The Download: computing’s next leap and permafrost’s climate threat

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, he argued. We simply had not built the tools yet.

He was right, and for decades, computing took us into that space almost for free, as transistors repeatedly halved in size. But that easy descent has now stalled. Today, the industry is increasingly turning to brute force, building ever-bigger data centers to boost performance.

Yet the laws of physics leave plenty of room for improvement.

Here’s how researchers are exploring ways to unlock the next leap in computing.

This story is from the latest edition of our print magazine: The Impossible issue. …