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We Don't Need Exotic Fuels to Cook the Earth, Coal Will Do
flickr/fallsroad Since the 1970s, a prominent strand of the environmental community has warned of imminent energy shortage, hoping to persuade people to conserve resources and shift to alternative...
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What Has the Pursuit of Fossil Fuels Cost Us? And Who Has Had to Pay?
flickr/fatguyinalittlecoat In his piece, "What if we never run out of oil?" Charles Mann examines the possibility that new technologies and new sources of petroleum, like methane hydrate, could mean...
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The Overwhelming Proliferation of Car-Sharing Companies
Reuters The transportation industry is squarely in the crosshairs of the tech start-up industry, and the fruits of their disruption were on full display at this year's South by Southwest (SXSW), the...
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The Aurora Graces Death Valley With Its Majestic Beauty, in Timelapse
For three days and two nights in the middle of March, a team of five "starchasers" camped out in the remote wilderness of Death Valley National Park as their cameras snapped up long shots of the night...
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Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant
Should I bring an umbrella to work today? Is there a good pizza place nearby? Is there a gas station on the way to Poughkeepsie, or should I fill up now? If you are a human, these questions are easy to...
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Farewell Herschel: One of Humanity's Greatest Telescopes Will See No More
It was bound to happen sooner or later: The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope has run out of the liquid helium it uses to keep cool. With the temperatures of all instruments on board...
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Retwact: A Tool for Fixing Twitter's Misinformation Problem
Even worse than the pornbots and trolls, one of Twitter's enduring drawbacks is that there's no reliable way to issue corrections with the service. The flaw drew a truckload of attention in the wake...
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What Unconventional Fossil Fuels Change About Our Energy Picture, and What...
ReutersPart of what makes debates about energy confusing to many is that the language of resource depletion allows one to make strong and accurate claims to justify widely divergent positions. Of...
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Governments Won't Need to Issue IDs: Data Brokers Will Identify You for Them
Our government collects a lot of information about us. Tax records, legal records, license records, records of government services received-- it's all in databases that are increasingly linked and...
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Oh the Places You'll Go: 38,000 Historical Maps to Explore at New Online Library
A map from Joseph and James Churchman's 1833 volume "Rudiments of National Knowledge, Presented To The Youth Of The United States, And To Enquiring Foreigners" (David Rumsey/DPLA) More than three...
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About That Terrifying Bagram Crash Video
By now you've seen the tragic footage of a Boeing 747 cargo plane crashing soon after takeoff from Bagram airport in Afghanistan. What does this look like, from an aviation perspective? To get the...
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The World's Tiniest Movie
There's Marcel the Shell small, and then there's atomic-level small. A new movie from researchers at IBM falls in the latter camp, having been magnified about 100 million times just to be viewable....
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Interesting Software Watch: Scapple Is Out of Beta
As the years wear on, my esteem grows for the writing program Scrivener as the single best bargain ever offered in the software world. And I mean: ever. It was originally for the Mac but now comes in a...
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Are Methane Hydrates Really Going to Change Geopolitics?
Reuters The right way to understand the potential of unconventional fuels like methane hydrates and tight oil is to closely examine their production rates and their prices. If these fuels can be...
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Our Future Might Be Bright: The Tentative, Rosy Predictions of Google's Eric...
At a protest in Turkey against the Syrian regime, a demonstrator takes pictures with her mobile phone which is painted with the colours of the Syrian independence flag. (Reuters) A new book by Google...
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How Facebook Designs the 'Perfect Empty Vessel' for Your Mind
One day in March, I was sitting across from Facebook's design director, Kate Aronowitz, at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park when she told me, "It takes a lot of work to create the perfect empty vessel." In...
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Can Instagram Finally Make a Profit With Its New Tag-and-Search Feature?
Instagram just got a bit more Facebook-y, rolling out a new feature that will allow you to add tags to your photos and then search by those tags. As Instagram explained on its blog: Today, we're...
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The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard
The first time I heard the lie, I was in fifth grade. Mr. Ward took me aside (or maybe he told the whole class, it was a long time ago) to tell me about the wonders of Dvorak, a different keyboard...
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Online Media Is a Fixie: Simple, Low-Maintenance, Fun, and Dangerous
A fixed-gear bike, ready to be ridden (Shutterstock/dutourdumonde) I was running on a hot day in Denver, bikes whizzing past me ("On your left!") thinking about online media when I hit on an analogy...
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'Interesting' Software Follow-Up: Scrivener, Google's Orphans
1) Scrivener Guide. Over the years, and most recently here, I have extolled the virtues of Scrivener as a major step forward in computerized writing tools. I'm grateful to my friend MG in the United...
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