ScienceExplainer
Why tech companies want to put data centres in space
AI's hunger for electricity is running into the limits of power grids. Orbit offers constant sunlight, and a long list of engineering problems.
Section
Science
Discoveries in biology, space and physics, and the tools accelerating them.
Google's Project Suncatcher will put four AI chips in orbit on 1 October
A fridge-sized prototype satellite carrying Google TPUs launches on a SpaceX Falcon 9, the first test of Google's idea for solar-powered data centres in space.
ScienceExplainer
How CRISPR works, in five minutes
It started as a bacterial immune system and became the most important gene-editing tool in biology. Here's the idea, without the jargon.
Claude flags a new CRISPR-like enzyme system as Anthropic launches a life sciences lab
950 AI agents searched through 1.9 billion protein clusters in 21 hours and surfaced 'ART', a phage system nobody had described. What it does is still unknown.
ScienceExplainer
Quantum computing, explained without the hype
What qubits are, why errors are the whole problem, and which jobs quantum computers might eventually do better than any supercomputer.