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Astronauts Snag Dramatic Photographs of Alaska's Erupting Volcano
Astronauts living on board the International Space Station managed to get these dramatic pictures of the Pavlof Volcano as it erupted over the weekend. The volcano began acting up last Monday, the...
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'Real Books From Real Trees for Real People': Microsoft's Fun eBook...
In late 1999, Microsoft created an ad for its upcoming 'Microsoft Reader' software. The headline blared, "This is a story about the future of reading," and underneath the story about the company's...
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Ghost Army: The Inflatable Tanks That Fooled Hitler
A Ghost Army halftrack with a speaker mounted on the back for "sonic deception" (National Archives) Bill Blass was one of them. So was Ellsworth Kelly. And Arthur Singer. And Art Kane. Before these...
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Two Bits of Life-Getting-Better Tech News
1) Amtrak suddenly has much better Wi-Fi service on some routes -- starting with the Acela I am taking right now from DC to NY. Of course I admit that griping about the speed and reliability of a...
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The 'Dance of the Planets' Is an Actual Thing, and It's Happening Now
Prom night! In 2009, in the night sky over the Very Large Telescope observatory at Paranal, Chile, the moon "danced" with Venus and Jupiter. (ESO/Wikimedia Commons) It's prom season -- for the...
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The 'Dance of the Planets' Is an Actual Thing, and It's Happening Now
Prom night! In 2009, in the night sky over the Very Large Telescope observatory at Paranal, Chile, the moon "danced" with Venus and Jupiter. (ESO/Wikimedia Commons) It's prom season -- for the...
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Get Ready: Google Just Went to the Galapagos, and Pretty Soon You'll Go Too...
Chrisophe Bailhache of the Catlin Seaview Survey, a Google partner, navigates the underwater camera through a group of sea lions. (Google/Catlin Seaview Survey) On Sunday, a team of Googlers returned...
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Do You and Google Need a Relationship Counselor?
Reuters If you're not paying for a product, the saying goes, then you're the product being sold. Another way of saying this is that you and Google -- and you and Twitter, and you and Facebook -- do...
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Not Safe for Anything: Don't Watch This Cicada Cam
Live video by Animal Planet L!ve Oh, god, Science Channel! What are you doing to us? As if a continental-scale INSECT INVASION was not enough. As if the fact that the cicada invasion is a "frenzy of...
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McKinsey Names the Most Over-Hyped (and Under-Hyped) Major Technologies Out...
The McKinsey Global Institute specializes in measuring the unmeasurable. Who else has the audacity to appraise the Internet but MGI, who slapped a $8 trillion price tag on the global digital economy....
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Xbox One: Our Servers Will Have More Power Than All the Computers in 1999!...
Marc Whitten stands in front of an army of servers (Microsoft). Watching the reveal of the Xbox One this week, one particular claim about Microsoft's new console caught my ear. Marc Whitten, the...
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You Didn't Have Any Lions to Run From, So You Clicked on This
Click here to avoid getting devoured by this guy. (Shutterstock/counterspell) So here you are, once again, on the Internet. (Hello, there. Welcome back, friend.) Here you are, another Norm within the...
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The Future of Brick-and-Mortar Retailers? Turning Into Datacenters
Sears! Once the catalog king, then an eminent brick-and-mortar retailer, and now, perhaps, a real-estate holding company that leases out space for computers that power the cloud. Data Center Knowledge...
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This Orchestra Played 'Carmen' ... Using Smartphones and Tablets
On April 30, the Czech National Symphony Orchestra got together to do something utterly ordinary: play Georges Bizet's opera Carmen. One element made this performance slightly less ordinary, though:...
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WikiLeaks, the Film: Massive Leaks Are a Natural Response to Government...
The story of WikiLeaks is recent history, so recent that to call it "history" at all seems like a misdirection. We have not seen the end of this narrative: Bradley Manning's trial is set to begin in...
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How to Groom a Glorious Mustache in Space
Astronauts are, by necessity if not always by nature, a tidy bunch. When you watch them doing their thing on the International Space Station, they're almost always clean-cut and clean-shaven. This is...
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The First Long-Distance Telegraph Message, Sent This Day in 1844: 'What Hath...
This strip of paper records the first ever message sent by telegraph, a feat that occurred on this day in 1844. Standing in the chamber of the Supreme Court, Samuel B. Morse sent a 19-letter message...
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'I'm, Like, Forced to. I Don't Know Why. Facebook Takes Up My Whole Life.'
Shutterstock/D. Hammonds Casey Schwartz, an eighth-grader in Millburn, NJ, is 14 years old. She got her first computer (a toy) when she was 18 months old. She got her first cellphone (a real one) when...
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7 Reasons Killer Whales Are Evil Geniuses
Over at Wired Science, a photographer caught a stunning sequence of a killer whale in Monterey Bay flipping a dolphin out of the water and then eating it. Apparently, they do this regularly! "I have...
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The Most Terrifying Description of Ocean Swimming I've Ever Read
You ever heard of the cookiecutter shark, Isistius brasiliensis? I hadn't either until Phenomena's Ed Yong told me about it today. "It's a small cat-sized animal with chocolate-coloured skin, a rounded...
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