With most of the habitable planet now devoted to livestock, technology may finally have some answers — The horse was no match for technology. There used to be up to 200,000 horses working in cities like New York City. Then they were gone, suddenly replaced by remarkable new inventions like cars, planes and electricity. But this raises a question. If we could replace horsepower with nuclear power…

Call them fickle if you want, but the first digital generation knows what they want and they will have the money to buy it — Generation Z were the first kids born into the age of social media and mobile phones. Now they’re growing up, starting careers and earning incomes that are expected to total an eye-watering $33 trillion by 2030. For those keeping count, that will add up to a quarter of global GDP.

Previous downturns have been worse, and there’s a mountain of capital waiting to jump back into the market — There’s no escaping the headlines; this is a bad news economy. The fallout from the pandemic, shaky supply chains, slumping stocks, and red-hot inflation are contributing to a perfect storm of uncertainty that could last for years. It’s inevitable that startups are feeling the impact as well. Their struggle for…

Technology has radically changed how we work, now it’s transforming where we live — When Sridhar Vembu waved goodbye to his family and left the small farming village where he was born, the teenager joined millions of others across India who were migrating to the country’s cities, seeking the education and jobs that could help them escape generations of grinding poverty. Vembu would go…

A startup pushes back against cancel culture — One of the weirdest tech success stories today is the conversation app Clubhouse. On the surface, it appears to be a glorified conference call with several people talking while a small audience listens. Sometimes the sound quality is so poor I can’t hear what they are saying. At other times…

The prehistoric wonder was discovered in Siberia after being entombed in ice for tens of thousands of years — At the same time NASA and SpaceX are racing into the future on Mars and beyond, other scientists have been camped out in the frozen Siberian wilderness, painstakingly digging into our past. Their latest discovery is unprecedented. A tuft of coarse reddish hair sticking out of the ice led them…

When you listen to someone’s voice online, are you sure it’s a real person? Because there’s a chance it might be Descript. — Have you seen this Arthur C. Clarke quote about new technology? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It’s what people thought when they heard their first radio or experienced their first elevator. It’s also how I felt the other day when I stumbled across something called Descript.

Critics say the cryptocurrency is an energy glutton that produces too much CO2, but they couldn’t be more wrong — Some people really don’t like Bitcoin. People like the Bloomberg columnist Lionel Laurent. Last week he called it a predatory hoax on desperate people. Worse, he sniffed, this speculative gold rush is consuming more energy than entire countries. He’s right about the second part. The computerized calculations that are used…

Google and Facebook have never been more powerful, but thanks to new competitors it’s never been easier to leave. — We made a deal with Big Tech. They are allowed to vacuum up our personal data and become billionaires, and in return we get cool things to do on the Internet. It has been a great deal for them. Google alone has raked in $1 trillion since 2000, while Mark…