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Cable Boxes Use an Absurd Amount of Energy, Even When They're Off
Game of Thrones is about a collection of power-hungry individuals. This, it turns out, is appropriate. Because the machines many people use to experience the show—cable boxes, allowing live and...
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On Teen Sexting: Same Sexism, Different Technology
One of the oldest, most outrageously sexist ideas presents sex as a lose-lose for girls: girls who have sex are slutty, while girls who don't have sex are prudes. This was stupid in the era of...
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Shaka, When the Walls Fell
On stardate 45047.2, Jean-Luc Picard leads the crew of the Enterprise in pursuit of a transmission beacon from the El-Adrel system, where a Tamarian vessel has been broadcasting a mathematical signal...
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Study: People Harassed Online Have Few Legal Protections
Lori Stewart started her blog, This Just In, as a way of writing about gardening and sharing stories about her family. She started a program and related website, Toys for Troops, to send toys to...
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The Hero in I.T.
It was September 1986 and I was settling into my job as the microcomputer manager at the Pasadena corporate headquarters of Avery International (maker of binders, office supplies, colorful stick-on...
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Barbie Leans In
This is Entrepreneur Barbie. She is sassy. She is stylish. She is really, really into pink. Entrepreneur Barbie is also, Mattel informs us, "smart." We have to take the company's word for it, since...
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NASA Is Building a Tiny Mothership to Pioneer Distant Lunar Oceans
Suppose you’re a planetary scientist. You operate an unmanned spacecraft, surveying a distant moon in our solar system. Years of funding, engineering work, and long-distance space travel have all come...
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The Most Popular Social Network for Young People? Texting
What are the most popular social networks, apps, and websites for high schoolers? Niche asked. Seven thousand teenagers answered. Here are the results (click to enlarge). I've sliced the data to get...
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A Sound You Can't Unhear (And What It Says About Your Brain)
Just listen to this radio clip. It's only takes 50 seconds for the Franklin Institute's chief bioscientist, Jayatri Das, to demonstrate something fundamental about your brain. She starts with a clip...
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Yo
Are you here? That’s all I want to know. Are you here, reading me? Clicking our links? Viewing our ads, or at least, allowing your browser to load them? Liking or faving or retweeting me? It’s what you...
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The Occult and the Telephone
Telephones were once new, and when they were, they were magical. Not in that Jobsian way of being magical, but like, actually a bit touched by the supernatural. "All previous generations, as the result...
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:) or :-)? Some Highly Scientific Data
The emoticon was invented, in its current form, as a means of moderating an intensely nerdy discussion. A nerdy discussion about—not to be redundant, but—physics. It was 1982. A group of researchers at...
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Meet Taco Bell's 'Resident Disruptor'
This week, Harvard historian Jill Lepore published a scathing critique of one of Silicon Valley's sacred texts, Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. The theory was first elucidated at...
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My Internet Hometown
When I first started out in journalism I worked for a website that paid per click and gave readers my email address. This is usually not a good combination for anybody, but especially not for a young,...
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'Why-Fi' or 'Wiffy'? How Americans Pronounce Common Tech Terms
Okay, once and for all: Is it "gif" or "jif"? EBay Deals, which runs a blog, decided to find out. Its team surveyed 1,100 people—U.S. residents, ranging in age from 18 to 45—asking them about the terms...
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At This School, You Can Check Out Drones Like Library Books
The University of South Florida recently received a grant to expand its "Digital Media Commons"—part of a broader effort to remodel the school's facilities with new technologies. After a year applying...
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Why People Name Their Machines
Humans have a longstanding tendency to anthropomorphize the objects and appliances we use—boats, cars, computers, even electric drills and washing machines. Think of a device, and someone out there has...
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My Childhood Memories Are Locked in a Yahoo Account
I’m on hold. I’ve been on hold for several hours. Every few minutes a recorded voice interrupts the Muzak to promise that, despite evidence otherwise, my call is important. Right. The line suddenly...
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How Often Men Think About Sex
It's a stat that gets bounced around as e-mail-forward wisdom: men think about sex every seven seconds. Even when the idea lacks this mythical specificity and grandiosity (that's 7,200 times a day!),...
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How to Ride on a Train (While Flying on a Plane)
In November of 2009, the Norwegian channel NRK aired a seven-hour-long program called "The Seven Hour Train Journey to Oslo." This title was, depending your perspective, either delightfully...
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