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Kids Are Using Bitcoin to Buy Fake IDs Online
The beauty of bitcoin, many of those who use the currency will tell you, is that it's decentralized. You don't have to bother with a bank, which means you don't necessarily leave the kind of paper...
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But What Would the End of Humanity Mean for Me?
Sometimes Stephen Hawking writes an article that both mentions Johnny Depp and strongly warns that computers are an imminent threat to humanity, and not many people really care. That is the day there...
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The Not-So-Distant Future When We Can All Upgrade Our Brains
In a decade, cognitive enhancement may have gone mainstream. Pills can already help you stay up longer, bring more focus to your work, and who knows what else. But what might sound good on an...
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Is an Expanded Biometric Immigration System Worth $7 Billion?
The push to stand up biometric checkpoints for foreigners departing the country would not, right now, yield expected benefits, such as quickly spotting people with invalid visas, according to a new...
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When the Submersible Is Lost in the Trench
1. Woods Hole lost its Nereus remotely operated sub on a 10,000 meter dive. "Everything was going fine. Two sets of pushcores were in the sample basket, and we’d recorded nearly two hours of video...
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The Communist Manifesto, as a Patent Application
Great books—books that change the way we see the world, books that spur us along our paths as people and cultures—are, in their way, patents. They are innovations made manifest. They are ideas that are...
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Why Green Jobs Are Booming in Bangladesh
Bangladesh is known for its apparel manufacturing industry—and for the conditions faced by garment workers toiling in Dickensian factories for a dollar a day. But according to a report released Sunday,...
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How a Small Plane Crash Looks When Passengers Are About to Survive Rather...
Let me explain the background of the amazing video below, shot two days ago in Australia. It's been 15 years since the Cirrus SR20 made its debut as "the plane with the parachute." At the time of its...
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Hunter of Planets, Mortal
1. Geoff Marcy, finder of planets around other suns, but a human like the rest of us. "With the next two years they found 10 more planets, generating headlines but also bruising controversy, as if Dr....
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Computers See Your Face as a Child. Will They Recognize You as an Adult?
This story began with a simple question: if a facial recognition system processes a lot of pictures of a child, will it recognize that person when he or she grows up? If I were to upload all my...
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A Breathalyzer That Can Diagnose Cancer
If a fingerprint can tell someone who you are, a "breathprint" could reveal how you're doing. That's according to Raed Dweik, the doctor who runs the pulmonary vascular program at the Cleveland...
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The Organic Battery From Japan That Could Spawn The Next Tesla
Dou Kani, the chief executive of Power Japan Plus, pushes what looks to be a standard lithium-ion battery across a conference table, the type of battery that powers everything from $30 flashlights to...
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The Library of Congress Wants to Destroy Your Old CDs (For Science)
If you've tried listening to any of your old CDs lately, if you even own them anymore, you may have noticed they won't play. That's what happened to mine, anyway. CD players have long since given up...
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The Future of Videoish Chat
1. Group video chat is dumb and hard. But group animated GIF chat is... awesome? "Imagine having a fixed time for recording yourself on camera - let’s say two seconds to capture your actions. But let’s...
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The Military Wants To Teach Robots Right From Wrong
Are robots capable of moral or ethical reasoning? It’s no longer just a question for tenured philosophy professors or Hollywood directors. This week, it’s a question being put to the United Nations....
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New Study: 'Cloud of Things' Could Make Customer Service Better, Humanity Worse
There's this 1960 Twilight Zone episode, "A Thing About Machines," that hinges on one of the classic conflicts in science fiction: Man versus machine. The story is about a wealthy curmudgeon who lives...
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The Powerful Authority of Cute Animals
More than likely than not, you’ve already been propositioned by the beckoning cat. Its barren, glimmering eyes are commonplace in the storefront windows of most American Chinatowns and many sushi...
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Goodbye Forever, Beloved Robot
Scientists broke the news in the style of French existentialist Albert Camus: "We lost Nereus today," Ken Kostel wrote of the deep-ocean robot, which imploded six miles beneath the surface of the...
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Get to Mars by Selling All Your Earthly Possessions
You and I aren’t going to Mars anytime soon, but if and when a base is established on the Red Planet one day, Elon Musk wants a ticket there to cost about what you’d pay for a California home. In other...
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