Last spring, filmmaker Paul Hough got a eerie bit of intel from his 12-year-old daughter: Apparently, an empty school bus had been spotted in their Los Angeles neighborhood, cruising around without any passengers inside. For Hough, a horror writer and filmmaker, the chilling incident proved inspirational. He quickly got to work on a video, titled […]
Pain is an indispensable tool for survival. The prick of a nail underfoot is a warning that protects you from a deep, dirty wound—and maybe tetanus. The sizzle of a steel skillet is a deterrent against a third-degree burn. As much as it sucks, pain, oddly enough, keeps us from hurting ourselves. It's a luxury […]
The middle of the TV season—aka the start of the new year—usually signals the closest thing television has to a midlife crisis. Sometimes it tries to reconnect with college friends. Sometimes it just tries something new and edgy. It can be a time of rejuvenation, or a desperate grab at relevance. But in the Age […]
This video shows a battle between samurai with jet packs. Don't get excited—it's fake. How do I know? There are a few obvious signs of fake-itude, starting with the shaking camera. This battle was likely recorded on a hand held phone—and if you went to all the trouble of creating a rocket pack, couldn't you […]
Try to think back to a time when the internet wasn’t a toxic mix of rage and false equivalence. Trick question! It’s always been. But for a few glorious years in the 1990s, it was also glittery and welcoming and amateurish and wonderful and absurd. It was the age of Geocities, and an era Marvel […]
After decades of heavy slog with no promise of success, quantum computing is suddenly buzzing with almost feverish excitement and activity. Nearly two years ago, IBM made a quantum computer available to the world: the 5-quantum-bit (qubit) resource they now call (a little awkwardly) the IBM Q experience. That seemed more like a toy for […]
Let me say this right off the bat: Most film geeks write down their predictions for the Oscars. This isn't that kind of story. Everything here is based on opinion, not on what will or should win. Play-along-at-home fans who fill out Oscar ballots each year often do one with their heads and one with […]
Humans lives their lives trapped in a glass cage of perception. You can only see a limited range of visible light, you can only taste a limited range of tastes, you can only hear a limited range of sounds. Them’s the evolutionary breaks. But machines can kind of leapfrog over the limitations of natural selection. […]
How best to describe this week? Oh, yes, this: It was the meme that captured the internet’s imagination, and provided a distraction from all the other news in the world last week. Because it the last seven days have pretty much been a garbage fire. Don’t believe us? Here’s what else was going on while […]
If you want to understand the personality of a material, study its electrons. Table salt forms cubic crystals because its atoms share electrons in that configuration; silver shines because its electrons absorb visible light and reradiate it back. Electron behavior causes nearly all material properties: hardness, conductivity, melting temperature. Quanta Magazine About Original story reprinted […]