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U.S. Marshals Are Selling 29,656.51306529 Bitcoin
The United States government finds itself in possession of an odd asset that it must now auction: Bitcoin, the digital currency. And we're not talking about a couple of spare bitcoin, but rather...
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This Delivery Cube Promises to End the Scourge of Pizza Slippage
You order the pizza—pepperoni, extra cheese. You wait. And wait. And wait. And then your pizza arrives. And it looks like this: Dominoes has decided to brand this not-very-tragic tragedy a...
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Working Around God: Technology, the Pace of Life, and the Shabbos Elevator
Today is Saturday. This is evident on the face of my sleep-deprived neighbor, here in the fluorescent hallway, shifting her whining toddler impatiently from one hip to the other, scowling at the...
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One Second of Love (on the Internet)
There is a feeling people get on the Internet—when an email arrives, or a Facebook message from an old friend, or a particularly good retweet. It's a tiny, perfect rush, as if you had photorealistic...
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When Lightning Strikes a Huge Wind Turbine
A team of storm chasers from Tea, South Dakota, spotted a wind turbine damaged by a lightning strike ear Ruthton, Minnesota. The Tea Storm Chasers gave me permission to post the image here. The only...
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The Woman Who Forgot the Names of Animals
We've all been mesmerized by them—those beautiful brain scan images that make us feel like we're on the cutting edge of scientifically decoding how we think. But as soon as one neuroscience study...
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The Man Who Introduced the World to Flying Saucers
The plan was to launch a flying saucer. NASA had designed a supersonic braking device—technically known as the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, less technically an enormous inflatable disk—to...
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Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization
"What is it about my data that suggests I might be a good fit for an anorexia study?" That's the question my friend Jean asked me after she saw this targeted advertisement on her Facebook profile:...
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Craigslist Is My Music Scene
In his speech celebrating the E Street Band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April, bandleader Bruce Springsteen said something striking: "Real bands are made primarily from the...
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Coal's Share of Energy Consumption at Highest Level Since 1970
This is not how you deal with climate change. In 2013, coal reached its largest share of the global energy market since 1970. Coal has reached its highest market share of global energy consumption for...
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The Playable Virtual Dolphin Created to Help Stroke Patients Recover
Controlling the body is a form of cognition. That's the fundamental insight that's powering a new project, Kata, centered loosely at Johns Hopkins' Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement lab. The...
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How ISIS Games Twitter
The advance of an army used to be marked by war drums. Now it’s marked by volleys of tweets. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni militant group that seized Iraq’s second-largest city...
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Adventures With Technology: A Call for Pitches
We live in a technologized world where humans do new things with tools every day. Yet most of the stories we read (and, let's be honest, write) are about what companies or researchers are doing. We...
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Chili's Has Installed More Than 45,000 Tablets in Its Restaurants
Have you ever been to a Chili's? Have you ever placed an order for the World-Famous Baby Back Ribs? Have you ever decided to, what the heck, make it a Full Rack, with some Homestyle Fries and Cinnamon...
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The Man Who Created GPS
Roger Easton was a key figure in the development of the Global Positioning System, GPS, a ubiquitous feature of modern life. What began as a way of tracking satellites like Sputnik became a way for...
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The 120-Year-Old Mind-Reading Machine
In the 1890s, when technologies like telephones and automobiles and lightbulbs were still strange and wonderful and new, inventors promised another remarkable device would soon be ubiquitous: the...
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A Middle Finger, But Still No Emoji People of Color
Some colossal works do not arrive with a clap of thunder, a rending of the earth, or a smiting of cities. Some we register only as a shuffling of papers. An engineer or bureaucrat files some documents,...
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Why Conservatives Might Be Left Out of the Next Wave of Tech
It's one of those stats that just smacks you across the face: In a recent Pew poll, only four percent—4%!—of consistent conservatives want to live in America's cities. Meanwhile, about a quarter of...
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The Forgotten Stars of Silent Film
The majority of silent films are long gone. Some 70 percent of the movies made in the United States between 1912 and 1929—nearly 8,000 titles—are lost to history, according to a study last year by the...
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Even Non-Nerds Should Care That Netflix Broke Up With Developers
On Friday, Netflix's VP of edge engineering, Daniel Jacobson, sent the following letter to the service's third-party developers: Netflix API Developers,As Netflix continues to grow internationally,...
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