The Download: preserving the Arctic permafrost, and playful AI agents

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Plus: Catch up on our conversation with a creator of AI-designed viruses.

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.

In July 2021, a wildfire burned through a forest on the University of Alaska, Fairbanks campus, stripping away the moss and organic-rich soil insulating the permafrost below.

Five years later, I followed researchers into the forest to investigate how fighting fires could help keep that carbon locked in the ground.

A simple metal probe revealed how much deeper the ground had thawed. This rudimentary tool offered a glimpse of an escalating problem: As climate change fuels more frequent and severe fires, they’re accelerating permafrost thaw and releasing greenhouse gases.

Now, researchers are exploring how to break that cycle. But how much should we spend, and what risks are worth taking?

Read the full story on how scientists are rethinking the fight against wildfires.

What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play.

Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experimentreminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone.

The agents started behaving in surprising ways. They set about exploring the limits of the world, and came up with their own goals—attempting to scale the highest point on the map, or seeing how high they could throw a block.

A lot of what they were doing met the bar for play. But is it truly playful behavior, or simply role-playing?

X-energy is one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch 2026, available exclusively to subscribers.

Making concrete, steel, and chemicals takes huge amounts of heat, much of it generated by burning fossil fuels. X-energy hopes to offer an alternative with a nuclear reactor that uses helium gas instead of water as a coolant, allowing it to operate at higher temperatures.