Trending

Meta Launches Muse Spark 1.3 With Upgraded Agentic AI and Coding FeaturesGimlet Labs Raises $300 Million to Make AI Compute Work Across Different ChipsCrusoe Raises More Than $3 Billion at $30 Billion Valuation for AI Data CentersMira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab in Talks for $1 Billion at $40 Billion ValuationWhatsApp Launches In-App Bill Payments in India, Challenging PhonePe and Google PayKRAFTON to Invest $250 Million in Indian AI and Deeptech StartupsMeta Launches Muse Spark 1.3 With Upgraded Agentic AI and Coding FeaturesGimlet Labs Raises $300 Million to Make AI Compute Work Across Different ChipsCrusoe Raises More Than $3 Billion at $30 Billion Valuation for AI Data CentersMira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab in Talks for $1 Billion at $40 Billion ValuationWhatsApp Launches In-App Bill Payments in India, Challenging PhonePe and Google PayKRAFTON to Invest $250 Million in Indian AI and Deeptech Startups

The Silent Network: How Underground Mesh Radio Is Becoming America's Backup Internet

Future Tech

The Silent Network: How Underground Mesh Radio Is Becoming America's Backup Internet

The first thing you notice is the antenna. It is not the sleek, white plastic of a Starlink dish or the black mast of a cellular repeater. It is a collapsible, military‑surplus whip antenna, clamped to a balcony railing with a hardware‑store bracket, connected by a thick coax cable to a small metal box no larger than a paperback novel. The box contains a LoRa radio chip—a low‑power, long‑range transceiver originally designed for agricultural sensors and smart meters—running custom firmware. The screen shows a list of nodes: KF7XYZ (range 4.2 miles), WA6ABC (range 7.8 miles), N8DEF (range 11.3 miles). No internet. No cellular. No central server. Just a mesh of neighbors, passing text messages and small files from one antenna to another, hop by hop, until they reach their destination.

The Chronological Feed

Sorted by: Latest

Future Tech

The Physicist Who Quit IBM to Build India's First Quantum Computer: How Dr. Nagendra Nagaraja Is Racing to Take His 25-Qubit Machine Public—Before the Americans and Chinese Lock Up the Market

In 2019, Dr. Nagendra Nagaraja was a senior quantum scientist at IBM Research, working on some of the world's most advanced superconducting quantum processors at the company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He had a comfortable salary, a prestigious position, and a front-row seat to the development of the hardware that would eventually power the world's largest quantum computing network. He was exactly where any ambitious quantum physicist would want to be—and he was restless. The machines he was building would be deployed everywhere except the country he came from. India, with its deep pool of scientific talent and its virtually nonexistent quantum hardware industry, was invisible in the quantum computing revolution. Nagaraja could not change that from Yorktown Heights. So he quit.

25 May 2026

Future Tech

The Two Dropouts Who Spent a Decade Building a Battery Nobody Believed In: How Gegadyne Energy Just Launched a Lithium-Free Power Pack That Charges in Minutes—and Is Already on European Factory Floors

In 2014, two mechatronics engineering students at Mumbai's Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies set out to build an electric vehicle for their final-year project. Jubin Varghese was a car enthusiast. Ameya Gadiwan was a hard-tech tinkerer. Together, they combed through Mumbai's junkyards, collecting spare parts, convinced that they could assemble a working EV from the discarded remnants of the internal-combustion age. They built the chassis. They built the drivetrain. And then they discovered that the battery required to power their creation would cost three times as much as everything else combined. They dropped out of college soon after and started Gegadyne Energy in 2015. They began with lead-acid batteries, which were cheap but charged painfully slowly. They switched to lithium-ion, which charged faster but degraded with every cycle. They experimented with supercapacitors—quick to charge, long-lasting, but low on energy density. Nothing worked. "There was scope to build incremental battery tech instead of creating something from scratch," Varghese said. "Since India doesn't have an established battery supply chain, we decided to work on materials that are widely available in nature."

