When something you thought was fixed turns out to be moving, a certain kind of uneasiness takes hold. For more than 20 years, Saturn, that ringed, far-off giant of a planet, has been doing just that to scientists. Depending on how researchers measured it, its rotation rate—which ought to be as steady as a heartbeat—kept seeming to change. For years, planetary scientists struggled with that conflict. I t was illogical. Furthermore, in science, things that don’t make sense usually indicate one of two things: either the universe is acting in a way that is far stranger than anticipated, or someone…
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
When an industry’s most fundamental input—the thing that every single operation depends on—suddenly becomes both costly and uncertain, a certain kind of quiet dread spreads throughout the sector. The airline industry currently finds itself in that situation. Staring at a fuel gauge that keeps falling while the price per gallon keeps rising instead of fumbling over passenger demand or getting caught up in labor disputes. Even though most people haven’t yet made the connection, travelers are already feeling the effects of the war in Iran. CategoryDetailsTopicIran War impact on global aviation fuel supplyKey EventU.S. and Israel launched military strikes on…
Antarctica has an almost unnerving quality. At first glance, it appears to be a place that time has long since abandoned, frozen, motionless, and unchanging. But for millions of years, something has been moving, draining, refilling, and carving beneath all that ice and cold, dark water without anyone noticing. Now scientists are observing. Furthermore, it is challenging to fully comprehend what they are discovering. 332 submarine canyon networks carved into the seafloor beneath Antarctic waters have been cataloged by a study published in the journal Marine Geology, which is five times more than anyone had previously discovered. Over 4,000 meters…
Millions of people simultaneously send money to friends, punch in orders on food delivery apps, and tap their cards at checkout counters during a busy Friday afternoon. Visa takes care of that. At a rate of 65,000 transactions per second, the infrastructure operates silently and covertly, humming along like a highway that no one bothers to look at because traffic is moving. For years, it seemed more idealistic than practical to think that blockchain could ever replace or even significantly challenge that level of throughput. Bitcoin’s maximum transaction rate was seven transactions per second. It’s not a network for payments.…
In the history of technology, there comes a time when a tool ceases to function as a tool. The precise moment it occurs is difficult to determine. You don’t see a warning light or hear a click. One day, you discover that the device you created is performing an action you never instructed it to perform, and it’s doing it pretty well. For artificial intelligence, that time seems to be now. And most people don’t realize how quickly it’s coming. TopicAI Unpredictability & Emergent Behavior in Large Language ModelsKey TermEmergent capabilities — complex behaviors arising spontaneously in AI systems beyond…
Somewhere in a Stanford bioengineering lab is a petri dish. It glows when exposed to ultraviolet light; some cells are red, some are green, and the colors change based on which way a tiny DNA segment is pointing. It sounds almost ornamental. It is not at all like that. What Jerome Bonnet, Pakpoom Subsoontorn, and Drew Endy have created in that dish has the potential to fundamentally alter how people store information. They have developed a living cell-based data storage medium that can reliably store, erase, and rewrite a binary digit that has been encoded directly into a microorganism’s DNA.…
When a scientist says something that no one quite knows how to dispute, a certain kind of silence falls over the room. It is more akin to the silence of recalibration than the silence of agreement. That appears to be the current state of cosmology following a number of discoveries that, when considered collectively, point to something genuinely unsettling: the universe might not be the neat, homogeneous structure that a century of physics had assumed it to be. The working assumption for the majority of the history of modern astronomy has been that the universe appears essentially the same in…
Standing inside a mid-sized telecom facility outside of Phoenix, there’s a moment when the sound—a faint, persistent whir coming from rows of storage units that, if you didn’t know better, you’d assume were relics—hits you before the sight. These are not artifacts. These 10,000 RPM hard drives are working hard. The kind of work that many believed, only a few years ago, would be fully under the purview of solid state by now. For the better part of ten years, spinning disks have been portrayed as slow, brittle, power-hungry dinosaurs that need to be replaced. They would be completed by…
Someone once sat in front of a keyboard in a room somewhere, most likely in the basement of a university building, with fluorescent lights and a water-stained ceiling tile in the corner. They were genuinely unable to tell if they were speaking to a machine or a human. On the surface, that moment seems unremarkable, but it is at the heart of one of the longest and most contentious debates in scientific history. In 1950, it began. It’s not over yet. Instead of publishing “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” as a triumphant proclamation, Alan Turing did so almost as a means…
The strangeness of it all dawns on you somewhere between trying on a pair of glasses and having them whisper instructions into your ear. Meta has made it much more difficult to ignore that moment, which is coming sooner than most people anticipated. The business best known for Facebook and Instagram has been discreetly developing what could prove to be one of the most clever long-term strategies in consumer electronics: smart glasses that mimic ordinary glasses. Not bulky headphones. CategoryDetailsCompanyMeta Platforms Inc.Product LineRay-Ban Meta Smart Glasses (Prescription Series)Eyewear PartnerEssilorLuxottica SANew Models CodenamesScriber & BlazerStyles AvailableRectangular and Rounded framesDistribution ChannelTraditional prescription…