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India's Last Telegram Will Be Sent in July
A stamp for the Indo-European Telegraph, circa 1967 (Shutterstock/rook76) In 1850, the British inventor William O'Shaughnessy -- who would later become famous for his early experiments with medical...
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NSA Leak Catch-Up: The Latest on the Edward Snowden Fallout
Fiber optic cables (Reuters). It's been two weeks since the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers began to publish their stories based on leaks and interviews with former NSA contractor, Edward...
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Confirmed: 1-Billion-Year-Old Water Tastes 'Terrible'
J. Telling Last month, a paper published in Nature reported on some water that had been trapped 1.5 miles below the Earth's surface in Canada for a long while. How long? Based on an analysis of the...
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Here's What Happens When You Light a Fire in Space
"When it comes to fire," says physics professor Forman A. Williams, "we're just getting started." Take the flame of a candle, the kind you might find on a birthday cake. The flame takes the familiar...
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What the Kids Are Doing: A Search Engine for 4 Million Vines
Vine is hard to explain. It's an app that lets you make and share six-second videos, which sounds absurd. But it's kind of fun, and especially since being acquired by Twitter, it has grown in...
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The Problem of the Chair
HumanscaleThe death of the industrial designer Niels Diffrient as noted by this New York Times obituary is still hard to believe, given his vitality and productivity at 84. I've already noted here how...
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Enbrel and the Autoimmune Era
Enbrel is one of the top ten drugs in the U.S. by sales, garnering the pharmaceutical giants who co-market the drug, Amgen and Pfizer, billions of dollars in revenue annually. People take Enbrel for...
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Machines Can't Flow: The Difference Between Mechanical and Human Productivity
Workers punching the clock at the SKF roller bearing factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Library of Congress) At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it seemed machines could do anything. At that...
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'Ads by Google': A Billion-Dollar Brainstorm Turns 10
Shutterstock/Nata-Lia On June 18, 2003, Google made an announcement. Following the successful launch of AdWords, the firm was going to extend its search-based ad program with a new service that would...
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What It's Like to See the Aurora From Space
These astronauts, Mike Massimino and Don Pettit, are a bit blasé about the view of the aurora from Earth. "One of the things that we've noticed," Massimino says, "is that when you see something, you...
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The Strange, Sad City of Baikonur, the World's Gateway to the Heavens
Wikimedia Commons When three astronauts rocketed off the Earth and headed to the International Space Station, they left from southern Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome, on the outskirts of a city of the...
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Google: The Xbox One Is 'Terrible'; Bing: The Xbox One Is 'Amazing'
Here's a fun game: do a Google search for "the xbox one is." And then do a Bing search for the same thing. You'll likely get results like Twitterer @evlbzltyr did -- and like I did, too, in the image...
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Where Rich People Live (AKA Maps of iPhone Use)
Our stuff often says a lot about us, whether we own a hybrid car or a station wagon, a MacBook Pro or an ancient desktop. And this is no less true of our smart phones, sold on a sharply divided market...
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Here You Go, Taxpayers: A Billion-Pixel Image of Mars
This, to be clear, is not the full billion-pixel image. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS) The main purpose of the Mars Science Laboratory's mission to the red planet is exactly what its name suggests: science....
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What the Digital Brains of the Future Might Be Like
Alexis Madrigal It is the rare entrepreneur who hits it truly big twice. Those who do -- such as Ev Williams, Ted Turner, and Elon Musk -- tend to stay within the original industry that made them. In...
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Kryptonite Is Crap
Earthly kimberlite photographed by Siim Sepp. Made galactic plot device by Ian Bogost. Superman debuted in Detective Comics' (known now as DC Comics) Action Comics #1 in April of 1938. It depicted...
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The 'Batman' Theme Song, Made With Sounds From Actual Bats
Ever wondered what the "Batman" theme song would sound like when performed by a collection of actual bats? Neither had I. And only partially because bats' sounds, for worse but probably for better,...
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#TeamVine: Instagram Has Video Now, but Not a Video-Making Culture
If you post videos on Instagram, I'm judging you. 🙉 #TeamVine-- Morgan Savage (@morgan_savage) June 20, 2013 Instagram, i.e. Facebook, announced that users of the photo-sharing service can now make...
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3D Printing: Not Every Hobby Turns Into the PC Industry
This week, 3D printing company Stratasys purchased another 3D printing company, MakerBot, for at least $403 million worth of Stratasys shares. The move makes the newly combined company the undisputed...
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Drone Over Washington
STML/Flickr Before you set foot in James Bridle's new exhibit at D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery of Art, you will likely walk directly on top of its largest work: an outline of a Reaper drone, as though it...
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