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Push Notifications Are as Distracting as Phone Calls
Fifteen years ago, cellphones announced their presence with a long and sometimes silly ring. Now, our devices are less likely to ring than emit a single beep or boop. Even a muted vibration might...
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The Women Who Rule Pluto
For all the firsts coming out of the New Horizons mission—color footage of Pluto, photos of all five of its moons, and flowing datastreams about Pluto’s composition and atmosphere—there’s one milestone...
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What's So Great About Being a Planet?
Being a planet is not really a state of being. It is instead a human construct, a categorical designation, and a slippery one at that. Which means that whatever Pluto actually is, its essential...
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The Camera Behind The New Pluto Photos
For decades after its discovery in 1930, Pluto looked like nothing more than a gray smudge in the abyss of space. We knew it was there—even knew its size and gravity—but, without better images, we...
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How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language
In Chinese, the word computer translates directly as electric brain. In Icelandic, a compass is a direction-shower, and a microscope a small-watcher. In Lakota, horse is literally dog of wonder. These...
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Where Have All the Axes Gone?
Last year was, by some accounts, the year of the lumbersexual—big beard, big plaid, big boots. Although not measured by time spent in the woods, the look’s ultimate accessory would have to be an axe. A...
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The (Newly Discovered, Very Important) Ice Mountains of Pluto
Ice mountains as tall as the Rockies loom high above Pluto’s surface. They are made of frozen water, and they rise from the planet’s methane and nitrogen surface. About every 150 hours, a brilliant...
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I Like Instagram
Sometimes writers mourn the loss of “the web we lost.” They get sad about blogs. They remember a time before Facebook. They sigh and sip their pour-over. I believe in the motivating power of nostalgia....
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What Is a ‘Computer’ Anymore?
People used to be computers. That is, for hundreds of years, computing was the work of humans, and very often women. Then, in the mid-20th century, machines began to take on the bulk of computing work,...
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The Chain Reaction That Doomed SpaceX's Rocket
A steel strut holding a helium bottle inside a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket snapped during flight, setting off a chain reaction that destroyed the rocket during a June launch, the company’s CEO and chief...
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Al Gore Dreamed Up a Satellite—and It Just Took Its First Picture of Earth
One night in February 1998, Vice President Al Gore awoke with a start. He had dreamed of a satellite. It would sit far out in space, beyond the reach of more conventional orbiters, so distant it could...
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The Secret Agents Who Stake Out the Ugliest Corners of the Internet
When President Obama launched his Twitter account in May, people noticed his rapid accumulation of followers, a silly back-and-forth with President Clinton, but also something more serious: the number...
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Global Warming Could Make Carbon Dating Impossible
Since the 1940s, scientists have used carbon dating to determine the age of fossils, identify vintages of wine and whiskey, and explore other organic artifacts like wood and ivory. The technique...
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Civilian and Military Aviation Styles: Do They Explain Anything About the...
Earlier this month an Air Force F-16 and a little single-engine Cessna 150 collided at low altitude near Charleston, South Carolina. The Air Force pilot ejected to safety; the two people aboard the...
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A Search Engine, but Not on the Internet
With all the hype around the Internet of Things—a future in which ordinary devices are sensor equipped and wifi-connected—we might be missing a concept that is something like its inverse: Let’s call it...
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I Like the Bus
As a traveler, my competitive advantage is laziness. I truly do not mind sitting still in one spot for hours on end with nothing to do but read or listen to music. In fact those are three of my...
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Why Is It So Hard to Track Taser Use?
The new video of the arrest of Sandra Bland is brutal and hard to watch. It also raises a question: Why did an officer threaten her with a stun gun? In the video, Bland, the 28-year-old woman whose...
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Breakfast With Zeke
It's not every morning that a Rhodes Scholar asks you if you'd prefer to sit indoors or out and freshens your water glass. But that's what happens when Zeke Emanuel decides to cook breakfast at a...
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Rebuilding the Breast
In 1882 an American surgeon named William Steward Halsted popularized what’s now called the radical mastectomy. He didn’t think of the idea—one of the first written proposals for a mastectomy was...
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The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music
When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist,...
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