This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Voters have elected Donald Trump to a second term in the White House. In the days leading up to the election, I kept thinking about what four years means for climate change…

The world’s first barcode, designed in 1948, took more than 25 years to make it out of the lab and onto a retail package. Since then, the barcode has done much more than make grocery checkouts faster—it has remade our understanding of how physical objects can be identified and tracked, creating a new pace and…