The Download: Inside Computing's Next Great Leap and Permafrost's Looming Climate Threat
Plus: AI has uncovered a decade-old flaw threatening much of the web.
By Thomas Macaulay | October 22, 2026
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.
How Far Can We Push Computing?
On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman delivered a lecture titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." There is no physical law preventing us from writing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, he argued. We simply had not yet built the tools to do it.
He was right. For decades, computing advanced into that microscopic 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-larger data centers to boost performance.
Yet the laws of physics still leave plenty of room for improvement.
Here's how researchers are exploring ways to unlock the next leap in computing.
—Volkan Gurses
This is an excerpt based on available content. The full edition continues with additional stories on permafrost's climate threat and an AI-discovered decade-old web vulnerability. Subscribe to The Download for the complete briefing.
Editor's note (2026 context): As the semiconductor industry approaches the physical limits of traditional transistor scaling—often framed as the twilight of Moore's Law—attention has shifted toward alternative architectures, including chiplet designs, 3D stacking, photonic computing, and neuromorphic approaches. Meanwhile, the explosive growth of AI workloads is driving record investment in hyperscale data centers, raising urgent questions about energy consumption and sustainability that echo the climate concerns explored elsewhere in this edition.