The Download: computing's next leap and permafrost's climate threat

Plus: AI has uncovered a decade-old flaw threatening much of the web. How far can we push computing? On a December evening in 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom." There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire on the head of a pin, he argued. We simply had not built the tools yet. He was right, and for decades, computing took us into that space almost for free, as transistors repeatedly halved in size.