You and your favorite cheese—whether it's cheddar, Wensleydale, or a good aged goat brie—have something in common: You’re both home to a constantly evolving menagerie of microbes. The bacteria inside you and your fermented dairy live together in a community called a biome, growing and changing in response to their environments. And they adapt to […]
Happy New Year! We're back at it, with more thrilling game news. Some Blizzard alums are joining Marvel's slate of developers, a competitive player is not getting what they deserve, and big corporate shakeups roil the international market. So, really, about the same as 2018. Let's get to it. A Group of Former Hearthstone Devs […]
If Jonathan Rothberg has a superpower, it’s cramming million-dollar, mainframe-sized machines onto single semiconductor circuit boards. The entrepreneurial engineer got famous (and rich) inventing the world’s first DNA sequencer on a chip. And he’s spent the last eight years sinking that expertise (and sizeable startup capital) into a new venture: making your smartphone screen a […]
There’s teamwork—NASA putting people on the moon, for instance, or the Mighty Ducks triumphing over Team Iceland—and then there’s teamwork. A gelatinous sea creature called a salp knows this better than anyone, forming long chains of neurologically connected individuals that work together for the greater good. That is, eating and not dying. A new study […]
Games like Onimusha don't get made anymore. The underrated 2001 Capcom classic is somewhere between an arcade brawler and Resident Evil. Creeping slowly through rooms with fixed, often askew camera angles, sword drawn, the samurai protagonist hacks his way through hordes of undead demons, solving small puzzles and soaking in the ambience. It's slow, stiff, […]
Imagine a world without grapes. Someday greenhouses like the one above may be our last defense against such a fate. Beneath the glow of high-voltage lamps, dozens of crop samples grow at the Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, New York. Here, Cornell University scientists crossbreed domesticated crops with their wild ancestors to propagate superhardy strains […]
In early 2015, Netflix made one of the most dramatic deals in the company’s career, announcing it had paid close to $12 million for Beasts of No Nation, a grim war tale starring Idris Elba. By then, the streaming service had already found Emmy success with original series like House of Cards, and had even […]
God is everywhere. And according to CBS, that includes Facebook. In the network’s new show, God Friended Me, aspiring atheist podcaster Miles Finer (Brandon Micheal Hall) is just trying to endure his dead-end job—and survive his reverend dad’s upcoming anniversary sermon—until his fledgling radio show, “The Millennial Prophet,” one day lands him his dream gig: […]
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 […]