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What Those Gorgeous Hubble Photos Reveal About the Universe
With its sights set some 7,000-light years into the darkness, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured an illuminating, yet ominous, new look at a cosmic classic. “The Pillars of Creation,” an...
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Why Are So Few Black People Using Bitcoin?
Edwardo Jackson will gladly drop a Bitcoin primer on anyone who's curious. Beyond his outer enthusiasm for the digital currency—when he talks about Bitcoin, he speeds up as if discussing a...
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Can a Video Game Help Rape Survivors?
When I first happened on Tusmørke's Autumn, it was buried among the hundreds of entries in this year's Independent Game Festival (IGF). The game's page seemed oddly vague, describing it as an Oculus...
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Meet the Robot Champ of Beer Pong
Why, you may have asked yourself, aren't there more robots playing beer pong? Well, now there are. And the arc of this robot's beer pong throw is so beautiful it could make a frat boy weep. Meet the...
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Web Poets Society
It’s 3 a.m. and the emails are coming in fast and furious. My iPhone is pinging like a Vegas slot machine that’s come up all cherries. What’s the emergency? I had just joined a discussion thread for a...
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The Story of Twitter's Fail Whale
This is part of an occasional series about abandoned Internet icons. When Twitter discontinued its beloved Fail Whale in the summer of 2013, the decision had more to do with what the whale...
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Clocks Are Too Precise (and People Don't Know What to Do About It)
Presenting to fellow scientists on the thorniness of time, Demetrios Matsakis will sometimes show a passage from Chaucer. It’s filled with the strange consonants and unexpected vowels of...
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Teddy Ruxpin in the Uncanny Valley
There was a particular moment, children of the 1980s can tell you, when Teddy Ruxpin was everywhere. All the cool kindergarteners toted him to show and tell. He blinked his heavy eyelids at kids during...
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Living Drones
Winter has descended upon the beehives. The drones have been killed. It's time for the workers and the queen to gather up, hunker down, and rely on body heat to weather the cold. The old will die, the...
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Fitness Trackers Only Help Rich People Get Thinner
Last year I bought a Lumo Lift, a device that tracks calories and buzzes whenever its wearer slouches. I wore it for about two weeks, wrote an article about it, and put it in a drawer. There it has...
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What Your Avatar Says About You
Whether I’m bashing orcs with a battle-axe or rallying with a friend in Nintendo Wii tennis, my digital doppelgänger is always a black guy with cool glasses, a big smile, and a curly fro. That’s how I...
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America's Top Killing Machine
For the better part of a century, the machine most likely to kill an American has been the automobile. Car crashes killed 33,561 people in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available,...
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California High-Speed Rail: The Collector's Edition
Over the past six months, I've done a long series of posts on the case for, and against, and then again for the north-south high-speed rail project that Jerry Brown has made a test of his legacy as...
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Most Popular on The New York Times in 2014? The Curiosity App
In 2013, something funny happened at The New York Times. The paper published thousands of stories online, yet its most popular piece of content wasn’t a story at all. It was—as I noted at the time—a...
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The Myth of Neutral Technology
In the aftermath of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the debate about police violence and safety has gained new national attention. Some politicians, including President Obama, have...
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Promoting the Dead on Facebook
Late last month, I noticed an odd post in the News Feed of my Facebook mobile app. It was a black-and-white picture of a girl wearing snorkeling goggles and winking at the camera. And it linked back to...
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The Voice-Activated Video Game
When he was in grad school, roboticist Daniel Wilson installed 150 binary sensors in his house. They ranged from infrared motion sensors—the kind you find in taps and towel dispensers in public...
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A World Transfixed by Screens
The continued massive growth of connected mobile devices is shaping not only how we communicate with each other, but how we look, behave, and experience the world around us. Smartphones and other...
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'V' Is for Very
Over lunch one day, a co-worker grumbled about something being "v. annoying." It took a second for me to understand what the quick, consonant blip pre-adjective was, and when my brain processed it, I...
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The Dark Psychology of the Sexist Internet Commenter
They say you should never read the comments. But sometimes, out of procrastination or curiosity or the narcissistic personality disorder that's endemic to newsrooms, you do. And if you happen to write...
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