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. This company’s plans to deploy space mirrors could jeopardize the night sky for many A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the…

21 August 2026

A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the night sky for many more people than intended, according to a new study. Later this year, the US company Reflect Orbital plans to launch a test satellite called Eärendil-1 that will extend an 18-by-18-meter mirror in orbit. The…

21 August 2026

When the biotech company Insilico Medicine used its computer models to propose a promising drug for pulmonary fibrosis, it enthusiastically claimed in a press release that the molecule had been “discovered by” its generative AI platform. Insilico leads a pack of companies using AI to rapidly come up with drug ideas humans might never think…

21 August 2026

“Daddy?” Theo curled against my side in bed. “Where do words go when they die?” I’d orchestrated the bedtime routine flawlessly: bath (taken), teeth (brushed), potty (tinkled), books (two), song (one, poorly sung), and snuggle (his chin on my second rib). Now was the moment when our son’s eyelids were supposed to flutter gently closed,…

21 August 2026

“Runaway” AI, “rogue” agents, and “autonomous” actors—the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly “superhuman” systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations…

20 August 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. Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis Sometime in the late 2000s, six-year-old Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car in Thailand when she saw a…

20 August 2026

There’s a hunt for new sources of hydrogen, and the gas (or at least the right conditions to make it) could be hiding beneath our feet. Hydrogen can be used as a fuel in everything from large trucks to planes to steelmaking. It’s often hailed as a climate solution because when burned, it produces water…

20 August 2026

Each day, an airline transports tens of thousands of passengers on hundreds of flights. Often these are not straightforward point-to-point routes, with passengers requiring multiple connections. The airline can consider potentially hundreds of variables to price each of these journeys: demand, season, time of day, current events, global markets, and competitor airline activity to name…

20 August 2026

Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mountains pass by out the window. She was just six years old but was about to be hit by an adult-size realization. “They were just quarried…

20 August 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. AI’s recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all The AI industry’s boldest promise right now is that AI will soon improve itself, with almost no need for human oversight.…

19 August 2026