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Building a Better Breast Pump
At the close of a hackathon held at the Massachusetts institute of Technology this weekend, tables were littered with the standard fare: empty coffee cups, LEDs, joysticks, and transistor parts. There...
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Beyond GMOs: The Rise of Synthetic Biology
Thousands of researchers will descend on Boston this fall for an event billed as the world’s largest gathering of synthetic biologists. The field is evolving so rapidly that even scientists working in...
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Peering Ever Deeper Into Matter
"I couldn't stop looking at the images," Gerd Binnig would say later, when accepting the Nobel Prize in 1986. "It was entering a new world." Just four years before, in 1982, he and Heinrich Rohrer had...
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Ello Says You're Not a Product, But You Are
Today the internet decided that Ello wasn’t just going to blip up and disappear quickly. The social media site is slowly letting new users in, and in declarations that sound eerily familiar, some are...
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The Woman With the Bionic Eye
Fran Fulton is 66, and she’s been fully blind for about 10 years. A few weeks ago, all that changed. Fulton suffers from retinitis pigmentosa—a degenerative eye disease that slowly causes...
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How to Stop a Rumor Online (Before the Rumor Becomes a Lie)
Did you hear the thing about the Florida woman who implanted a third breast in order to be "unattractive to men"? The one who is filming "her daily life in Tampa to show the struggles she faces because...
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When Everything Works Like Your Cell Phone
Everyone understands what it means to own a plunger. Go to a store, buy the tool, take the physical object home, use it. No contract is required. If you give it away, all its plunging capabilities go...
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Tasty Mutants: The Invention of the Modern Oyster
If you slurped down any oysters on the half-shell this summer, you probably didn’t realize they were monsters. Not monsters in the pejorative sense, but man made creatures—the invention of a modern-day...
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From Ballooners to Bombers: A History of the Backpack Parachute
At the beginning, pilots didn't want parachutes. Even in an emergency, one aviator sniffed, "It’s much safer for an operator to remain in his seat." Parachutes weren't safety devices—they were the...
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Slouching Towards Not Slouching
"A straight back may be said to be an element of beauty," wrote D. F. Lincoln, a physician in Philadelphia, in 1896. "Round shoulders and a twisted spine are an element of the opposite quality, beyond...
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Let There Be Light Emitting Diodes: How to Illuminate the Sistine Chapel
When Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he did so, for the most part, using the light of the sun that streamed through the windows of the building. And for the past 500 years since...
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The Day We Brought Our Robot Home
“You just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans,” argues Dr. Lanning, director of U.S. Robots lab in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. The day my husband and I brought our robot home,...
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Confronting My Cyberbully, 13 Years Later
When I was thirteen, I had a falling-out with my best friend, after which she tortured me over the Internet for the next three years. We were so close that she knew the answer to my security question,...
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The Gender Politics of Pockets
I am one of the 10 million people who acquired an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus ten days ago. Coming from Planet Android, I wasn’t as put off by the larger dimensions as everyone else in the technosphere...
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The Great Soda Water Shake Up
Joseph Priestley had a lot of unusual ideas. As a clergyman and philosopher in the late 18th century, his theological notions (he wrote that the Anglican Church, and its teachings, were a corruption of...
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The U.S. Is Saving Nukes So It Can Blow Up Asteroids
Why is the U.S. falling behind on its promises to destroy old nuclear weapons? Here’s one reason given to government auditors (pdf): That’s right, the U.S. isn’t dismantling its old nuclear weapons,...
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What Crazy Tech Idea Could Become Real?
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/380990/what-crazy-tech-idea-could-become-real/
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Social Media, the New Press Release
In 1928, The New York Times installed a news ticker on the side of its building. The prologue to today’s TV news tickers, the Times called it a “zipper” and displayed the headlines of the day on it. A...
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The End of the Selfie Hype Cycle
Are you sick of reading about selfies? Are you tired of hearing about how those pictures you took of yourself on vacation last month are evidence of narcissism, but also maybe of empowerment, but also...
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The Other Side of the Phone
Wearing shapeless, color-coded smocks, they enter the tiny interview rooms, their faces weathered from homelessness, twitching with worry and terror and detox as they look at me through the soundproof...
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