Augmented Reality Is Transforming Museums
New York’s Museum of Modern Art is under siege. Well, a virtual siege, at least. A group of renegade artists has co-opted the brightly-lit Jackson Pollock gallery on the museum’s fifth floor, turning it into their personal augmented reality playground. To the uninitiated, the gallery remains unchanged; Pollock’s distinctive drip paintings are as prominent and…
Puerto Rico’s Slow-Motion Medical Disaster
Hurricane Maria left a ruined island and 16 Puerto Rico residents dead. But public health experts worry that figure could climb higher in the coming weeks, as many on the island fail to get medicines or treatment they need for chronic diseases. Roads are blocked, supplies are stuck at the ports, and only 49 of…
The Brotox Boom: Why More Men Are Turning to Plastic Surgery
Brent looks like the archetypal thirtysomething tech guy. Clad in dark jeans and a button-up, the marketing director fits right in at his startup in San Jose. He landed the gig with the usual Silicon Valley pedigree, having worked at a couple of startups and Fortune 500 companies. He keeps a regimented gym schedule. He’s…
The Only Place You Can Legally Climb a Redwood
Dangling like a piñata from a polyester rope, I’m inching up a 1,000-year-old tree named Grandfather. This forest in Northern California’s Santa Cruz Mountains is said to be the only place where one can legally climb a redwood. I’ve covered about 100 feet in 30 minutes, halfway to the top. Suspended in my saddle—a sort…
Just How Much Food Do Cities Squander?
This story originally appeared on Citylab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Last winter, teams of researchers in three US cities donned goggles, gloves, and respirators, tore into bags of other people’s household garbage, and then pawed though the contents. Separating slimy banana peels from clumps of coffee grounds was dirty work, but it had a laudable…
Witches, Frog-Gods, and the Deepening Schism of Internet Religions
In its four decades, the internet has seen a lot of conceptual alchemy, but there's nothing quite so odd as the Cult of Kek. The maybe-maybe-not religion is the brainchild of the so-called alt-right, some of whom claim to believe not only in white supremacy, but also in the supremacy of an ancient Egyptian deity…
It's Past Time for You To Ditch That Fancy Scientific Calculator
Bruce Sherwood, the co-author of Matter and Interactions, had a question for me when I saw him at the American Association of Physics Teachers conference not long ago: "What calculator do you use?" If this seems odd, well, it was a conference of physics teachers. I responded with something along the lines of "I don't…
Author Marlon James' New Epic Topples Fantasy Tropes
The first installment of Marlon James' Dark Star trilogy tests the reader's commitment. "The child is dead. There is nothing left to know." Of course, that's not entirely true—620 pages follow. James, a deft stylist with a taste for violence and grand revelation (just look to his Man Booker Prize–winning historical saga, 2014's A Brief…
Resurrecting a Long-Lost Galapagos Giant Tortoise
If you go to Floreana Island, in the Galapagos, you can still see descendants of the giant tortoises that Darwin documented in the 19th century when he visited these islands. From the dock, just weave between indolent sea lions and impassive ruby-red marine iguanas and ask around for the truck to the highlands. It’ll be…
See How Human Activity Is Changing Animal Migration Patterns
This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Zozu, like any other white stork in Europe, typically flies to southern Africa for the winter. Yet when researchers at Germany’s Max Plank Institute for Ornithology tracked the bird’s path using a GPS logger in 2016, they found that he and a few others had…