For the last 100 years, ever since German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to pluck fertilizer out of thin air with brute-force chemistry, farmers have relied on an imperfect product to make their plants grow: fertilizer. Production of the stuff burns through 3 percent of the world’s natural gas annually, releases […]
"There's this big, ugly sucker at the door," the young woman says, her eyes twinkling, "and he said, 'Who do you think you are, Lena Horne?' I said no but that I knew Miss Horne like a sister." It's the beginning of a short soliloquy from Walton Jones' play The 1940's Radio Hour, and as […]
A year ago this week, Chinese physicists launched the world’s first quantum satellite. Unlike the dishes that deliver your Howard Stern and cricket tournaments, this 1,400-pound behemoth doesn’t beam radio waves. Instead, the physicists designed it to send and receive bits of information encoded in delicate photons of infrared light. It’s a test of a […]
If I had to describe Devil May Cry 5—and I do, it's my job—I'd call it a guitar riff. You know the type. The big, cheesy run that's trying, so hard, so very earnestly, to be cool. But it has something, some bit of inspiration and wit, that even though trying to be cool is […]
“Human enhancement with in-the-body technologies introduces new potential for both individual opportunity and individual exploitation.” —“Cyborgs, Robots and Society,” Technologies (2018) It’s not like I haven’t thought about killing the humans since I hacked my governor module. But then I started exploring the company servers and discovered hundreds of hours of downloadable entertainment media, and […]
Underwater robots do a lot of neat things—take photos of underwater volcanoes, track leopard sharks, and explore shipwrecks—but they could still learn a few things from fish. Especially the rocket-fast, insanely agile tuna. Tuna are built to cruise across oceans, usually around 2 mph. But they can crank up to 45 mph at the drop […]
Click:EGP nicotine pouches To be blind on the internet, at its worst, is to be told that you are a liar. “Every time I say I’m visually impaired,” says Casey Greer. “someone will try to shut me down, saying ‘Well then how did you type this comment?!’ It feels silly that in 2019, I always […]
Orange Is the New Black’s sentence is up. Netflix announced this week that the show’s seventh season, hitting the streaming service next year, would be its last. After that, it’s dunzo. For many viewers, this is sad news—the inmates of Litchfield have been a part of the conversation for a long time now. But for […]
The mountain of evidence connecting professional football and long-term brain damage grew this week with publication of a new study that examined the brains of former NFL players. Boston University scientists found 110 of the 111 post-mortem brains showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the […]
Smug eco-warriors may think they’re curbing global warming with their vegan diets, charged-up Teslas, and rooftop solar panels. But according to Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, we’re barely staving off disaster. He should know: The pessimistic professor has been studying sea ice for nearly 50 years. […]