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How Do Astronauts Vote From Space?
In November of 2007, Clayton Anderson participated in the most ordinary of elections—voting on a handful of local ballot proposals for his Houston suburb. But Anderson cast his ballot in an...
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Roger Ebert's Wikipedia [Citation Needed]
Like many of us, Roger Ebert liked to scour Wikipedia late at night. He read about silent films, lauded actors, and television personalities. And every now and then between 2004 and 2009, he inserted...
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Cars Just Had Their Most Fuel-Efficient Year Ever
Cars sold in America have never had better fuel economy. That’s the finding of a new EPA report on the fuel economy of cars and light trucks from model-year 2013. Last year’s cars are more fuel...
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For $150,000, You Can Buy a Window From the Manhattan Project
On October 22nd, paddles will fly at the Bonhams auction house on Madison Avenue as collectors bid on some of the most coveted, and most unusual, science and technology objects in existence. This will...
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So, We Know Who Is Running Our Ello Account
The wonderful and terrible thing about the Internet is that there's never any mystery anymore. Nearly as soon as we posted a story about how an unknown person was running The Atlantic's Ello account...
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Expected Fatality Rate for That Mars Reality Show: 100 Percent
Mars One, an organization based in the Netherlands, has been recruiting amateur astronauts to send on a one-way, televised trip to Mars, with the hopes of building a colony there. The organization says...
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How Bill Gates Thinks
When interesting people hang out, interesting things tend to happen. So when we found out that Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From and The Ghost Map was going to sit down and talk to...
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The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women
In December 2012, an Icelandic woman named Thorlaug Agustsdottir discovered a Facebook group called “Men are better than women.” One image she found there, Thorlaug wrote to us this summer in an email,...
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A Third of You Have Done Things to Talk About Them on Facebook
Ford, as part of its publicity push on the occasion of Mustang's 50 years on the road, recently conducted a survey. The basic idea was to get a sense of Americans' sense of adventure as it stands in...
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How the Plastic Bag Became So Popular
In the 1960s, plastics were just becoming popular. Polyethylene, which today is one of the world's most ubiquitous plastics, had been created in 1898, and then again in 1933. But it wasn't until 1953...
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The Cigarette That Charges for Every Puff
Cigarettes might have one of the easiest-to-understand interfaces in the world. Step one: Light it. Step two: Inhale from the side that isn’t on fire. A new patent from Philip Morris hints at how that...
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Microsoft's CEO and the Worst Career Advice Imaginable
Discuss gender in the workplace and there it is, stubborn, infuriating, impossible to avoid: the pay gap. For every dollar a man earns, professional women earn only 78 cents. The pay gap holds across...
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Why the White House Is Using Emoji
On Wednesday, the White House Council of Economic Advisors released a report about the status of Millennials across the nation, touching on education, debt, and healthcare rates. The report is modeled...
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The Sadness of Super Smashing Solo
For a decade and a half, I could only beat up Pikachu in the privacy of my own home. I could only spar with Samus Aran while planted on my couch. I could only dodge Mario’s fireballs while connected to...
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Scientists Explain Why Nobody Puts Cheddar on Pizza
Here is what happens, chemically, when you bake a pizza. (Warning: The following description will be ever-so-slightly disgusting.) The water molecules contained in the cheese atop the pizza—all those...
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The Anti-Addicting iPhone Game
Here is the description for the current top-grossing iPhone game in the App Store: "Introducing: Clan Wars! Crush enemy clans in clan versus clan battles. Lead your clan to victory! Clash of Clans is...
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No One Knows How Teens Listen to Music
Remember Apple's iPod silhouette ads? The psychedelic TV spots where people would dance hyperactively with an MP3 player in their hand and headphones in their ears? Talk about a throwback; those ads...
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Endangered Tree Snails Keep Hawaii Public Radio Off the Air
Just four years ago Hawaii's NPR affiliate could finally say it beamed its twin signals to listeners across the populated island of Oahu and over a glittering stretch of the Pacific Ocean to the...
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All Aboard for the California High-Speed Rail Chronicles!
After a few weeks' pause for reflection—and for article-writing, and for involvement with news from Scotland, Hong Kong, the Middle East, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—it's time once more to dig into on...
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Snowboarding Was Almost Called 'Snurfing'
In 1965—or maybe it was 1966, but we'll go with 1965, because most people do—Sherman Poppen was living in Muskegon, Michigan, a city on the shores of Lake Michigan where large dunes slide along the...
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