Some billionaires are attention-seekers who attend conferences, participate in interviews, and appear to be incapable of withstanding the lure of a camera. Among them was Leonid Radvinsky. For the majority of his adult life, the Ukrainian-American businessman who surreptitiously created one of the most profitable and contentious platforms on the…

A spiral timeline depicting the entire history of human technology was created by Max Roser at Our World in Data. Stone tools at the center mark the beginning of it 3.4 million years ago. The spiral’s rings each stand for 200,000 years. Before our ancestors discovered how to control fire…

On April 3, 2024, a tiny capsule created by a business that most people were unaware of plummeted from the sky over the Utah desert, landing in a dust cloud. There were crystals grown in microgravity that may find use in semiconductors, fiber optic cables with optical qualities impossible to…

Nowadays, you can see them if you go outside on a clear night practically anywhere on Earth, such as a field in rural Saskatchewan, a beach in southern Portugal, or a plateau in the Chilean Atacama where some of the most potent telescopes in the world are aimed at the…

It’s difficult to miss the scope of what’s being constructed when you drive through Sriperumbudur, a dusty industrial town in Tamil Nadu about forty kilometers outside Chennai. With worker dorms still under construction in early 2024, cranes moving against the flat southern sky, and the entire operation humming with a…

It took roughly three weeks for someone to attempt to list stocks on a blockchain at any significant scale. By early May 2021, German and British regulators had had enough of Binance’s April 2021 introduction of tokenized stocks. The item disappeared. Before it collapsed spectacularly in late 2022, FTX was…

Someone declares data science dead every few years. Before the floor completely vanishes, a new tool appears, job titles change, and Reddit threads are filled with people questioning whether they should switch careers. It occurred with the introduction of AutoML. It occurred when basic analyst work began to be replaced…

Observing a disease that can be prevented develops a certain kind of dread. It’s more like watching water seep through a crack you thought you’d sealed years ago than a sudden, sharp alarm. That’s the sentiment that pervades Utah at the moment, as measles has been spreading through unvaccinated communities…

It begins softly. A little weariness that lasts longer than it should. Perhaps a change in bowel habits that is bothersome but not concerning. A 32-year-old is half-listening to a nurse calling names while scrolling through their phone in a packed clinic waiting area. They are not thinking about cancer.…

The lithium pools in Chile’s Atacama Desert glow an artificial turquoise at sunrise. They appear almost tranquil from a distance, with geometric shapes spanning an endless, arid plain. The air feels brittle up close. Underfoot, the ground cracks. Other than the faint hum of pumps extracting brine from deep underground,…

From the outside, the Federal Reserve building in Washington doesn’t appear particularly striking. Quiet lawns, symmetry, marble. However, decisions are being purposefully postponed behind closed doors and carefully crafted statements. Policymakers characterize the approach as straightforward: wait, observe, then take action. It makes sense. It frequently is. However, there is…

The trading floor’s appearance has changed. Numbers continue to flicker and screens continue to glow, but the atmosphere feels different—less certain, more disjointed. In addition to earnings reports, traders also look at bond yields, oil prices, AI spending projections, and even the geopolitical headlines that are scrolling in the corner.…