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A Cultural History of the Fever
For most of human history, an unusually high body temperature was a sign of the supernatural. Fevers were sinister but common, unnatural but real. And without a theoretical underpinning by which to...
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Can Game Theory Help to Prevent Rape?
One in five women who attended college during the past four years say they were sexually assaulted, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll published this summer, but only 11...
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The Cyborg Drummer
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/405811/the-cyborg-drummer/
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Flushing the Toilet Has Never Been Riskier
Flushing toilets enable most Americans to make their own waste disappear as if by magic, but most would be hard-pressed to answer this simple question: When you flush, where does it go? Septic tank...
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The Private Islands Inside National Parks
In the years after the financial crisis, someone built a luxury home inside a national park. That someone was a luxury developer notorious for finding land of value to the federal government and buying...
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Not Even the People Who Write Algorithms Really Know How They Work
Sometimes there’s a little crack in the web that is just big enough to catch a glimpse of who the robots running the show think you are. You might deduce, for example, that the tracking software that...
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Gas Leaks Can't Be Tamed
During my senior year of high school, I quit my job at the local minor-league baseball stadium and got a new one checking gas lines in the Chicago suburbs. I didn’t realize at the time I signed on that...
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The Allure of an Ad-Free Internet
Well, that happened fast. After 36 hours as the No. 1 paid app in the App store, the programmer Marco Arment is pulling his ad-blocker, Peace, from the market. “Even though I’m ‘winning,’ I’ve enjoyed...
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Volkswagen's Game of Make-Believe
One of the great lessons of the pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing is this: Computers are only pretending machines. Software is always just imitating something else. Volkswagen seems to have...
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An Extradition Hearing for Kim Dotcom
In January 2012, the FBI shut down Megaupload, a file-sharing site, and accused its founder, Kim Dotcom (that’s his legal name), of copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering. Dotcom...
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The IAEA's 'Significant Progress' on Iran
The head of the U.N. nuclear-watchdog agency says his visit over the weekend to Iran’s Parchin military site is “significant progress” in the organization’s investigation of the Islamic Republic’s...
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The End of the 'Waze Left'
The navigation app Waze is beloved for exploiting shortcuts, avoiding traffic, and proving that the shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line. But its sinuous directions can...
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Moonquakes and Marsquakes
The first thing to know about moonquakes is this: They last forever. While most earthquakes are over in under a minute, moonquakes can last for an afternoon. In the 1970s, at least one 5.5-magnitude...
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How Much of the World Has Regular Internet Access?
If you’re reading this, let me start by saying, you’re very special. One of the (many) reasons you’re very special is because of the United Nations Broadband Commission’s most-recent findings about the...
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What Are Those Kids Doing With That Enormous Gun?
In the summer of 2013 my friend Maura lost her iPhone in the Hamptons. (Maura asked me not to use her last name because of the sensitive nature of this story.) She was partying at a decidedly...
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Why Would Apple Make an Electric Car, Not a Driverless One?
Apple is doubling down on developing an electric car, and has assigned a 2019 ship-date to its secret automotive project, code-named Titan, according to a report this week in The Wall Street Journal....
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Pumpkin Beers Are Already Here Because Climate Change
It was scorching in Oregon this summer. So hot the autumn pumpkins ripened early. Which meant the brewers at Rogue, best known for Dead Guy Ale, found themselves picking pumpkins five weeks ahead of...
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Moon Bloopers, a NASA Study
Feeling the moon underfoot is like walking on “moist talcum powder,” the astronaut Buzz Aldrin once said. It’s also not the easiest terrain to navigate. Not for a human accustomed to gravitational...
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Engineering Humans for War
Retired four-star general Paul F. Gorman recalls first learning about the “weakling of the battlefield” from reading S.L.A. Marshall, the U.S. Army combat historian during World War II. After...
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About Those Fingerprints Stolen in the OPM Hack
The government hack believed to be the biggest in U.S. history just got worse. The Office of Personnel Management said Wednesday it underestimated the number of people whose fingerprints were stolen in...
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