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 […]
Arguably, there’s no bad time to watch horror movies. Everything from summer slashers to Silent Night, Deadly Night has its time and place. That said, Halloween season really is the best time to settle in with a good gory flick. Whether you’re planning to head to the theater to check out David Gordon Green’s Halloween, […]
In the summer of 2008, Rich Juzwiak was working as a culture writer for VH1’s website, a job that required him to keep up with a daunting assortment of reality-television shows. Some were well-established hits: Survivor, The Apprentice, Big Brother. Others were single-season oddities, like The White Rapper Show or Crowned. No matter what show […]