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Driving With Peter
It’s 108 degrees outside, and not much cooler in the dusty red cargo van. The air conditioner doesn’t work. The windows are rolled down as far as they’ll go. The breeze generated from the van’s speed...
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Lone Geniuses Are Overrated
Somewhat to my surprise, Walter Isaacson’s new book, The Innovators, a group portrait of the men and women who invented computers and the Internet, is riveting, propulsive and at times deeply moving....
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This Is My Voice: YouTube and the Transgender Autobiography
On a sunny morning in September, Skylar Kergil turns on his computer. He fills up his “BONK!” coffee mug while peering at the camera with a grin on his face. As he sips his drink, he begins to tell his...
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The Woman Who Invented Disposable Diapers
Marion Donovan, inventor of the first disposable diaper, told Barbara Walters that one simple question guided her work: "What do I think will help a lot of people and most certainly will help me?" The...
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Facebook and Apple Will Pay for Employees to Freeze Their Eggs
At a recent cocktail party in New York City, the women in attendance were sent away with gift bags that included Cadbury creme eggs. This was a bit on the nose. The party was hosted by a company called...
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Big Data Can Guess Who You Are Based on Your Zip Code
In the era of Big Data, your zip code is a window into what you can afford to buy, but it also reveals how you spend time—and, in essence, who you are. That's according to software company Esri, which...
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The U.S. Won't Say What Its Secret Space Drone Did for Two Years
America’s top-secret space drone is coming home today after a record 22 months in orbit—and we have no idea how it spent its time up there. The X-37B, made by Boeing for the U.S. Air Force, is catnip...
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U.S. Observes 'World Standards Day' on Different Day Than World
Happy World Standards Day! The International Organization for Standardization has declared today, October 14, to be a celebration of the hundreds of engineering and scientific standards from which we...
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The Surgeons Who Make Toes Into Thumbs
Plastic surgeons are masters of rearrangement. Yes, they tuck tummies and build breasts, but it would be overly simplistic to think that’s all they do. They also restore the form and function of the...
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Searching for Superconductivity
When you start looking into the origins of the world's great inventions, you'll quickly start finding charming myths and stories almost too good to check. These stories get told over and over again,...
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Rats Aren’t Smarter Than Mice and That Actually Matters
In the world of animal research, there has long been a clear hierarchy of intelligence. Monkeys are at the top, naturally. Then come rats, the workhorses of the psychology lab. And down at the bottom...
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Biometrics Can Be Cool Again
By now, it's common knowledge that passwords are flawed. In April, the Heartbleed bug forced users to reset passwords across hundreds of thousands of websites. The celebrity photos stolen in September...
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A World of Beloved Books (According to Facebook)
What books have stayed with you? It’s a simple but powerful question. Over the summer, it swept through Facebook, and hundreds of thousands of users listed 10 books that had moved them. “They do not...
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The British Monarchy's First Vacuum Cleaner
Like most inventions, the vacuum cleaner did not emerge, whole, out of one inventor's head and immediately attain its perfect form. There were, first, cleaners that used brushes to stir up dust from...
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In Defense of iPhones the FBI Can't Search
The head of the FBI is upset. In James B. Comey's ideal world, FBI agents would be able to access everything on a person's smartphone as long as a judge had issued a lawful warrant. But technology...
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A Simple Way Out of the Plastic Versus Paper Bag Dilemma
This is a complex infographic about how the choices you make in selecting a bag affect the environment in a variety of ways. The data here will show you that, at least according to the calculations by...
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The Peril of Being a Black Inventor in the Old South
In October 1914, the New Orleans Times-Picayune sent a reporter to a roadshow that included the National Safety Device Company's demonstration of its "safety hood." That demonstration involved setting...
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What It Takes to Produce One Ton of Chicken
Let's start here: One may have ethical objections to "conventional," non-free-range chicken production, and nothing in this data can change or even shape that conviction. In fact, I find myself in...
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The (Environmental) Case Against Toast
Let me tell you a story about data dreams and how they are squashed and how you learn something about the complexity of the world along the way. When we started this project, I wanted to create an...
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35 Years Ago Today, Spreadsheets Were Invented
On this day in 1979, a computer program called VisiCalc first shipped for the Apple II platform, marking the birth of the spreadsheet, a now-ubiquitous tool used to compile everything from grocery...
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