and Microsoft/Quantinuum drove logical error rates down to 0.001%. Lining up three very different kinds of 2026 progress to ask what quantum computing actually still needs.
Quantum ComputingGoogle and Xcel Energy chose an iron-based battery, not lithium-ion, for a record-setting grid storage project in Minnesota. As lithium-ion dominates short daily cycles, why does a battery built to run for four straight days matter? A look at the efficiency-versus-cost tradeoffs reshaping how grid batteries specialize in 2026.
Climate TechA New Hampshire man lived 271 days without dialysis after receiving a genetically engineered pig kidney — a record before the organ was ultimately removed. Comparing heavily edited US pig kidneys with China's simpler six-edit approach, this piece traces the real barrier facing pig-to-human organ transplants.
MedicineMIT Technology Review named mechanistic interpretability one of its Breakthrough Technologies of 2026. Work at Anthropic and Google DeepMind is starting to reveal what happens inside large language models once dismissed as black boxes — from circuits that plan a poem's rhyme in advance to chains of reasoning explainable by as few as 200 neurons.
AITSMC has begun mass-producing 2-nanometer chips while Samsung struggles with yield, and Japan's Rapidus aims to start production in late 2027. A look at the frontier of chip miniaturization — and the 3D stacking that may come next.
Semiconductors