The antique clocks in Harvard’s Jefferson Laboratory tick with a comforting assurance. Despite the anxious graduate students pacing below them, their metal hands sweep forward. In that corridor, time seems to be steady. Physicists in neighboring offices, however, are wondering if there is any such sense of forward motion. According to a recent line of research linked to Harvard theorists and collaborators, time may be something that observers themselves create rather than an outside force that moves us forward. At first, it sounds philosophical, almost like a late-night argument in a dorm room. However, the concept stems from the oldest…
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.
Read More
On a dreary London morning, commuters browse through their phones with a recognizable half-focus, their thumbs moving more quickly than their conscious minds. Before the train arrives at the next stop, a coffee suggestion appears. Uncannily, a news alert coincides with a discussion they had the previous evening. It’s convenient. It’s a little unsettling, too. The idea that our gadgets are no longer merely reacting to us is becoming more widespread. They’re waiting for us. According to Google’s most recent research on artificial intelligence, forecasting human decisions is now a problem that is being steadily resolved through engineering rather than…
It’s surprising how quiet the CERN control room is. Physicists lean over laptops, waiting for collisions that occur too quickly to see and too small to imagine, as rows of screens glow in gentle blues and greens. Winter haze covers the Jura Mountains outside. The idea that the universe might be concealing something much more bizarre than new particles is becoming more prevalent inside. The Higgs boson has been confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider, which has been smashing protons together at near-light speed for more than ten years. This has strengthened the Standard Model, which is physics’ most trustworthy…
The internet ceases to feel like a metaphor the first time you enter a real data center’s “cold aisle.” Your throat will get dry from the sharpness of the air. A constant, mechanical wind is pushed by fans. In tiny, uncaring rhythms, LEDs blink. Behind the locked cabinets, behind the sleek, contemporary branding about AI and the cloud, there’s an older sound: racks of spinning disks performing the unglamorous task of preventing the evaporation of everyone’s forgotten corporate files, logs, backups, security footage, and photos. SSDs seem to have already won because they are clearly superior in areas that people…
A faint chime was the first indication that something had changed. When someone said, “Hey Copilot,” a laptop on a Shoreditch café table lit up its microphone icon for a moment before a soothing, artificial voice answered. No new window opened. The app didn’t launch. It appeared as though the operating system itself was listening. Windows has been a world of menus, folders, and click paths that are learned through practice for many years. Now, that landscape is changing—not through a radical redesign, but rather through minor details where AI infiltrates everyday tasks. Microsoft’s Copilot integration subtly alters Windows’ behavior…
Nowadays, the term “lost hard drives” sounds like a line from an office comedy—an IT accident, a sheepish email, a desperate search beneath desks. However, “lost” used to mean something completely different at Los Alamos: a few pounds of glass and metal that might contain knowledge that never truly goes away, even when politicians usher in a new era. The transition from filing cabinets to spinning platters, from guarded vaults to the uncomfortable, human spaces between procedures, gives the impression that the Cold War didn’t really end, but rather altered the way that things were stored. According to the reference…
At the end of a long conference day, the idea sounds like a dare: “Sure, sure—store data in DNA, the stuff in your cells, why not?” The dare begins to feel less like a joke and more like a pressure valve when you consider the direction the storage industry is already taking—AI models proliferating, compliance regulations becoming more stringent, businesses hoarding everything “just in case.” It seems like we’re getting to the point where data saving isn’t the most difficult aspect. Maintaining, cooling, migrating, paying for, and keeping it readable is. The scene in the reference material from the Georgia…
Outside the sleepy town of Blönduós, where the wind seems to be louder than the traffic, the Borealis Data Center is located next to a horse farm. The silence vanishes as soon as you enter the server hall. Like airplane engines, fans roar. Your face is pressed against warm air. From continents away, rows of machines process artificial intelligence queries while glowing in the harsh light. It has the feel of a mechanical climate system that simultaneously breathes data and heat, rather than a building. Technicians here have been wheeling in new hardware made for AI workloads and disassembling racks…
Engineers once argued over whether the Start button should glow when hovered on a rainy afternoon in Redmond. Now, that degree of obsession seems far away. When Windows 11 first came out, the Start menu was positioned in the middle of the taskbar. It had lost its animated Live Tiles and was now surrounded by neat rows of icons. At first glance, it appeared serene, even graceful. However, it wasn’t until millions of users started clicking that the change’s weight became apparent. It seemed like a sensible choice. In addition to consuming battery life and exposing information that few people…
A hard drive is one of those uncommon devices that seems normal until you realize what it’s really used for. Usually ignored, it hums inside a beige office PC or is stacked in a data center rack where the air has a subtle scent of cable plastic and warm dust. Then the room becomes slightly quieter as someone utters the number aloud, the number that causes even seasoned engineers to pause in the middle of their sentences. The gap is the number. The read/write head of a contemporary HDD does not scuff the platter like a record needle. It flies.…