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Helen Keller and the Glove That Couldn't Hear
On the second day of March 1950, Helen Keller showed up at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. There, she encountered Norbert Wiener, the mathematician and engineer best known as the father of...
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It Wasn't Relativity That Won Einstein His Nobel Prize
Albert Einstein never won a Nobel prize for the theory of relativity—in fact, it was only through long, political jockeying within the Nobel committee that he won the prize at all. Instead, when he was...
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When Phone Operators Were Unruly Teenage Boys
When the telegraph was the primary means of instant communication in the United States, it regularly employed boys to operate its switches. Boys were nimble, the thinking went. They were quick. They...
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The Pop-Tart at 50: Perfect Just the Way It Is
As of this week, Pop-Tarts have been part of Americans' breakfasts—and, let's be honest, late-night snacks—for 50 years. What's remarkable about their reign (besides the fact that, despite an...
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Humanity's Most Famous Mixtape Is Now 11 Billion Miles From Earth
With every second that ticks past, the spacecraft Voyager 1 ventures farther away from Earth. You can actually watch this happen, in a way, on NASA's website, which tracks the probe's distance from our...
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How Two Men Unlocked Modern Encryption
In September of 1974, when he was 30 years old, Whitfield Diffie was obsessed with cryptography. So obsessed that he was criss-crossing the country trying to talk to anyone who could help him expand...
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Northern Hemisphere or Southern, the Toilets Drain the Same
The Simpsons episode "Bart vs. Australia," which involves the oldest Simpson kid getting indicted for fraud in the Commonwealth, starts with a scene in a bathroom. Bart has noticed that the water in...
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Has Apple Abandoned Egalitarianism?
Watching the Apple Watch announcement event a few weeks ago, I kept thinking of my favorite Andy Warhol quote. No, not the “15 minutes of fame” one—Apple, trying to parlay its success with the iPod and...
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Modern Life Without a Pancreas
My hiking shoes were just laced up when there was a frantic vibrating in my pocket. I reached inside, took out the iPod-sized medical device and checked the screen. Up at the top, where my blood...
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The Strongest, Most Expensive Material On Earth
It was so simple. Take a small flake of graphite and put it on piece of regular old Scotch tape. Pinch it in between the tape, peeling off layer after layer until it leaves only the vaguest, most...
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Leaves Change Color Each Fall Because of Dieting Trees
No offense to Pumpkin Spice Lattes and decorative gourds, but the real signs of fall are the leaves—leaves that transform from green to red. And green to orange. And green to yellow. Autumnal romance...
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The Briefcases That Imitate Cell Phone Towers
In the last year, Americans have become more and more aware of the scope, and prevalence of tracking technology. From Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, to privacy breaches, the fact that the...
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Love is Not Algorithmic
There is no higher praise these days than being data-driven. A person who is data-driven is free of bias, and cuts through arguments with a sword of truth. No longer do we need to fumble through life....
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The Creation Myth of Chocolate Chip Cookies
America existed for more than 160 years before chocolate chip cookies did. There were cookies, yes—the first written recipe for an American cookie was published in 1796 in the book American Cookery and...
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Murder in a Time Before Google
I don’t recall ever being told that my father had been murdered. I have no memory of a day when my mother sat me down and slowly and carefully unwound the story of how he had been reckless with his...
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Facebook's Mood Manipulation Experiment Might Have Been Illegal
When news emerged this summer that Facebook had manipulated its users’s feeds to run a psychological experiment, people were angry. Many claimed the experiment was unethical. But did it break the law?...
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26 Percent of Facebook Users Crop Vacation Photos to Hide Their Bodies
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a vacation picture is worth a thousand humblebrags. A photo of yourself at the beach/on a hike/riding the Tennessee Tornado at Dollywood is, of course, not just...
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The Great Era of Underwater Tunneling
Here's what it's like to enter Japan's Seikan Tunnel, which connects two islands —Hokkaido and Honshu—and is one of the world's longest underwater tunnels. The Seikan expanse is close to 34 miles long...
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Going West: The World of Live Action, Competitive Oregon Trail
On a sunny Saturday last week, I found myself pushing a 200 pound man on an ancient kiddie wagon with two missing wheels up a hill with about a 40 percent incline while he shouted out facts about how...
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Stepping Down: Rethinking the Fitness Tracker
The day after my hip surgery, I took a total of 48 steps from the couch, to the bathroom, and back. Compare that to my 5,423,095 total lifetime steps on Fitbit over the last 628 days. That averages out...
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