Features-and-investigations Articles

Tech Article

December 17, 2025

This Nobel Prize–winning chemist dreams of making water from thin air

Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of...

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Tech Article

December 16, 2025

AI materials discovery now needs to move into the real world

The microwave-size instrument at Lila Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doesn’t look all that different from others that I’ve seen in...

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Tech Article

December 16, 2025

AI coding is now everywhere. But not everyone is convinced.

Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly...

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Tech Article

October 16, 2025

The race to make the perfect baby is creating an ethical mess

Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so...

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Tech Article

October 15, 2025

The quest to find out how our bodies react to extreme temperatures

It’s the 25th of June and I’m shivering in my lab-issued underwear in Fort Worth, Texas. Libby Cowgill, an anthropologist in a furry parka, has...

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Tech Article

October 14, 2025

How aging clocks can help us understand why we age—and if we can reverse it

Be honest: Have you ever looked up someone from your childhood on social media with the sole intention of seeing how they’ve aged? One of my...

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Tech Article

September 30, 2025

Scientists can see Earth’s permafrost thawing from space

Something is rotten in the city of Nunapitchuk. In recent years, a crack has formed in the middle of a house. Sewage has leached into the earth. Soil...

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Tech Article

August 26, 2025

How these two brothers became go-to experts on America’s “mystery drone” invasion

On a Friday evening last December, every tier of US law enforcement - federal, state, and local - was dispatched to the US Army Natick Soldier...

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Tech Article

August 21, 2025

On the ground in Ukraine’s largest Starlink repair shop

Oleh Kovalskyy thinks that Starlink terminals are built as if someone assembled them with their feet. Or perhaps with their hands behind their back....

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Tech Article

August 19, 2025

How churches use data and AI as engines of surveillance

On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby - unaware they’ve just passed...

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Tech Article

August 13, 2025

Why Trump’s “golden dome” missile defense idea is another ripped straight from the movies

In 1940, a fresh-faced Ronald Reagan starred as US Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft in Murder in the Air, an action film centered on a fictional...

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