25 May 2026

Future Tech

The Software Company That Bet 8 Years on a Battery: How KPIT Built India's First Indigenous Sodium-Ion Power Pack—and Handed It to a Manufacturer to Take on Lithium

In December 2023, a publicly listed automotive software company with no prior history in electrochemistry unveiled a battery technology that it had been developing, quietly and without fanfare, for eight years. The company was KPIT Technologies, a Pune-headquartered mobility solutions firm with a market capitalisation of roughly ₹45,000 crore, over 12,000 employees, and a client roster that includes some of the largest automakers on Earth. It was not a battery startup. It was not a research laboratory. It was a software company that had decided, in 2015, that India's electric vehicle revolution would never reach scale unless someone built a battery that did not depend on lithium—and that it was willing to be the company that tried.

25 May 2026

Future Tech

The Five Friends Who Bet Everything on Building the World's First Hybrid Satellite Eye

In 2020, five final-year students at IIT Madras sat in a hostel room and asked themselves a question that most aerospace engineers spend entire careers avoiding. What if you could put two completely different kinds of cameras on the same satellite? Not one optical camera that takes beautiful pictures in daylight and goes blind the moment a cloud passes over. Not one radar sensor that can see through storms and darkness but produces images that look like a grainy ultrasound. Both. On one platform. Working together. The question was technically elegant and commercially insane—the kind of problem that had defeated every satellite manufacturer for a generation because the two sensors interfered with each other, the data streams were incompatible, and the engineering complexity was orders of magnitude greater than building two separate satellites.

25 May 2026

Future Tech

America Is About to Have Two Stock Markets for the Same Company: Inside the SEC's $15.1 Billion Tokenized Stock Gamble

Sometime this week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to publish a document that will do something no American financial regulator has ever done. It will create a legal framework for two parallel stock markets to trade the same shares of Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia—one running on the century-old infrastructure of the New York Stock Exchange, the other on crypto rails that settle instantly, operate 24 hours a day, and require no permission from the companies whose shares they track. The document is called an "innovation exemption," and it is the most significant regulatory experiment in the structure of American equity markets since the creation of the SEC itself in 1934.

22 May 2026

Future Tech

The €180 Million Bet That Went Quietly Wrong: Inside the Metacore Meltdown—and Supercell's Gamble to Salvage It

In the autumn of 2020, a small Finnish game studio released a mobile puzzle title that should not have worked. The game involved no shooting, no racing, no combat of any kind. Its central mechanic was merging—dragging one garden tool onto another to create a slightly better garden tool, then using that tool to renovate a crumbling mansion. The protagonist was a grandmother. The story, such as it was, involved a family mystery buried somewhere in the estate. The name, Merge Mansion, sounded like a retirement-home hobby.

22 May 2026

Future Tech

The Five-Week Software Upgrade That Could Save Your Next Flight: How a Romanian Startup Is Rewriting the Code That Keeps 10 Million Planes a Year From Colliding

In a modest office in Romania's capital, a team of engineers has spent the past year doing something that the global aviation industry has spent decades trying to avoid: they rewrote the software that coordinates air traffic across an entire continent. Not a prototype. Not a simulation. The actual production software that underpins aviation systems used in airports and air traffic control operations across Europe, contributing to successful journeys for tens of millions of airline passengers every year.

22 May 2026

Future Tech

The Payment Rail That Ate India Just Swallowed Greece: How UPI's Silent Global Takeover Is Redrawing the Map of Money

On a quiet Wednesday morning in Athens, a Greek software engineer named Dimitris opened his Eurobank app and sent €200 to his freelance contractor in Bengaluru. The money left his account in euros, converted to rupees at a rate that was near-interbank, and landed in the contractor's Indian bank account approximately twelve seconds later. The fee was 0.07 percent. Dimitris did not need to enter a SWIFT code, an IBAN number, or any of the arcane alphanumeric identifiers that have made cross-border payments a multi-day ordeal for half a century. He typed a UPI ID—a virtual payment address that looks like an email address—and pressed send.

22 May 2026

Load More Stories