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Scientists Cannot Explain This Crazy Ant Behavior, but They Love It
Forget swarms of nanobots taking over the world—if something is going to band together to rise against humans, my money is on ants. Look at this video of them forming a chain to move something way...
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The Harsh, Polarizing Language of a 'Kill Switch' for Smartphones
California passed a law this week that, depending on who you believe, will bring about either a drastic drop in violent crime or an increased risk of terrorism—apparently with the possibility of little...
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What Instagram Did for Photos, This Could Do for Videos
The Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York, launched a new exhibit this week. It's called "The Space Between: Redefining Public and Personal in Smartphone Photography," and it considers the...
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California High-Speed Rail No. 10: Palate Cleanser
As a reminder, this is No. 10 in a series on the proposed north-south California High-Speed Rail system, which deserves national attention as the highest-stakes infrastructure project underway anywhere...
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The Secret Pot-Growing Operations in America's Cornfields
On any given weekday in the summer, you will find me walking through fields counting bugs. In fact, it’s my job: I’m an ecologist studying the communities of insects that live in agricultural...
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The New Internet Honesty
There I was, brainlessly scrolling through my Instagram feed one day, when I found myself looking at a glimpse of modern-day honesty. It was this quick succession of videos that made me stop, little...
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These Two Guys Studied Their Feces for a Year
In 2009, Eric Alm, a professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hadn’t had a bowel movement at home for almost the entire year. Neither did Lawrence David, Alm’s...
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It's Totally Normal to Watch Other People Play Video Games
Incredible amounts of money invite incredulousness. Last week, many media commentators found themselves in disbelief: In a deal worth more than $1 billion, Amazon acquired Twitch—a company and website...
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'The Most Expensive GIF of All Time' Is Being Sold for $5,800
What is digital art? What is it worth? Like any art—and like anything else, really—it's worth what the highest bidder says it is. Jeff Koons knows this; in 2013, his Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at...
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The Coming Age of the Internet Naturalist
Three years ago, Shaun Winterton was looking at photos of bugs on Flickr. Winterton is an expert on a type of insect called lacewings—beautiful, strange creatures with long, translucent (and, yes,...
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How Do Planets Form?
In the past half-decade, we’ve learned about thousands of planets throughout the galaxy, but we still don’t really know what turns young, spinning baby stars into stable solar systems. In fact,...
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Why Privacy Policies Are So Inscrutable
Websites didn’t used to write privacy policies. As late as 1998 only 14 percent of websites disclosed anything about their data-gathering techniques, even as 92 percent collected “great amounts of...
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The 3 Baby Bumps the World Cared About
There are roughly 360,000 births per day. That's 250 new babies each minute or 131 million each year. That's a lot of baby bumps converting into babies at any time scale. And yet, according to Google...
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The Next Big Thing in Fancy Food
It was only a matter of time before the most creative chefs in the country started looking for their next challenge. The foams and gels and perfect spheres of molecular gastronomy no longer surprise;...
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What Does the Chief Technology Officer of a Country Do?
On Thursday, President Barack Obama appointed Megan Smith the new U.S. Chief Technology Officer. Previously a vice president at Google, Smith ran the company’s secretive skunkworks and led business...
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The Geography of NFL Fandom
“This map displays Facebook fans of NFL teams across the United States. Each county is color-coded based on which official team page has the most 'Likes' from people who live in that county.”...
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How Gore-Tex Was Born
"It looked," wrote Field & Stream in 1977, "as though the centuries-long search for a waterproof-yet-breathable lightweight fabric had ended in complete success." This was a year after Early...
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The 100 Books Facebook Users Love
A few weeks ago, I started to see a viral status being passed around my Facebook friends. “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way,” it begins. “Don’t take more than a few minutes, and...
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Behold, a Database That Tracks More Than 500 Episodes of The Simpsons
What is The Simpsons? It's a television show, certainly—specifically, the longest-running American sitcom of all time. It's a cultural touchstone. It's a delight. But it's also an archival...
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When Cars Are as Hackable as Cell Phones
Imagine this future scenario: Self-driving cars form an orderly procession down a highway, traveling at precisely the right following distance and speed. All the on-board computers cooperate and all...
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