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The Revolution Will Be Adorable: Why Google's Cars Are So Cute
When Ford introduced the Model T in 1908, the company transformed not just how cars were manufactured, but also how they were marketed. Automobiles, previously, had been luxury goods, often associated...
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Google Car for Sale: Slightly Underequipped
The Google Car prototype sure is cute. And as Megan Garber already explained on these pages, it’s cute because it hopes to convey familiarity and comfort while eschewing “creepiness,” that scourge of...
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Why Can't Americans Find Out What Big Data Knows About Them?
I remember the moment, four years ago, when I realized just how well Big Data knew me. I was sitting in the newsroom one afternoon and clicked over to Facebook, where an advertisement caught my eye....
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The Number of Humans in Space Doubled Today
Just after midnight local time on Thursday, a Soyuz rocket with three men aboard lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Minutes later, as it departed Earth’s lower atmosphere and...
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How to Restore a Rothko (Without Ruining a Rothko)
In the 1980s, the art conservator Raymond Lafontaine developed a new way to preserve paintings: He used light from slide projects to augment works that had faded. The technique came from “thinking...
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Google Answers Some of the Pressing Questions About Its Self-Driving Car
Google continues to release more details about their autonomous car plans, as other carmakers ramp up their efforts and regulators try to finish drafting the laws that will govern their use on...
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Only 2% of Google's American Workforce Is Black
The technology industry is frequently thought of as a place that’s heavily white and male, and often unfriendly, if not hostile, to women. Google took a look at its own diversity record and released...
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Regulating New Organisms
1. A Department of Energy-funded report by the. J. Craig Venter Institute finds that the way the USDA APHIS program regulates genetically modified plants might not work in the future. "Genetically...
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Man Bites Dog: A Small Publisher Speaks Up on Amazon's Behalf
I've long been wary of Amazon, for reasons that have come to a head with its highly publicized struggle with Hachette. This recent Atlantic item by Jeremy Greenfield lays out the stakes well. To...
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Why Do We Love Manhattanhenge So Much?
There's something magical about Manhattanhenge, the twice-a-year phenomenon when the sun sets exactly along the cross streets of New York City's prodigious grid. Manhattanhenge is happening tonight at...
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The Military Is Building Brain Chips to Treat PTSD
How well can you predict your next mood swing? How well can anyone? It’s an existential dilemma for many of us but for the military, the ability to treat anxiety, depression, memory loss and the...
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The Future of Wearables Makes Cool Gadgets Meaningful
On an average day in 1998, statistician David Fairley was walking up a busy San Francisco street to pick up his son from preschool. Traffic was heavy, and halfway to the school, he started to feel weak...
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How Wearable Devices Could Get Doctors' Stamp of Approval
Wearables have been hot in Silicon Valley. They refer to little computers and sensors you wear on your body instead of devices you keep on your desk or in your pocket. The great hope for many...
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A Photo Filter, Just for Your Face
Photo filters are blunt instruments. The Hefes and Amaros and Kelvins of the world—the algorithms that transform our snapshots into light-washed little works of EmoArt—are extremely un-selective about...
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This Yeast Archive Is Trying to Save Endangered Beer
In late November of 2009, the town of Cockermouth, in the Lake District of England, had a flood. Heavy rains—16 inches in 24 hours—led the rivers Cocker and Derwent to overflow their stone barriers;...
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How to Read the Mind of a Wildfire
In a stand of ponderosa pine trees high in the Santa Catalina Mountains overlooking Tucson, Arizona, forest-and-fire ecologist Don Falk squatted with me next to a 100-foot-tall tree born a decade or...
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Surveillant Anxiety in the Age of Snowden and Normcore
1. Surveillant anxiety may not catch on as a term, but Kate Crawford's essay on the topic is outstanding. "Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin: The anxiety of those surveilled is deeply...
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Skip the Humans: Drug Discovery by Simulating Cells
The future of medicine, we're often told, will be personalized. We'll have gene therapies, wearables to monitor our vital signs—maybe even new kinds of vital signs—and robot doctors to diagnose our...
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Impressions from the Face of a Corpse
When the curators of Stanford University’s art museum asked Darren Waterston to make art from their collection, he fixed on the bone-white death mask of Leland Stanford Jr. Along with their millions,...
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