The concept of storing energy in sand has an almost poetic quality. It is ubiquitous, old, and unglamorous. The amount of material beneath your feet is so abundant that it almost seems offensive when you walk on any beach or in any desert. Google, a business that has never exactly struggled with ambition, is now discreetly testing the use of sand as a thermal battery, storing excess renewable energy as heat and releasing it back into grids when the sun sets or the wind stops. CategoryDetailsCompanyGoogle LLC (Alphabet Inc. subsidiary)Founded1998 — Menlo Park, CaliforniaCEOSundar PichaiHeadquartersMountain View, California, USACore FocusSearch, Cloud,…
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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On the outskirts of Kankaanpää, a small town in southwest Finland with just over 11,000 residents, is a steel silo that holds 100 tonnes of sand. It doesn’t appear to be much. It is 23 feet high and 13 feet wide, and if you didn’t know what was inside, you might think it was just regular industrial storage. However, the events taking place within that silo are anything but typical. That sand is quietly storing enough energy to heat about a hundred homes while being heated to temperatures as high as 500 degrees Celsius. CategoryDetailsCompany NamePolar Night EnergyFounded2021, FinlandHeadquartersFinland (Operations…
Jiajun Wu, an MIT PhD candidate, likes to use a thought experiment to explain why machines still have trouble with something that kids take for granted. Without hesitation, a child who has never seen a pink elephant can describe one; the elephant from memory and the color from experience are instantly combined to create something new. This is not possible for a computer that has been trained on millions of gray elephant photos. It has no color separate from the animal. Other than the color, it has no animals. “The ability to generalize and recognize something you’ve never seen before,”…
Every tech company has a point in its history when it outgrows its initial concept. That moment appears to be coming at precisely the right time for nothing. The London-based startup is reportedly working covertly on a pair of AI-powered smart glasses that will be released sometime in the first half of 2027, according to a Bloomberg report. Nothing refused to say anything. For the time being, this falls somewhere between rumor and roadmap, which is actually a very intriguing place to start. FieldDetailCompany nameNothing Technology LimitedFounded2020Founder & CEOCarl Pei (co-founder of OnePlus)HeadquartersLondon, United KingdomValuation$1.3 billion (unicorn status, 2024)Latest funding$200 million…
Humanity has always had a tendency to feel both a little small and a little silly in deep space. Astronomers and physicists believe they have mapped the main categories of cosmic behavior, but then something happens that sends out a signal that defies all known models. This year, it happened once more—in a series of findings that have genuinely unsettled, intrigued, and, if you spend any time speaking with the scientists involved, quietly thrilled the scientific community. CategoryDetailEvent NameGRB 250702B — Longest Gamma-Ray Burst Ever RecordedDuration25,000 seconds (approximately seven hours)Detection Year2025Lead ResearcherEliza Neights, NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterDetection InstrumentGamma-ray Burst…
The morning after something like this, a tech company experiences a certain kind of silence. Not the quiet of serenity, but the quiet that precedes awkward questions being asked in cramped spaces. The entire internal source code of Claude Code was inadvertently released to the public npm registry on March 31, 2026, by Anthropic, the AI safety company that has spent years establishing a reputation as the calm, responsible voice in a careless industry. Not a hack. No outside interference. All it took to see 512,000 lines of proprietary TypeScript was a single missing line in a build configuration file.…
Apple hardly ever blinks. That’s just the way the business runs; it’s neither a compliment nor a criticism. For many years, the only option for getting security updates for your iPhone was to either accept the risk or update to the version that Apple recommended. No compromise, no exceptions, and no compromise. Therefore, it was worthwhile to pause and consider why Apple silently released an emergency update for iOS 18 devices in early April—devices that Apple had essentially stopped patching months earlier. CategoryDetailsTopicApple iOS 18 DarkSword Emergency Security PatchAffected SoftwareiOS 18.7.7 (Build 22H340)Threat NameDarkSword Exploit ChainThreat TypePrivilege escalation malware; no…
When you watch a machine move in a way that no human ever intended, a certain kind of strangeness sets in. Something rougher, more erratic, rather than the polished, well-planned motion of a Boston Dynamics video. Something that, despite being entirely composed of code and physics simulations, appears to be almost alive. Observing the alleged “walking metamachine” evokes that sensation. It’s also difficult to shake. A group of engineers bent over blueprints did not create the robot. It had actually grown. An AI system was given the task by a team of researchers, who essentially instructed it to solve a…
Every significant scientific narrative has a point at which it becomes apparent that the ground has changed—not figuratively, but literally beneath the foundations of what scientists believed to be settled. In physics, we might already be past that point. The experiment has been completed. The outcomes are in. Nobody really knows what to do with them, which is an uncomfortable fact. Physics relied on two significant discoveries for the majority of the 20th century. Atoms, particles, and the invisible machinery of matter were all handled by quantum mechanics. Gravity, galaxies, the geometry of space, and time itself were all addressed…
Being informed that the day is shorter than it once was has a subtle unsettling quality. Not by hours or even seconds that you could feel, but by a millisecond or two that was taken away without your consent and only detected by devices that are more adept at measuring time than any human mind could ever be. But here we are, in a summer when the Earth is spinning a bit too quickly, and the scientists observing it are doing what they usually do when something doesn’t quite fit: comparing notes while trying not to appear alarmed. Three days…