There’s a certain false sense of security that results from selecting “delete.” The file is no longer visible. The folder is empty. The desktop appears tidy. Every single one of those files is still perfectly intact on a hard drive somewhere in a storage room, a box by the printer, or a recycling bin, just waiting for someone with the right resources and the right incentive to retrieve them. This vulnerability isn’t hypothetical. Which?, a UK computing magazine, once purchased eight computers on eBay and recovered 22,000 deleted files from them, including passwords, customer information, logins, and private correspondence. Everything.…
Author: Melissa Hogan
Melissa Hogan
Melissa Hogan is the Senior Editor at Temporaer, and quite possibly the person on the internet who has thought the most about what happens to your data when a hard disk drive fails. She is a self-described storage hardware obsessive — the kind of person who reads NVMe specification documents for fun, tracks NAND flash fab yield rates with genuine emotional investment, and has strong, considered opinions about why QLC cells are misunderstood by mainstream tech media. She came to technology writing the way many of the best specialists do: not through a newsroom, but through an obsession that simply refused to stay quiet.Melissa, a stay-at-home mother, is an example of what the technology industry frequently undervalues: the serious, self-made expert who exists entirely outside of the institutional pipeline. She developed her technological expertise solely through self-directed learning, practical hardware experimentation, and an extraordinary appetite for technical documentation. She doesn't have a degree in journalism or experience in corporate technology, but what she brings to her editorial work at Temporaer is something more uncommon: a sincere, unfulfilled passion for how computers store, retrieve, and safeguard data, along with the patience to fully comprehend it and the ability to articulate it.
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Common Sense Media, a California-based nonprofit best known for rating kid-friendly films and apps, sent proposals to executives at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic at some point in recent months. According to several people familiar with the discussions and documents Politico was able to obtain, the pitch was straightforward: pay $10 million annually for ten years to assist in funding a new institute that would evaluate the risks AI technologies pose to children. Over the entire period, that amounts to $100 million per company. Contributing businesses would receive a seat on a Technical Advisory Council in exchange, which would have a…
Early in 2014, a young Sam Altman entered the small Redmond, Washington office of Helion Energy while carrying textbooks on nuclear fusion. At the time, the business was a research operation, cautious and incremental like most deep-science startups are when they’re still attempting to establish the fundamentals of physics. Altman stayed there for a few days. Helion was moving more quickly after he departed. He made a $9.5 million investment a year later. He contributed an additional $375 million by 2021. Around the same time, Altman was co-founding OpenAI, and the relationship between those two bets—on fusion and AI—was not…
A BBC correspondent sat with his eyes closed in a soundproofed booth at Sussex University’s Centre for Consciousness Science, watching geometric patterns bloom and change in colors he described as vivid, neon, and completely his own. Strobe lights pulsed around him. Nothing as dramatic as machine sentience was being tested by the experiment’s researchers. They were attempting to comprehend the true nature of human consciousness—that is, how the brain creates inner experience from an electrical signal. However, it is inextricably linked to what is taking place concurrently in datacenters all over the world, which is why they are asking that…
Researchers have done something that was practically forbidden in their own field in a lab at the Cavendish, an old Victorian-era physics building at the University of Cambridge where generations of scientists have made discoveries that rewrote textbooks. A substance that doesn’t conduct electricity was subjected to electrical current. And it was successful. Not in theory. Not in a model. generating light in a physical apparatus. light that is capable of penetrating human tissue. The study, which was published in Nature in December 2025, details what the researchers refer to as a new family of LEDs made of insulating nanoparticles,…
When the people who created the measuring instruments begin to acknowledge that they aren’t functioning as intended, a certain kind of unease sets in. That’s about where climate science is at the moment. The fundamental physics hasn’t changed, so we’re not in a state of collapse, but rather in a moment of real, unsettling uncertainty that the most cautious voices in the field are no longer keeping to themselves. When NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt publicly states that “our predictions failed quite dramatically for the specifics of 2023,” it’s not a casual acknowledgement. One of the…
In early April, fertilizer sacks were still being unloaded from cargo ships at the port of Lianyungang on China’s eastern Jiangsu coast. This scene appeared almost ordinary in comparison to everything else going on. Rice farmers in Southeast Asia were calculating harvests they could no longer afford to grow, gas stations were closing, and airlines were halving their flights. Supply chains from the Gulf to the Mekong Delta were disrupted by the war in Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz. China was observing. Take caution. And from a position that is far more comfortable than most.…
Alex Preston made a choice that ended his association with the world’s most closely watched newspaper at some point during the editing process, between a first draft and a piece that was submitted. He reviewed a book using an AI tool. The tool discreetly copied text from a Guardian review of the same book and incorporated it into his draft without noticing it because it pulls from online sources in the same manner as these systems. Preston failed to notice it. His editors failed to notice it. Someone read it. Every freelancer in the industry should sit up straight after…
Imagine this: a person going through a difficult divorce is sitting at the kitchen table and entering their circumstances into ChatGPT late on a Tuesday night in a quiet home. They wish to comprehend their options, consider potential arguments from their spouse, and perhaps gain insight into the perspective of a judge. It has the feel of research. It seems intimate. In a hazy way, it feels like self-defense. According to a February 2026 federal court decision, what it really is could be a gift to the opposing side’s lawyer. United States v. Heppner, which was decided by the U.S.…
Research reports that are written by people who genuinely believe what they are saying exhibit a certain level of urgency. That quality can be found in the October 2025 UNC Innovate Carolina energy storage report. It’s 48 pages long, comprehensive without being evasive, and its main point is straightforward: before the window closes, North Carolina must move more quickly, build more carefully, and treat energy storage as an economic priority rather than a policy footnote. It remains to be seen if state lawmakers will pay attention. The report comes at a time when the American battery industry as a whole…