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MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of science and technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” on how we might manipulate and control things on an extremely small scale. There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, he argued, or from storing every book ever written in something the size of a dust speck—or, ultimately, from arranging matter atom by atom. Biology already did versions of this (a living cell keeps its instructions in a wisp of DNA), so all of this was plainly permitted by the laws

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Plug a phone into a modern charger and the first 10 minutes are impressive. The next 20 are not.

This is not a defect. It’s the connected device protecting itself. As temperature rises during charging, a smartphone’s battery management system reduces the current it will accept, because heat accelerates the chemical degradation that permanently reduces battery capacity. The charger may be capable of delivering more, but the device simply stops taking it.

For anyone building products in the portable power category, this creates an uncomfortable gap between specification and experience. A device rated at 25 watts is accurate in the sense that it can deliver 25 watts. Whether it delivers 25 watts for the duration of a charge is a different question, and one the specification does not answer.

The specification gap

The gap matters commercially because it is invisible at the point

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Throughout the history of the computer chip, engineers have treated waste heat as an inevitable cost of a calculation. Hannah Earley, however, thinks it’s a design choice. Earley, 31, is cofounder and chief technology officer of Vaire Computing, a startup building chips that recycle energy usually thrown away as heat—a strategy known as reversible computing. Ultimately, she thinks, this approach could help make data centers (and our laptops and phones) much more energy efficient. 

When conventional computer chips perform calculations, they erase the information they no longer need along the way, dissipating energy as heat in the process. Earley compares the approach to racing through a city only to pump the brakes at every intersection: The car loses momentum and must burn more fuel to accelerate again. Reversible computing aims to keep the momentum going—instead of erasing information from the intermediate steps in a

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For years, legacy technology has been a problem companies knew they needed to solve, but one they often struggled to tackle. The cost, complexity, and risk of replacing business-critical systems could make modernization feel like a disruption to manage instead of an opportunity to pursue. But with the rise in customer expectations and the changes AI brought to the economics of software development, that calculation is changing. Bupa’s modernization of its My Bupa mobile application offers a case study in what becomes possible when a legacy migration is treated as a business transformation rather than a technology rewrite.

Bupa CIO of health insurance Asifa Sherazi describes the risks of waiting for legacy systems to become an emergency: “The end-of-life technology is a risk that compounds quietly, and then arrives all at once.” For Bupa, moving its application from Xamarin to native Swift and Kotlin

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