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The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal If We Want to Preserve Our Cultural...
The anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to make archivists criminals if they try to preserve our society's artifacts for future generations. Perhaps by now...
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The End of the Hangup
Why the physical form of smartphones and the unreliable operation of cellular networks has made hanging up the telephone impossible. Western Electric model 500 telephone (Ian Bogost) "Can I use my...
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Today in Terrifying Drones: A Quadcopter with a Claw for Snatching
A novel fear enters the nightmares of modern life: being snatched from above by a robot with an eagle-like talon. Most days, American military drones engaged in combat across the world are scary...
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The Immortal, Shattered Cells of Henrietta Lacks
Scientists have sequenced a line of HeLa cells, and found them to be "a mess." Stained HeLa cells (Wikimedia Commons) In 1951, scientists at Johns Hopkins Hospital harvested cells from Henrietta Lacks....
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For St. Patrick's Day, Dancing Hungarians!
Turn to me for your seasonal Magyar/Hibernian connections. I mention the item below purely because I love it. But if you imagine the dancing figures in the video not as folk dancers from Sapientia...
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Google Street View Goes to Its Most Extreme Destinations Yet: 4 of the...
It's just like hiking up Mt. Everest -- minus the hiking part. Aconcagua (Google) Perhaps you've always been curious: What is it like on top of the world? But as for going yourself, well, you'll leave...
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The 10 Minutes When Scientists Brought a Species Back from Extinction
The story of Celia, the last bucardo in the world, and her short-lived clone. Tucked inside Carl Zimmer's wonderful and thorough feature on de-extinction, a topic that got a TEDx coming out party last...
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From Nuclear Weapon to Children's Toy
Rene Burri Here, we see children riding the casing for a nuclear weapon. The casing is like the one that contained Fat Man, one of the two nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Japan at the...
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The Short-Lived Brilliance of Batter Blaster
Making waffles for his wife one day (and destroying his kitchen in the process), Sean O'Connor dreamt up the perfect shortcut: a can that would squirt out pancakes or waffles with the ease of a...
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Reverse Engineering McDonald's: How to Make a Scarily Authentic Filet-o-Fish
All this wonder can be yours, from the comfort of home. (Wikimedia Commons) The Filet-o-Fish is, if not the most inspired menu item available at McDonald's, then certainly the most divinely inspired....
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An Ergonomic Chair for Schoolchildren
Perch Since I am sitting as I type this, I regret to be reminded: Sitting all day reduces life expectancy. Sitting is associated with an increased risk of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Sitting...
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The Things Tornadoes Carry
And how far they go, and how we found out through a Facebook group. This metal poster, bearing the likeness of a Smithville, Mississippi child who died of bone cancer in 1998, flew more than 50 miles...
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Curiosity's Hit-and-Run Leads to Another Martian Discovery
The white planet? The "Tintina" rock Curiosity cut through in its travels (NASA/JPL-Caltech) Back in January, the Mars Curiosity rover did what it was built to do: It plowed over some rock. On this...
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The 'Canonical' Image of a Drone Is a Rendering Dressed Up in Photoshop
The media of the drone war is not like the media of World War II or Vietnam. Largely, it does not exist outside official government releases. We see the aftermath of explosions, sometimes, but almost...
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Chill Out, People: We Still Do Not Know If Voyager 1 Has Left the Solar System
NASA For 35 years, a spaceship built here on this planet has been flying away from our planet. And today, on this momentous day of March 20, 2013, the American Geophysical Union put out a press release...
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The Engines That Propelled Us Into Space, Recovered From the Ocean Floor
A Saturn V thrust chamber, found on the Atlantic floor (Bezos Expeditions) On July 16, 1969, a rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida launched three humans into space, destination moon. They were hurtled...
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The Coming Age of Space Colonization
A crescent earth rises above the lunar horizon. (NASA/Reuters) Our new issue — yes! subscribe! — contains a two-page Q&A I conducted with Eric C. Anderson. He has had a variety of tech and...
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How Children Use iPads
A few years into the touch-screen era, the sight of a child as young as two bent over an iPad can still be astonishing. "Norman Rockwell never painted Boy Swiping Finger on Screen," observes Hanna...
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A Problem Google Has Created for Itself
Over the eons I've been a fan of, and sucker for, each latest automated system to "simplify" and "bring order to" my life. Very early on this led me to the beautiful-and-doomed Lotus Agenda for my DOS...
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NASA or MOMA? Play the Game!
One of the most enduring and inspiring side effects of space exploration is the pictures -- pictures of Earth taken from new heights; pictures of Earth's neighbors, taken from new angles; pictures that...
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