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Women in Combat: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, Aided by Technology
Many of the arguments against "bands of sisters" are moot. In part because of improved tools. Members of the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Brigade try on female body armor in Afghanistan. (David Kamm,...
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This Pod of Sperm Whales Would Like to Teach You a Lesson About Humanity
A tale of inter-species interaction, told by some friendly cetaceans There are many times that humanity could stand to learn a little something from nature. This is one of those times. In 2011, the...
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The 'Mystic Writing Pad': What Would Freud Make of Today's Tablets?
No, of course Freud didn't write anything about the iPad. But an obscure 1925 essay on the "Mystic Pad" gives us some clues as to what he would have made of modern computing technologies....
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The Lab Accident That Led to the Discovery of Supertasters
A cloud of chemicals. One researcher detects a smell. The other does not. What happens next? Science. A food laboratory from 1935, though sadly not the one in the story (flickr/University of...
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How Steve Jobs Ended Up Sitting in Front of a Rosetta Stone Replica With...
A photographer's marketing trick, a legend's self-importance, and a funny pair of glasses. Photographer Tom Zimberoff's original contact sheet from his Jobs photoshoot (Tom Zimberoff).Just when you...
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NASA's Beloved Curiosity Rover Hasn't Even Driven a Whole Mile Yet
See how it stacks up with other extra-planetary exploration in one chart. Lunkhod 1 (Wikimedia Commons) NASA's Curiosity Rover arrived on Mars last August to much fanfare, but it's trails on the planet...
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The Museum of Lost Sounds
A radio pioneer once imagined he could listen back through time. Now you can, in a way, thanks to a Cornell archive. Alexis Madrigal What if you could build a radio so powerful that you could detect...
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What Twitter Really Looks Like
Tweetping.net I just watched the West Coast wake up. On Twitter. I did it by watching the lights come on on Tweetping, which visualizes Twitter activity in real time, on a global scale. When I looked...
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What Does Google Do If the Government Comes Looking for Your Emails?
The company has clarified a bit about its process for responding to government requests for user data. Every single day, dozens of requests from law-enforcement officials, courts, and other government...
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A Surprisingly Beautiful Photo of Mars at Night, Courtesy of NASA's Curiosity...
Using the camera at the end of its long robotic arm, Curiosity has taken a picture of a rock illuminated by the rover's ultraviolet LEDs. NASA Not to take things for granted, but we have a lot --...
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A Brother Remembers the Boy Who Grew Up to Be a Challenger Astronaut
As a kid in the 1950s, Ronald McNair dreamed of going to space -- no matter what obstacles might stand in his way. His brother Carl recounts the story of how, as a nine year old, Ronald got into...
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Here Is the Robot That Will Extract Water From the Moon
NASA's latest prototype has found a way to, quite literally, get water out of rocks. No word on if it can get blood from stone yet. The RASSOR robot climbs a hill during a recent test at NASA's...
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How Bad Are the Dreamliner's Problems? Elon Musk Weighs In
1) What's wrong with the 787 Dreamliner? No one knows for sure, now that the simplest and most easily correctable problem -- some production defect in the specific batch of batteries involved in two...
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When Newspapers Were New, or, How Londoners Got Word of the Plague
Daniel Defoe's novel about London's 1665 plague can help us understand new media. No, really.The plague was abroad.Londoners knew not where it had come from, only that it was upon Holland. "It was...
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Moonrise in Real Time
Celestial movement at human speed. Maybe the closest I've ever come to a religious experience was watching the full moon rise out of the almost-infinite emptiness of Wyoming. (It might have helped I...
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Would You Spend the Night at an Underwater Hotel?
This is either a). the best idea ever or b). the worst. Deep Ocean Technology Imagine this: You wake up after spending the night in a luxurious hotel room. Yawning, stretching, greet-the-day-ing, you...
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What If the Great Wikipedia 'Revolution' Was Actually a Reversion?
Sure, Wikipedia represents a drastic departure from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but if you compare it with even earlier reference works, it doesn't look so unusual. The frontispiece from Ephraim...
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A Whole New Realm of Bad Taste: TxtSpk and License Plates
Step aside, "ASSMAN": The digital world has opened up a whole new way to offend and/or delight fellow drivers. Sorry, AKAPIMP! You can't have any of this on your vanity plate. (Government Attic and...
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Study: Facebook Is Your Frenemy
Facebook is stressful! Also, we love it. Shutterstock/Ryan DeBerardinis + PicMonkey Facebook is terrible. But Facebook is, at the same time, wonderful. We love it, we hate it. We love to hate it, hate...
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