Every time your phone syncs its clock, it is trusting a number the scientific community fixed in 1967: the duration of 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the radiation corresponding to the transition betwe...
For decades, connecting a phone to a satellite meant a dish, a suitcase and patience: big terminals, aimed by hand and extremely expensive. Over the last two years the industry has done the opposite —...
Tomorrow’s weather report looks like a blind promise, but it is not: it is the result of solving, over the whole atmosphere, the same physics equations that describe how a fluid moves. What sets...
A working satellite crosses the sky at 7.6 kilometres per second. Beside it, with no engine, no battery and nobody at the controls, travels a fragment of the upper stage of a rocket launched thirty ye...
There is a sentence that shows up every time the subject comes out: “a quantum computer tries every solution at once.” It is false, and understanding why it is false explains the real prob...
Every time your phone draws the blue dot on the map, there is no satellite looking at you. What exists is four atomic clocks in orbit keeping their own account of time and a receiver in your pocket th...
You open the maps app, and in under a second you know exactly where you are. The system that makes this possible does not depend on a giant antenna or your carrier: it depends on 31 satellites about 2...
Cold archiving is the industry’s awkward problem: data that must be kept for decades —medical records, satellite imagery, backups with legal value— is not consulted daily, yet cannot be deleted....
Have you ever stopped to think about how your phone knows exactly which street you are on, or how an app warns you about the traffic jam just as you reach the roundabout? Behind that small everyday mi...
When we think of computers, we imagine machines that process zeros and ones. Quantum computers do something very different: they work with tiny particles that can be in several states at once. It soun...
Imagine a source of energy that does not pollute, that barely generates waste and that could power entire cities with a minimal amount of fuel. It is not science fiction: it is nuclear fusion, the sam...