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Wiretapping Undersea Fiber Optics Is Easy: It's Just a Matter of Money
Image: Submarine Cable Map A few weeks ago, more NSA leak-related news broke: it turned out the US government was tapping into undersea cables. The operation's code name? Fairview. The revelation was...
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Guerrilla Painters Are Fighting for Beirut's Public Spaces
Painting in Geitawi With its long history as a colonial chew toy, Beirut is blessed and cursed with an extremely layered, complex urban fabric. The city has been planned, constructed, and modeled in...
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'The Truman Show' Was Prophetic
Peter Weir's The Truman Show, written by science fiction screenwriter Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, In Time), is remembered for several things. Its tiny, embedded cameras in every nook and cranny of the...
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These Robot Snakes Can Slither Through Nuclear Power Plants That Are Melting...
Image via CMU Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute has developed modular snake robots to navigate the labyrinthine pipes, valves, nooks and crannies of power plants. Scientists tested the snakes in the...
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Life Satisfaction Peaks at 23, Craters in Your Mid-50s, Rises Again at 69
Happy Birthday, Larry? via Joi/Flickr Ah, remember after you graduated college? You were going to take on the world! You were educated and young; your friends still lived in town. Your loans were still...
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I Watched James Deen Make the First-Ever Google Glass Porn
I sat across the table from the porn star James Deen, and all I could think about was that in the very near future he would be wearing nothing but my pair of Google Glass, and doing what he does best....
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Huge Heliostatic Mirrors Are Rigging Artificial Sunlight in Norway
Images courtesy of Visit Rjukan It’s already dark and cold in the wintertime, especially in Scandinavia. But winter in Rjukan, a small town in Norway, is about as bleak as it gets. The 3,500 residents...
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Off-Brand iPhone Charger Shocks Man into a Coma
Photo via Phil Roeder/Flickr I remember my first cell phone coming with a stern warning that I should never use it while it was plugged into the wall. I’m not sure if my latest phone came with the same...
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The Grassroots Campaign to Take Away the Spy Money: An Interview with Defund...
Image via Flickr On Wednesday, Congress is set to vote on a Defense Appropriations bill amendment that would defund the NSA's surveillance program. The amendment, proposed by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI)...
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These Photos of NASA Staff Dressed Up as Vikings Started a Congressional...
Photos by Ved Chirayath I guess Congress must not have a lot of pressing concerns right now, because Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa is taking the time to investigate a series of photographs of NASA...
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The North Pole Looks Like a Lake Today
Photo: NPEO What you're looking at above is an image taken today by the North Pole Environmental Observatory webcam. The water you see isn't sea water, rather it's a large meltwater lake sitting on...
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The Viral Success of Vermin Supreme
When the first presidential vote that you cast goes to a guy who would lose to George W. Bush, the hurt and cynicism takes forever to fade. It takes a truly charismatic leader to bring you back to the...
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I Shot a New Hit Movie on a 1969 Video Camera
Me with the Sony AVC 3260 on set of Computer Chess. Photos: Carlyn Hudson I have shot movies for Andrew Bujalski in the boxy 1.33:1 aspect ratio (also known as 4:3, the industry standard), or on grainy...
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Next Year, 3D Printers May Finally Make Something You Want to Keep
Image: Form Labs' Press Kit Technophiles and hackers are delighting over the expiration of key laser sintering patents in early 2014, which they think will open up the market for the next boom in 3D...
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50,000 Finns Might Have Just Crowd-Written the Nation's Next Copyright Law
Image via Flickr Oh, Finland. Home to the freest press in the world, one of the most transparent governments, the first country to make broadband access a legal right, and it crowd-sources new laws to...
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Could Living as a Virtual Cow Make You Go Vegan?
Photo by the author Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson and his colleagues at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) are transforming people into cows. Participants in their immersive virtual...
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The Solar-Powered Airplane Reaches the End of the Sky Road
The Solar Impulse from the front. All photos via Derek Mead. The Solar Impulse, after crossing the United States from California to New York without stopping for fuel once, has completed its mission...
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Like Fracking, Geothermal Power Can Cause Earthquakes
Photo: monikomad/Flickr Last week a series of studies was published in Science, which looked at the connections between energy production and earthquakes. Specifically, they examined the connection...
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"Born to Die" Electronics Dissolve When You're Done With Them
If there's one thing that's true about consumer electronics, it's that no new product stays hot for very long. The latest innovation is constantly rendering your old gadgets obsolete. In fact the...
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What Climate Change Sounds Like on a Cello
via Ensia It may not have the immediate hit of a mind-controlled cello duet, but it's a slow burn that stands to bring the harsh reality of global warming to a fever pitch. With the sweep of a bow...
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