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How Comments Shape Perceptions of Sites' Quality—and Affect Traffic
There’s a game I like to play sometimes. It’s called “How many Internet comments do I have to read until I lose faith in humanity?” All too often, the answer is: one comment. From The Atlantic to Yahoo...
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The 'Rock Star' of the Submarine World Just Turned 50
In 1956, a team of scientists convened in Washington to discuss the way forward in deep-sea exploration. They focused on the future because there was, at that point, no real past to speak of: At the...
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Life Magnified: The Alien Familiarity of the Cellular World
Our universe is a vast and repeating tapestry of convergences. This how we experience it anyway, and in part because our brains are hardwired to recognize patterns. We can't help but see the fractal...
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A Submarine to Explore the Ocean on Saturn's Moon, Titan
1. A proposed autonomous submarine for exploring the hydrocarbon sea of Kraken Mare on Titan, one of Saturn's moon. "Titan is unique in the outer solar system in that it is the only one of the bodies...
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Nintendo Took Away All My Old Mario Kart Friends
In my household, we make big life decisions by playing Mario Kart. Want to talk through the pros and cons of a job offer? Meet me on Rainbow Road. After that, we can finally figure out what we should...
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GE Made a Copper Man, and He Helped Bombardiers Fight WWII
One thing about the American forces during World War II: they had our not-quite-as-globalized companies behind them, a fact that these corporations now like to highlight. Today, GE posted about their...
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Tetris Is 30 Years Old Today
On June 6, 1984, the computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov launched the side project he'd been working on at Moscow's Academy of Science of the USSR: a simple video game—an almost ridiculously simple video...
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Why There Will Never Be a List of Every Word
This afternoon, @everyword will send its final missive. The Twitter account has published what it claims to be every word in the English language, one tweet per word, since 2007. It’s now counting the...
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How Jetpacks and Flying Cars Turned into Cliches About the Future
When a man in a jetpack jumped from the roof of the Four Seasons in Denver this week, the big question Good Morning America had was: Could jetpacks represent the future of commuting? Based on this...
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Computers Are Getting Better Than Humans Are at Facial Recognition
Perceiving whether someone is sad, happy, or angry by the way he turns up his nose or knits his brow comes naturally to humans. Most of us are good at reading faces. Really good, it turns out. So what...
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Tank + Wheelchair = Tankchair
1. Meet the Tankchair. "Soden is the inventor of the Tankchair, which is a wheelchair in the same sense that an aircraft carrier is a boat. His fearsome-looking machine can traverse rugged hillsides,...
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How to Put All the World Cup Games on Your Calendar
The World Cup is upon us. There are so many games during the group play portion of the global tournament that it's hard to keep up with them all. So, some good soccer samaritans on Reddit have created...
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You Might Soon Be Able to Watch Netflix on Amtrak Wifi
They may snake through the hills and vales of New England at more than 150 miles per hour, but many Amtrak passengers have a complaint: It’s just not fast enough. The wifi, they mean. (Though some of...
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When PARRY Met ELIZA: A Ridiculous Chatbot Conversation From 1972
This weekend, to mark the 60th anniversary of Alan Turing's death, a chatbot named Eugene Goostman—a program pretending to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy—fooled one of three assembled judges into...
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Meet the Old, Best Wearable: The Panasonic Toot-A-Loop
Hardware makers are hoping your computer, which jumped into your pocket as your phone, will soon leap from your pants onto your wrist or become your shirt. It's the wearables revolution, we read. But...
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The Internet (as a Pen-and-Pencil Drawing)
You could see it as an amalgamation of lights, studded across the surface of the Earth. Or as an explosion of nodes, rendered in exquisite pastels. Or as fiberoptic cables, arranged in neat rows under...
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The Promise of a New Internet
People tend to talk about the Internet the way they talk about democracy—optimistically, and in terms that describe how it ought to be rather than how it actually is. This idealism is what buoys much...
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The Drones Are Coming
In February of 2012, Congress passed a spending bill for the Federal Aviation Administration that would, in addition to allocating $63.4 billion for modernizing the U.S.'s air traffic control systems,...
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A Second Life for Wasted Soda Bottles: High-Tech Roofing
Perhaps the iconic image of developing-world poverty is a small collection of huts with thatched roofs. Unfortunately for those living in such places, these roofs are terrible. They leak and, when...
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Google Owns a Satellite Now
Google will buy the micro-satellite startup Skybox Imaging for $500 million, the company announced today. While the deal isn’t yet closed, it’s a big moment. I mean, Google owns satellites now! And the...
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