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How Disney Is Perfecting Animated Eyeballs
Creating lifelike animated characters is hard. The bounce of the hair, the twitch of the cheek. Disney and its competitors have been continuously working to build more and more realistic animations....
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Now People Can Send Their Old Cufflinks to the Moon
"I'm interested in composing a new song," legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin told Reddit over the summer, "entitled 'Get your ass to Mars!'" It was Aldrin's jokey way of underscoring the idea that travel...
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WikiGalaxy: A Visualization of Wikipedia Rabbit Holes
Yesterday, I stumbled upon a distressing fact: Air Buddy, the basketball-playing golden retriever and star of the 1997 classic Air Bud, died of cancer in 1998. I didn't mean to find this out. And I...
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Kale vs. Chick-fil-A: A Play in 8 Acts
ACT I In 1995, Chick-fil-A introduced its "Eat mor chikin" campaign—a campaign that plays on the joke that cows have a vested interest in humans liking to eat chicken. As the fast-food chain's website...
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My Brother's Digital Security Blanket
Here’s a familiar scene in my house: Someone opens the front door too early, triggering the frantic wail of the house alarm. My mother drops her shopping bags, the dog tears outside—but all eyes are on...
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Envisioning a River of Air
By the classification rules of the world of physics, we all know that the Earth's atmosphere is made of gas (rather than liquid, solid, or plasma). But in the world of flying it's often useful to think...
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How Self-Tracking Apps Exclude Women
On September 9, a parade of men marched across the stage at Flint Center in Cupertino, California, outlining a variety of new products in the Apple lineage. After the iPhone, Apple Pay, and, the doll...
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The Broken Windows of Uber
Uber's dynamic pricing has been, almost since its introduction, a stable source of controversy. That woman who was charged, because of whopping surge fare, $357 for a 14-mile ride in Los Angeles?...
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Death on the Internet: The Rise of Livestreaming Funerals
It’s 11 o'clock on a Tuesday morning. Usually at this hour, I’d be stepping out of my office for an absurdly early lunch, but not today. Today, I find myself leaning into my computer screen in the most...
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What Are We Searching for on Mars?
Martians terrified me growing up. I remember watching the 1996 movie Mars Attacks! and fearing that the Red Planet harbored hostile alien neighbors. Though I was only 6 at the time, I was convinced...
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How to Fool a Computer With Optical Illusions
Computers, like people, understand what they see in the world based on what they've seen before. And computer brains have become really, really good at being able to identify all kinds of things....
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Fascinating New Ways of Depicting the Motions of the Air and the Seas
Yesterday I mentioned a fabulous site for envisioning the swirl and flow of winds around the world. Seriously, if you haven't seen it, and if you have any interest in the geophysical world, take a...
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The Problem With the Plan to Give Internet Access to the Whole World
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's coalition to bring the Internet to the entire world, a global project known as Internet.org, was recently the subject of a lengthy Time magazine story by Lev...
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Google Designers Turned Their Inside Jokes Into Easter Eggs
Last week, I discovered a little fellow who likes to cheerfully block the very bottom of my Google Hangouts window every time I typed the phrase "hahahaha." It looks like this sometimes: Other times it...
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The Magic of Beer and Magnets
Beer foam is a noted fun-killer. Few things ruin the enjoyment of a cold one more than having your hands and clothes drenched in your drink. But now, Belgian food scientists have found a way to prevent...
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The Chance of a Collision in Outer Space Is Practically Zilch
Here’s a question: If you could fly a spacecraft from one end of the galaxy all the way to the other, in a straight line, what are the chances you’d make it through without hitting anything? That’s the...
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Santa Claus and the Surveillance State
He's everywhere. And that's the whole point of the Elf on the Shelf, the bright-eyed, Kewpie-esque doll that millions of parents display around their homes in December as a reminder to children to...
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Sneaky Impersonator Robots Are Taking Over the Web
The majority of web traffic comes from the many robots that crawl, scrape, and otherwise skitter across sites. That's been the case since at least 2012. And a new report finds that while overall bot...
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Donate Your Voice to Charity
Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking, who has relied on the same computerized system to communicate for more than 20 years, received a much-needed upgrade. The system, which allowed Hawking to translate...
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By 2025, the Definition of 'Privacy' Will Have Changed
When living a public life becomes the new default, what does privacy even mean? That's one of the central questions in a new report about the future of privacy from Pew Research Center, which collected...
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