When an image model generates a portrait from the phrase “a lighthouse on a cliff in the fog”, it does not draw anything. There are no strokes, no brushes, no edges placed one after anothe...
Every time you type into a chatbot, you have switched on a machine that does not “remember” your conversation the way a person does. It does not re-read it: it recomputes it. And that reco...
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...
Your phone has known where it is for years thanks to satellites, mobile masts and Wi-Fi networks. But none of those systems can answer a far humbler question that, for many jobs, is far more useful: h...
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 —...
The machine much of the industry had written off still stores almost everything nobody needs to read right now. In 2026, with NAND memory prices having doubled and orders for 30 and 40 terabyte drives...
In an electric car today, the part that can catch fire is a liquid. Not the lithium, not the electrodes: the electrolyte, that blend of organic solvents — ethylene and dimethyl carbonate, among others...
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...
Deleting a file on a modern computer is instantaneous: no noise, no waiting. Inside, though, almost nothing is actually erased. What happens is closer to crossing a line out of an address book than to...
For thirty years, proving who you are has meant sharing a secret with the server. You know the password, the server keeps a scrambled copy and the two are compared. The problem is not the password its...
When we rent a machine in the cloud, trust rests on a contractual promise: the provider says it does not look at our data. For decades that promise had no technical backing. The hypervisor — the softw...
An attacker does not need to write to your memory to change what is inside it. Reading it hard, fast and always in the same place is enough. That is the whole idea behind Rowhammer, a physical defect ...
Every time you ask something of a chatbot, a semantic search engine or a shop’s recommender, there is no keyword matching going on underneath. Your sentence has been turned into a vector: a list...
Training a large language model does not stall for lack of compute. In a training cluster thousands of graphics cards spend a good part of their time waiting for each other, and the culprit is almost ...
On 28 April 2025, at 12:33 in the afternoon, the Iberian peninsula went dark. It was not a neighbourhood outage or a one-hour cut: it was the complete collapse of the electricity system of continental...
A 51.2 Tbps network switch, the kind that fills any AI training hall, burns more energy moving bits from one chip to another than deciding where they should go. And the cost is not in the switching, b...
From 2 kW per rack to 130 kW: why air stopped being enough and how 45 °C water became critical infrastructure for AI....
There is an icon that showed up this year in the default chat app of millions of phones and that almost nobody looks at twice: a small padlock with the word “Encrypted” next to it. Behind ...
In October 2026 anyone can produce at home a photograph of a place that does not exist, a video of a politician saying what he never said, or the image of a document with an impeccable seal. The indus...
For twenty years, every generation of Wi-Fi has been sold with the same number: megabits per second. 802.11n promised 600 Mbps, 802.11ac reached 3.5 Gbps, Wi-Fi 6 landed around 9.6 and Wi-Fi 7 sat in ...
When we upload a file to the cloud, the server typically has to open it to process it. To search for a word in a document, to train a model, or to calculate an average, the machine needs to read the d...
For nearly two decades, consumer wireless audio has lived inside an architecture designed for something else: Bluetooth Classic, conceived in the early 2000s to replace the cable on a hands-free heads...
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...
A high-end processor is no longer a single piece of silicon. A few years ago, manufacturers stopped trying to fit everything into one die — the slice of wafer already cut and ready to be package...
In a modern server there are two resources growing at different speeds. Cores multiply with every generation; memory bandwidth per core does not. That mismatch is the well-known memory wall: the proce...
There is a figure the industry has been repeating for years and that rarely makes the headlines: around 70% of the serious vulnerabilities Microsoft patches every month share the same origin. They are...
Ultra Wideband does not send more data or reach further: it measures time to picosecond precision. This is how the radio that unlocks your car before you touch the door works....
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...
There is a silent threat that doesn’t unfold in real time, but slowly: the “harvest now, decrypt later” strategy. An attacker can be storing all the encrypted traffic flowing across ...
Look at the board of a modern graphics card through the right magnifier and you will not find a single piece of silicon next to the processor, but five or six smaller ones bonded to it. They are the H...