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Should We All Stop Taking Birth Control?
Image via What is our obsession with the “natural” state of humanity? As if that is a thing, a truer state—a toolless, techless, laudable past we ought to revere. We’re urged to unplug; every time I...
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Do Certain Mental Illnesses Have a Common Cause?
Photo via Flickr / CC. Mental illness has long mystified physicians with its convoluted etiology. In a seemingly boundless constellation of likely causal agents behind the maladies of the mind, few...
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How to Cook on Mars
Image: HI-SEAS There are plenty of reasons that cosmonauts and futurists the world over have been fascinated with the prospect of traveling to Mars—but food isn't one of them. But even if you're intent...
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Cassette Tapes Are Almost Cool Again
Image via Frédéric Bisson/Flickr Tapes are due for a midlife crisis. Invented in 1963 by Lou Ottens and later introduced at the Funkausstellung radio exhibition in Berlin, compact cassettes would go on...
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Cutting Soot and Methane Alone Won't Slow Down Global Warming
Photo: La Melodie/Flickr Over the past several years a number of studies have touted the potential advantages in reducing global warming by reducing short-lived climate pollutants such as black carbon...
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The Defense Department Thinks Troves of Personal Data Pose a National...
Image via Flickr Just when you thought things over at the Department of Defense couldn't get any nuttier, the Pentagon is now crowdsourcing US national security—to protect the country from the looming...
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The Anti-Mosquito Patch Is a Crowdfunding Juggernaut
As I was out in the woods over the weekend, the bug spray was keeping the mosquitoes from biting, but it sure wasn’t keeping them away from me and out of my ears. That high-pitched whine is enough to...
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We Asked Mars One Applicants Why They Want to Leave This Planet Forever
Image via the Mars One site Some offers are too good to be true. For the aspiring space cadet, Bas Lansdorp has proposed an opportunity to change the lives of cosmically inclined daydreamers across the...
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The European Space Agency Is Unlocking the Mystery of Mars's Interior
The inside of Mars is full of secrets. Via NASA/JPL It’s been almost 40 years since humans started exploring Mars up close, with landers and rovers on the surface and probes in orbit. And we’ve gained...
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Liquid Crystals Slowed Down the Speed of Light a Billionfold
This liquid crystal display can be used in a device to measure items traveling one trillionth of a meter per second. Photo: Dong Wei. Even in Elon Musk's Hyperloop, you'd only be going a fraction of...
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Death in the Getty's Online Open Content Project
Paul Gauguin (French, 1848 - 1903) Arii Matamoe (The Royal End), 1892, Oil on coarse fabric On Monday, the Getty, the world famous California-based institution dedicated to the understanding and...
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The Feds Think a Database Can Stop Chemical Plants from Exploding
A chemical plant in Corpus Christie, Texas. Photo via Jay Phagan/Flickr Nearly four months after a tiny fertilizer factory in West, Texas exploded into a disaster of historic proportions, the Obama...
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Extreme Weather and Climate Change Are Stuck in a Vicious Cycle
Photo: Flickr/jczart It seems like every other week, a scientist is warning us that global climate change is going to lead to more extreme weather events. (Maybe we should listen?) But this week, we...
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Life on the Fringes of Cyberculture: An Interview with Gareth Branwyn
Gareth Branwyn says the cyberpunk ethos lives on today in the maker movement. Photo courtesy Scott Beale. A decades-long career as a writer cyberculture pioneer has landed Gareth Branwyn in some...
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Researchers Say the Internet of Things Could Piggyback on Existing Networks
There's a reason people are so hyped up about the coming internet of things, and it's because if and when ubiquitous computing actually comes to pass it'll be amazingly surreal. A couple of credit...
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The British Library's Wi-fi Blocked Hamlet, But These 14 Classics Are Way...
Hamlet's death, via Will Hart/Flickr. A man in the British Library was trying to reference Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when he was thwarted by the filter on the library’s WiFi. The BBC reported that the...
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High Food Prices Are Fueling Egypt's Riots—and Those in Brazil, Turkey, and...
Image: Flickr Conflict continues to sweep Egypt, and the death toll is rising fast. Demonstrators protesting ex-president Mohammed Morsi's ouster are the latest victims, and they number at least in the...
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Why Are Search Trends for Classic Psychedelics Just Kinda Meh?
via chrisidone. Not to say people on (in) the internet are any less obsessed with brain-blasting drugs than they already are. Just toggle around this Google Trends chart and you'll see, among things,...
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Why You Should Learn Another Language
Just think, next time you're in a Parisian library, you could actually read things! Via Loops San/Flickr Being an adult is hard. And in our vast techno-digital landscape, there are millions of...
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Today's Coeds Are Having Less Sex Than Gen Xers Did
Image via Flickr A college campus is considered one of the best place to get laid. You might expect that with over 80 percent of incoming freshmen toting smartphones in 2012—and nearly all with...
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