A rare warm spell in January melted enough snow to uncover Cornell University's newest athletic field, built for field hockey. Months before, it was a meadow teeming with birds and bugs; now it's more than an acre of synthetic turf roughly the color of the felt on a pool table, almost digital in its saturation....

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. Isfakegrassabadidea?TheAstroTurfwarsarefarfromover. In 2001,Americans installed just over 7 million square meters of synthetic turf. By 2024, that number was 79 million square meters-enough to carpet all of Manhattan and then some. The...