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The Power of Gear: How Technical Equipment Redefines Our Relationship With...
Photo courtesy Scott McGuire. Several years ago, when half of our team worked on the editorial staff at Dwell magazine, we took a daytrip down to the head office of The North Face to visit their...
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So You're Doing Some Rock Climbing ... When an Avalanche Strikes
Say you're rock climbing. Say you're doing said rock climbing at Via Ferrata, in St-Christophe-en-Oisans, France, which looks out over a gorge filled with beautifully turquoise glacial waters. Say...
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'People Who Thought Chechnya Was the Czech Republic,' Collectors' Edition
publicshaming.tumblr.com Twitter and Facebook, at their best, mimic person-to-person conversation: They provide a way for people to chat -- and laugh and argue and share -- unconstrained from...
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Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help...
We live in an age of information, it is said again and again. But that doesn't mean we live in an age of good information, as last week seemed intent on bearing out. In fact, quite the opposite....
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Toward an Ecological Model of Research and Development
The belief that basic or pure research lays the foundation for applied research was fixed in science policy circles by Vannevar Bush's 1945 report on Science: The Endless Frontier. Unfortunately, his...
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What Happened to Stock Markets When the AP's Twitter Account Was Hacked
Stock markets momentarily plunged after a tweet sent by the Twitter account of the Associated Press, which was apparently hacked, erroneously reported that explosions at the White House had injured US...
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The Bounty ZIP Codes Brought America
From the National Postal Museum: "Mr. Zip did not just appear in ZIP Code promotions. The Post Office Department featured Mr. Zip in an advertisement announcing the 1968 increase in postage rates."...
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Peek In on Our Strange, Wonderful World With a New Archival Video App
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Rick and Megan Prelinger, the curators of the Prelinger Archives and Prelinger Library, are a national treasure. Following their own interests and supported...
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NASA Released a Magical Timelapse of 3 Years of Solar Beauty, and We Set It...
For three years, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has been orbiting our planet, keeping its watchful eye on our sun, a star in our own backyard. During that time, we've seen amazing things:Â massive,...
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NASA Sends Cell Phones (Regular Old Cell Phones) Into Space
Brian Fung/Flickr/NASA/JPL Today, in NASA Is the Best: The space agency this week took a handful of cheap but powerful smartphones, slapped them to a gigantic rocket and blasted them into low-earth...
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Twitter Feed Got You Down? Try Following This Shepherd (Yes, a Real Shepherd)
@herdyshepherd1 I have a completely unsubstantiated theory that my social media feeds have moods. Sometimes, everyone is happy and debates are civil. Other times, people are ragged and nasty. Whether...
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6 Amazing Facts From an Amazing Obituary of a 'Human Computer'
Reuters The New York Times has up a gem of an obituary, 500 words chock-full of wonderful bits about its subject, a mathematician by the name of Shakuntala Devi, who passed away in Bangalore on Sunday...
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Hubble Dreams: The 1946 Paper Promoting a Powerful Space Telescope
NASA The Hubble Space Telescope is aging. But there was a time when it was merely a twinkle in some astronomer's eye. In fact, we know exactly who that astronomer was, and when he first told the world...
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For the First Time Ever, You Can Now Hear What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded...
Alexander Graham Bell, self-portrait (Library of Congress) On March 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke nine words that heralded our modern age of rapid long-distance communication. "Mr. Watson --...
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Google Sees More Government Requests to Remove Content Than Ever Before
In the latest edition of its Transparency Report, released this morning, Google revealed that the final six months of 2012 saw an increase in government requests to remove content -- often YouTube...
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The Meaning of (Making) Life
Christina Agapakis is a rising star among the new generation of biology researchers. Trained in the science of custom-building organisms known as synthetic biology, the UCLA researcher likes to think...
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Breaking News Is Broken. Could Buzzfeed Be the One to Fix It?
The headlines summed it up, or tried to: "Major breaking news errors." "The brokenness of breaking news." "Breaking news is broken." And, yep: Last week's big breaking news story brought, as it always...
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The Earth's Core Is as Hot as the Surface of the Sun
Wikimedia Commons A new study in Science suggests that the temperature of our planet's core is much, much hotter than previously thought -- 6,000 degrees Kelvin, compared with earlier estimations that...
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Dying in Space: An American Dream
Humanity's future? (Mars One) If you are at least 18 years of age and curious and capable and resourceful, with a capacity for self-reflection, an ability to trust other people, and a deep sense of...
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The Company That's Buying Up All the Key Pieces of the Online-News Ecosystem
msmail/FlickrIn the past couple years, an ecology of sorts has come into being among online news sites. It's the blogosphere metastized, maybe, or merged with the money of traditional media. A web...
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