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. The $400 million machine powering the future of chipmaking It’s a bit of a schlep to get to the top of ASML’s newest machine. It’s about the size of a double-decker…

23 June 2026

Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine.  It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the ground, it looks like a…

23 June 2026

India is home to about 60% of the world’s wild Asian elephants, and around 80% of the animals’ habitat lies outside protected areas, according to the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change. That brings people and wildlife into close contact, and clashes can turn lethal: There have been some 3,000 human casualties in the…

23 June 2026

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic’s latest feud with the US government, here’s a recap: In April the company said it had built an AI model called Mythos…

22 June 2026

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. Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel —Niall Firth I’m currently around 1,000 feet beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I’m increasingly…

22 June 2026

It’s cold, it’s very, very noisy, and—if I can be quite honest with you—I’m not feeling super relaxed. I’m currently around 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I am increasingly aware of the pressure from millions of tons of seawater just above my…

22 June 2026

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. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck…

19 June 2026

The Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade. The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing…

19 June 2026

This week, I covered the story of Casey Harrell—a man with ALS who is “the first power user” of a brain implant, according to the researchers who worked with him. Harrell is paralyzed and unable to speak coherently without the device. He has now spent almost three years using a brain-computer interface (BCI) that enables…

19 June 2026

There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement. Like a lot…

19 June 2026