Maybe it's just us, but it seems as though everyone was on pins and needles last week. Between the looming shutdown of the US government, fretting over President Trump praising anti-abortion efforts, and everyone wondering just why Ja Rule was a trending topic on Twitter (no, really, why?), there was a lot of cause for […]
Each winter, crackling and splintering ice echoes across the Uncompahgre Gorge, roughly 10 miles northeast of Telluride, Colorado. The sound signals high season at Ouray Ice Park, the world’s first and largest man-made frozen climbing grounds. The gorge’s walls are crisscrossed by 2 miles of pipes, crowned by a network of valves, showerheads, and faucets. […]
About four minutes into the VR experience Lambchild Superstar, you start to feel like you’re on acid at Coachella. (Not that we’d know about that kind of thing.) Instead of watching a life-changing Beyoncé performance, though, you’re the one making the music … and one of the instruments is a magic-mushroom-eating cow that farts notes […]
Since NASA’s Juno mission began orbiting Jupiter and sending data back to Earth last July, Juno scientists have all sounded pretty alike: They are very excited, and very confused. “Almost nothing is as we anticipated,” Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton told WIRED in May. “But it’s exciting that Jupiter is so different than we assumed.” […]
In this moment, there is only one thing I wish to know, and those are the words coming out of Sylvester Stallone’s mouth—if indeed they are words. I’m watching Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. Incomprehensibly, Stallone has a small part in it, speaking, as he often does, incomprehensibly. But, gosh, he looks very important. […]
Well, Solo: A Star Wars Story has a poster now and J.J. Abrams is done with the script for Star Wars: Episode IX, which is set to begin shooting in July, so things are definitely moving forward in the galaxy far, far away. But the 18-month gap between those two releases is the longest between […]
Less than 24 hours before I arrive at HBO’s offices in midtown Manhattan on an early April morning, Saheed Vassell is fatally gunned down by police in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood weathering the cruel agony of gentrification. Vassell’s death was preceded by that of Stephon Clark on March 18 in Sacramento, and of Decynthia […]
It's still near the beginning of the semester for most introductory physics courses—so it's not too late to give some physics advice. I know it might be hard to believe—at least it is for me—but I have been a physics educator in one form or another for over 20 years. In all that time, I […]
Recently, I was hungry. So I told the Whole Foods chatbot what I had in my fridge, and it revealed that a bacon, lettuce, and heirloom tomato sandwich was mine for the making. Yum. Then, out of boredom, I booted up the movie-recommendation bot And Chill, which suggested I watch Jake Gyllenhaal repeatedly relive the […]
The baby was still in diapers when the first blister appeared, ballooning red and angry from his pale, newborn skin. Soon, they became a regular feature on the map of his body, along with deep creases in his face when he howled out in pain. A doctor told the parents his LAMB3 gene had a […]