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Why Do Erasers Suck at Erasing?
You’re using pencil, fast and furious, to scribble notes when you make a mistake. Maybe after all these years you’re still mixing up b’s and d’s. No matter, because on the other end of your writing...
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A Year After Death of Silk Road, Darknet Markets Are Booming
It's been one year since the FBI shut down Silk Road, the granddaddy of darknet marketplaces, and arrested main Silk Road admin Ross William Ulbricht (or, as he was known online, Dread Pirate Roberts)....
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The Future of Surgery: Less Cutting, More Robots
The inside of the human body is dark and closed off—for the most part—from the world around it. This is usually an advantage. But when something goes wrong and surgeons believe they can fix it, they...
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Why Police Lineups Will Never Be Perfect
One night in 1984, a man broke into 22-year-old Jennifer Thompson’s apartment, threatened her at knifepoint, and raped her. While it was happening she tried to memorize everything about him—his face,...
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One Name to Rule Them All: Facebook's Identity Problem
It’s not every day that Facebook issues a public apology. And it’s certainly not every day that the rights of drag queens win the day, a community that has historically been mocked, maligned, and...
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Brewing Bad: The All-Natural Origins of Meth
Nagai Nagayoshi, the first man to create meth, began his life in Tokushima Prefecture, a place that today farms sweet potatoes and strawberries, just to the west of Osaka. When he was born in 1845, the...
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The Ebola Patient Was Sent Home Because of Bad Software
Thomas Eric Duncan has been in isolation for Ebola at Dallas' Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital since September 28—but that wasn't his first trip to that hospital. After developing a fever and...
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Why the JP Morgan Data Breach Is Like No Other
Another month, another report of a large corporation failing to keep customer information secure. This time, it's JP Morgan reporting that 76 million households and 8 million small business were...
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New York Literally Invented Nightlife
Nightlife—the nightlife that Americans know now, with dark restaurants and dance floors—did not exist until the 1920s. It's not that people didn't go out at night. But the way they went out, to saloons...
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NASA Should Have Put a Ring on Orbit
In the summer of 1975, at the behest of NASA, a group of professors, volunteers, and students at Stanford University spent 10 weeks imagining what human colonization of space would look like and how,...
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The Navy's Future Fleet of Swarming Boat-Drones
It’s August on Virginia’s James River and a secret military exercise is about to make history. A large ship that the Navy sometimes calls a high-value unit, HVU, is making its way down the river’s...
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What Firechat's Success in Hong Kong Means for a Global Internet
Look at pictures of any protest and you’ll see a mix of high and low technology. The Occupy Central protests in Hong Kong are no different. As the futurist Georgina Voss noticed, you’ll see umbrellas...
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The First Soft Contact Lenses Were Created With a Toy Construction Set
In 1961, Otto Wichterle had time to fiddle around. Three years before, he had been the dean of Prague's Institute for Chemical Technology. And then, all of a sudden, he wasn't. In Soviet-era...
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How to Tweet Like a Robot on Mars
When a worried 5-year-old named Timur asked Chris Hadfield in September whether the Voyager 1 satellite—now careening through Deep Space 11 billion miles from Earth—would be okay flying solo, the...
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The Quiet Rise of the Satellite Spy Agency
As far as intelligence agencies go, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has remained relatively low profile—attracting neither the intrigue of, say, the CIA nor the umbrage directed toward the...
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What It Felt Like to Test the First Submarine Nuclear Reactor
In the middle of last century, out in southern Idaho, amid the sagebrush and the steppes, the Navy kept a secret site. In that place—dry and arid, far from the sea and very much unlike it—scientists...
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Why Robots Could Be Awesome Whistleblowers
Given recent concerns over the imminently expanding robotic workforce, a simple solution to ease this apprehension is to employ robots for jobs humans would gladly surrender. One job in particular not...
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Nobody Knows What Running Looks Like
Picture a person running. You’re probably picturing them wrong. It’s okay, you wouldn’t be alone. It turns out that artists have been drawing people running incorrectly for thousands of years. From...
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So, Who Is Running Our Ello Account?
Ello, a relatively new social media network and the latest to promise a sanctified, commercial-free space to be brag and/or moan about your life, has only been around for four months. While the...
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How to Count the World's Unconnected Billions
One hundred is a deceptive number. In the rich world, mobile phone penetration, measured by the number of active SIM cards, exceeds 100 percent. That would imply that not only does every man, woman,...
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