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Could You Hand Draw a Map of Your Hometown?
We all like to think we know our towns and cities pretty well. I, for example, can tell you every bar in my neighborhood and which ones are gross and which ones charge too much for beer. I could draw...
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9 Wild Inventions That Modernized Thanksgiving
While you probably associate Thanksgiving with homecooked food made around the hearth, inventors have long been working on ways to modernize the family meal. Here, we present nine real patents—from an...
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Recalculating: The Mind and the Map
The mere mention of Boston inspires dread in my family. On one infamous trip from our home in upstate New York to a Boston wedding, we were done in by a single step in the directions sent by family...
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The Geography of Gratitude
Satya Murthy/FlickrWhat are you thankful for? For Facebook users who recently passed around a status-update game, the answer was pretty clear: friends, family, and health. The analysis was released...
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The Sound Recorder That Changed Film
Stefan Kudelski didn't set out to make a sound recorder. He was interested in robotics, and in the 1950s, one of the ways to create robotic memory was to use magnetic tape. As a student, working with...
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The Food Industry's Least Appetizing Ads
I love food technology because it's such a strange combination of things: process engineering, flavor science, and things I ate yesterday. So, every Thanksgiving, I write a bunch of stories about how...
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Americans Have Always Felt Guilty About TV Watching
With Thanksgiving, the holidays have begun in earnest, ushering in an uneasy season of guilt borne partly of over-consumption: too much shopping, too much pie (if such a thing even exists), and too...
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The First Batch of Gatorade Tasted Terrible
The first time Robert Cade tasted his specially formulated sports drinks, he vomited. It tasted disgusting. One person compared it to urine, another to toilet bowl cleaner. This, perhaps, should not...
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The Earliest Crash Test Dummies Were Cadavers
Over the past few decades, the annual death rate in America has declined dramatically, but the leading causes of death have remained the same. Heart disease kills the most people, and then cancer....
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How Flash Games Shaped the Internet
The Flash platform—that thing Adobe is always asking for you to update—is on life support. True, Adobe last released an update of their Flash Player less than a month ago, fixing the latest round of...
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The First Bar Code Was Round
In 1948, the war had ended, and Joseph Woodland was back on campus. After spending a couple of years working on the Manhattan project, he had come back to Drexel to finish his bachelor's degree and...
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The Industrializtion of Space
We may talk about "space tourism" as a specialized form of space travel; even the most cutting-edge space exploration, though, is disconcertingly similar to the basic experience of Earth-bound...
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When Does the First Amendment Protect Threats?
Not long ago, a dissatisfied reader emailed that he had enough guns to stop people like me. I emailed back to ask whether he was threatening me. The reply: “I'm not stupid enough to telegraph genuine...
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John Harvey Kellogg Believed Light Could Cure Diabetes
John Harvey Kellogg may be most famous for creating breakfast cereal—for which his more commercially minded brother actually deserves a lot of the credit—but his sanitarium was full of inventions that...
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The Global Geography of Internet Addiction
Thanks to its young population armed with smartphones, Brazil beat nine other Internet-connected countries for its citizens’ frequency of web use, according to a new report from business consultancy...
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Discoverer of DNA Forced to Sell His Nobel Prize
James Watson, the famed molecular biologist and co-discoverer of DNA, is putting his Nobel Prize up for auction. This sad final chapter to his career traces back to racial remarks he made in 2007,...
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The Odd History of the First Erotic Computer Game
On October 5, 1981, Time magazine ran a story called “Software for the Masses”—a retrospective meditation on how computing became personal. If 1970s computer ownership had been limited to hobbyists who...
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A Eulogy to Clip Art, in Clip Art
"The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop," Microsoft announced in a blog post yesterday. The collection of images that have graced so many PowerPoint presentations, family...
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Why Haven't We Seen Rosetta's Comet in Color Until Now?
After months of painting Comet 67P's barren surface with shades of grey, the Rosetta spacecraft has finally released its first colored image of the space rock, which show valleys, cliffs, and craters...
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A New Harassment Policy for Twitter
It’s no secret that Twitter is currently playing host to an uptick in targeted harassment. The site has long provided an easy way for people to lob hostile and threatening messages into someone’s...
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