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Why the World Smells Different After It Rains
"Petrichor" is the wonderful word that describes the wonderful scent of the air after a rain shower. It comes, like so many wonderful words do, from the ancient Greek: a combination of ichor, the...
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Google Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself
Every weekday at 3:40 p.m., the message popped up on my phone: 22 mins to Work. Google Now was doing its job. It was reminding me where to go and how to get there. Google Now, in case you don’t know,...
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Your Sushi May Be Getting Smarter
Every year, some 48 million people in the United States get sick from something they ate. And thousands of them die from these foodborne illnesses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and...
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How One Woman Deciphered Her Own Genetic Mutation
Kim Goodsell was running along a mountain trail when her left ankle began turning inward, unbidden. A few weeks later she started having trouble lifting her feet properly near the end of her runs, and...
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Blend Up the Internet and Everything Turns Orange
If you ask Jim Bumgardner what his job is, he might say puzzles. But he also might say software development, or art, or “Mayor of the North Pole” (at least on Foursquare). Or he might just point you...
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So What Exactly Is a 'Killer Robot'?
For as long as we’ve been able to make robots, we’ve been worried about them killing us. In 1942, Isaac Asimov published a short story called Runaround that both coined the term "robotics" and...
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How Much Should You Know About How Facebook Works?
Every semester, Cornell professor Jeff Hancock asks his students to complete an experiment. First, he has them all Google the same search term. Then, he asks each student to turn to the right or left...
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A Secret Code in Google Translate?
Earlier this week security reporter Brian Krebs pointed out an odd glitch in Google Translate. It had to do with the service’s treatment of “Lorem Ipsum” placeholder text—the string of Latin words that...
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The Island Nation That Bought a Back-Up Property
Mikarite Temari, the mayor of Christmas Island, Kiribati’s largest atoll, rolled his eyes and shook his head as I read off my laptop in his office what his president, Anote Tong, had said during a...
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The Modest Pleasure of Boxed Wine
After a long day of work filled with meetings and too many emails, there are few things I look forward to as much as the glass of wine that awaits me at home. That evening beverage signals the end of a...
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There Still Isn't One Good Way to Represent the Internet in Art
Last fall, one of the nation’s most prestigious performing-arts organizations devoted a great deal of money and time to make GChats taller than giraffes. Or, not GChats, precisely. But in the service...
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The Primary Way to Report Harassment Online Is Broken
Death threats, violent misogyny, child pornography, copyright infringement. See any of those four very different things on a social media site and you pretty much have only one technical option: You...
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Social Media Ruined Shark Week
My family and I had just settled in to watch a segment of Discovery Channel's Shark Week—I Escaped Jaws II, a harrowing report about people who have survived shark attacks—when up popped the on-screen...
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The Next Generations of Facebook's News Feed
One of the vexing things about the way algorithms rule the Internet is that it's impossible to glean they're there without knowing exactly what they're doing. The outcome of algorithmic sorting is only...
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What Is Pandora Doing Right?
Another week, another addition to Silicon Valley's diversity data parade. All summer long, leading tech companies have been trumpeting slash apologizing for the numbers that show how few women and...
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Baby Boomers Are Still Playing Words With Friends
College students love their Instagram. Baby Boomers still use Yahoo Mail. These were some of the findings of a new report from the web traffic-monitoring company ComScore, which examines the most...
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The Facebook Experience Without a Like Button
We’re now at that stage of Facebook where users are some combination of bored and anxious. They're ready to start pushing and prodding at the network to see what they get back out, and they've started...
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Why Are There So Many Sinkholes in Florida?
The state that’s well known for hurricanes and alligators has another high-profile natural worry on its list: the possibility that the Earth could, at any moment, gobble up a whole neighborhood. Yes,...
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