ARCHIVE

Fusion Is Leaving the Physics Lab and Entering the Engineering Era

In 2025 two reactors held a piece of a star in place for over 20 minutes and produced no usable power. That paradox, not another unlimited-energy promise, is where fusion actually stands.

Why Pharma Is Sending "Mini-Factories" Into Orbit

A factory the size of a mini-fridge is orbiting Earth, processing pharmaceutical crystals in microgravity and returning them by capsule. Orbit is turning from a laboratory into a supply chain.

Beyond the Wheelchair: How Machines Are Learning to Restore Motion

Without an implant or surgery, researchers are teaching an EEG cap to translate imagined movement into control of a robotic hand. It is an early step towards restoring motion after paralysis.

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six More Deep Dives, One a Day

Next week on The Signal: six deep dives, one a day, Monday to Saturday.

Riding a Laser to Another Star

The most concrete plan to reach another solar system carries no fuel at all. It leaves the engine on the ground and rides a beam of light.

The Year Quantum Computers Learned to Fix Their Own Mistakes

For decades, quantum machines have been too error-prone to trust. In 2026 the fix that finally counts, error correction, starts shipping to paying customers.

AI Is Searching for Physics' Holy Grail

Plus the fusion gold rush: how smart money reframed fusion from a climate bet into an AI-infrastructure bet. One edition, two energy frontiers.

Robots Small Enough to Swim Your Bloodstream

Forget humanoids. The most radical robots of 2026 are specks that travel through your body under magnetic control, some of them partly alive, carrying a drug straight to its target.

Mirror Life: The Science We May Choose Not to Build

All life on Earth is one-handed. A few labs are learning to build the mirror image, and the scientists closest to the work are asking the world to stop before a mirror cell can copy itself.

The One Place AI Cannot Bluff Is Mathematics

AI has gone from failing at arithmetic to proposing new theorems and helping topple an 87-year-old conjecture, and because every proof can be checked to the last step, maths is the rare place a machine cannot bluff.

The Frontier Week Ahead: Six More Deep Dives, One a Day

One deep dive a day, Monday to Saturday, plus this week's featured article: Inside the Fusion Gold Rush.

NASA Is Building a Telescope the Size of a City Out of Six Shoeboxes

NASA's SunRISE flies six toaster-oven satellites in tight formation so they behave as one radio telescope kilometres wide, built to map where on the Sun the biggest particle storms are launched, the space weather that can threaten satellites, power grids and astronauts.