Explore the Technology section of The Pulse for insights into innovation, artificial intelligence and technologies shaping the future.
The film on the bench looks almost exactly like the plastic wrap around a deli sandwich. It is thin, faintly white, flexible enough to fold without…
Concrete dust on the asphalt is the first sign something went wrong. Then comes the freight, scattered across three lanes below the Houston Avenue overpass on…
The block sits on a table in Green Island, New York, and looks like rigid foam insulation. It is not fiberglass. It is not polystyrene. It…
Pull up a piece of old carpet and it looks like it should be simple to deal with. It is mostly fiber, often the same nylon…
The alley was quiet, the vehicle moving slowly, and the wooden pole had stood there for years without incident. Then a driverless taxi in Phoenix pressed…
The truck rolled east past Claremore on a Tuesday afternoon, an oversized load strapped to a flatbed trailer. It rode higher than the law allows. The…
The ship lost power about 12 nautical miles out, off the entrance to the Bay of Islands. Then it began to drift. Winds were running near…
Every day in America, roughly 55 million used diapers go into a trash bag. Nearly all of them end the same way, buried. A diaper is…
A pile of pale sawdust is one of the cheapest materials on any sawmill floor. Most of it gets burned for fuel. That burning releases carbon…
The fiber is spun in a laboratory, not by a spider. It is grown inside bacteria, drawn out of a protein solution, then pulled in a…
In the dark hours of a September night, a 656 foot car carrier cleared the Port of Brunswick, Georgia, and turned toward the open Atlantic. Inside…
The asphalt went first. A hole 33 feet across and close to 60 feet deep opened in a Rockdale street in southern Sydney, directly above the…
A glass bottle leaves a kitchen counter and goes into the recycling bin. The bin implies the material starts over somewhere else. Usually it does not.…
The ocean had been patient for more than a century. When the Cape Hatteras lighthouse was completed, the Atlantic was a comfortable 1,500 feet away. After…
For nine days, one stretch of Britain’s busiest express railway had no rails on it at all. Below the gap, a concrete box the length of…
On the afternoon of June 3, smoke began rising from a deck of a 600 foot ship moving through the North Pacific. The vessel was the…
A data center has three problems and the building is only one of them. It has to be cool, because every watt that goes into a…
There is a shovel hanging on a wall in Argentina. Blade up, handle down, flat against the plaster. No bracket. No hook. No screw. There is not…
A board that looks ordinary sits on a workbench in Frederick, Maryland. Run a hand along it and the grain feels normal, cool and smooth. Press…
Three chutes come off the end of the line, and three bunkers fill at once. Pale fiber fluff in the first. Dark plastic chip in the…
A cluster of derelict boats sat at Rhode Island marinas, hulls intact, going nowhere. Nobody wanted them. No ordinary recycler could melt them down or pull…
The bowl of green powder on a lab bench in Seattle looked like something from a kitchen, not a construction site. It was sea lettuce, the…
Two pieces of metal sliding against each other inside an engine are never supposed to touch. That is the whole trick of a bearing, and it…
A gravel yard at the edge of a small town in southern Finland, birch trees at the fence line. In the middle of it stands a…
Keeping an old building is usually cheaper than replacing it outright. Usually. The exception is when what you are keeping has to carry something it was…
A bale of jeans the size of a refrigerator, strapped and stacked against a wall in Arizona. The strap gets cut and the whole thing sags…
Along one stretch of Saudi Arabia’s northern Red Sea coast, a cutter suction dredger works a channel. Behind it the water carries a pale plume that…
A patient fasts overnight, drinks two glasses of water and swallows a capsule. Somewhere else entirely, a physician picks up a controller. On the screen is…
A machine built for mud has no business in the ocean. Wheels are the wrong shape for water, a hull full of batteries is the wrong…
On the sonar map they look manufactured. Circles, thousands of them, each about the length of two football fields across and sunk maybe sixteen feet into…
Behind one concrete wall on a Chinese river sits enough water to fill a small sea. Ten trillion gallons of it, lifted and held about 575…
It is still warm when it goes in the bin. A foil lid, a paper filter glued to a plastic wall, and a wet plug of…
The machine sits on the wet coping with water still running off it. Four printed flippers, a clear tube of electronics, a camera the size of a…
The light goes out of the sky over downtown Houston and a seam overhead starts to move. Then it pours. A ribbon of animals comes out of a…
The drain pan catches it black and thick, smelling faintly of combustion and metal. That quart of old crankcase oil looks like it has seen its…
The bales come in stacked like hay. Burgundy, beige, grey and brown, pressed into blocks and trucked from houses and offices across the Southwest. Every block…
A mattress is the largest single object most households will ever throw away. Americans set roughly 50,000 of them on the curb every day, which works out to…
The world’s reservoirs, counted together, hold enough water to fill the Grand Canyon twice. From the bank at Yichang in central China, the most famous of…
Push the base of a paper cup flat into wet soil and cover it over. Keep it damp and nothing happens for the first week. Then the…
Under an elevated road there is a strip of land nobody has ever wanted. No light reaches it, nothing planted there survives, and it collects grit and…
He walks the line and pushes on each one with his boot. Three of them give, and the tops come away in his hand, hollow and soft…
The underside of the bridge is the part that nobody photographs. Grey, damp, tagged, scrubbed, tagged again, all of it on a city budget. Then one of…
The snow lands on the bridge and does not stay. On the road leading up to it the same snow is settling normally, an inch of it and…
On a Wednesday night in August, a low building on flat pasture south of Austin came alive. No steam. No turbine. No line running out to…
An email arrived in Austin one morning in January, carrying photographs of a roof taken from the air. The policy attached to that roof had been…
The machine standing in the Qatari desert does not look like a printer. It looks like a bridge somebody parked over a building site, a steel…
The machete goes in low, and the whole plant comes down in a single push. It is not a tree, and it does not splinter. It…
Picture the scene: a plain room, a few glass vials lined up on a table, and a dog that has never met the person whose sweat…
The letter arrived without warning. A Texas homeowner opened her email to find two grainy photographs of her own roof attached, images she never knew had…
It hangs in the corner of your porch every August, rebuilt overnight like nothing happened. The spider that made it is smaller than a blueberry. The…
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