Admiral Hugh Sinclair and the Case for Putting Him Back
Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair ran MI6 from 1923 to 1939, the longest tenure in the service's history. He built the signals intelligence apparatus that…
28 min read
Category
Technology
The ENIAC
The Moore School had been one of the leading electrical engineering schools in the United States since the 1920s.…
22 min read
The Haber-Bosch Process
On a July morning in 1909, in a small laboratory at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe, a German physical chemist and his assistant opened a…
16 min read
The First Cell Phone Call
On the morning of April 3, 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper walked out of a midtown Manhattan hotel onto Sixth Avenue, lifted…
18 min read
The Terafab Project
On the afternoon of 21 March 2026, in a press release issued from the Giga Texas site north of Austin, Elon Musk formally announced…
19 min read
The First Web Page
On the morning of 12 November 1990, in an office on the third floor of Building 2 of CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear…
20 min read
The Hardware Behind M3
MiniMax M3 is a 428-billion-parameter open-weights vision-and-language model from the Shanghai lab Moonshot AI. Roughly 23 billion parameters are active per token, drawn from…
20 min read
The Semafor Two-Sided Story
A digital-media startup founded in October 2022 by Ben Smith and Justin B. Smith with $25 million in initial venture funding has, in less…
20 min read
Why Rest of World Matters
A small American nonprofit publication, founded in 2019 by Sophie Schmidt with personal investment of more than $6 million from a family trust, has,…
25 min read
Why Bloomberg for AI News
A stand-alone newsroom with more than 2,700 journalists worldwide has, in the years since 2017, built what may be the deepest and most consistent…
24 min read
The Importance of Taiwan
A small island of 23 million people off the coast of China, smaller than Switzerland and with fewer inhabitants than Texas, hosts the only…
24 min read
The City That Made the Microchip
A coastal city in northwestern Taiwan, smaller than Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the place where more than ten per cent of the world’s semiconductors are…
17 min read
How Philips Built the Chip Industry
Two of the most strategically important companies in the world — ASML, the Dutch monopoly on the lithography machines that pattern every advanced chip,…
16 min read
ASML and the Lithography Monopoly
For nearly thirty years, a single company in the southern Netherlands has been working on a single machine: the extreme ultraviolet lithography scanner. Today,…
22 min read
The Surgical Robot Story
The surgical robot, in 2024, is used in more than 2 million operations worldwide each year, most of them prostatectomies and gynaecological procedures performed…
15 min read
The Cochlear Implant Story
The cochlear implant is the first device to replace a human sense. More than a million people worldwide can now hear because of it.…
14 min read
The Medical Imaging Story
Every year, more than four billion medical imaging examinations are performed worldwide. The technologies — X-ray, CT, MRI, ultrasound, PET — have, in less…
15 min read
The Self Driving Car Story
In October 2024, the first robotaxis without a safety driver began commercial operation in several US cities. The technology, more than fifteen years in…
16 min read
The Smartphone Camera Story
The smartphone camera, in less than twenty years, has become the most-used camera in human history. More photographs are now taken every two days…
18 min read
The Modern Display Story
The display is the most-used interface in modern technology. The average person in a developed country looks at a screen for more than seven…
18 min read
Modern Solar Cell Engineering
A modern solar cell converts more than a quarter of the sunlight that hits it into electricity. The cell is a few hundred micrometres…
17 min read
Lithium-Ion and Beyond
The lithium-ion battery is the most important energy-storage technology of the twenty-first century. It powers the phones in our pockets, the laptops on our…
17 min read
Mobile Phones to Smartphones
In 2024, there are more than 8.6 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, more than the number of people on Earth. The mobile phone, in less…
15 min read
The Satellite Internet Story
In 2024, more than 7,000 active satellites are orbiting the Earth, more than half of them part of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. The LEO satellite…
15 min read