High-Res Satellites Want to Track Human Activity From Space
Hopkinsville, Kentucky, is normally a mid-size town, home to 32,000 people and a big bowling ball manufacturer. But on August 21, its human density more than tripled, as around 100,000 people swarmed toward the total solar eclipse. Hundreds of miles above the crowd, high-resolution satellites stared down, snapping images of the sprawl. These satellites belong…
For Scientists Predicting Sea Level Rise, Wind Is the Biggest Unknown
From the air, the largest glacier on the biggest ice sheet in the world looks the same as it has for centuries; massive, stable, blindingly white. But beneath the surface it’s a totally different story. East Antarctica’s Totten Glacier is melting, fast, from below. Thanks to warm ocean upwellings flowing into the glacier—in some places…
American Horror Story: Apocalypse Is Ryan Murphy’s Infinity War—Here's a Primer
Young, passionate men in form-fitting costumes; folks who go by the name "witch"; monsters gleefully planning the end of civilization. No, this isn't the Marvel Cinematic Universe—it's the weird, twisted world of American Horror Story. It may not be as intricately plotted and intertwined as the MCU, but the world of Ryan Murphy’s FX anthology…
Cantina Talk: Here's a Buttload of Information About the New Star Wars Streaming Show
For those keeping a close eye on everything coming out of the galaxy far, far away, it's been a busy few weeks. Star Wars Resistance has launched, and is offering some background information on the political landscape of the galaxy. Meanwhile, the Marvel comic series filled in a missing piece of lore from the original…
AI Research Is in Desperate Need of an Ethical Watchdog
About a week ago, Stanford University researchers posted online a study on the latest dystopian AI: They'd made a machine learning algorithm that essentially works as gaydar. After training it with tens of thousands of photographs from dating sites, the algorithm could perform better than a human judge in specific instances. For example, when given…
Heaven Will Be Mine: In Space, No One Can Hear You Reach Out
It's 1981, in a version of reality where the Cold War was waged not human to human, but human to extraterrestrial enemy from beyond the stars. To fight, we developed robot bodies to wear in space; these Ship-Selves are advanced and almost unkillable, weapons and homes and clothes and identities all rolled into one. And,…
A Keen-Eyed Robot Goes to Work for a Paralyzed Veteran
In December of 2016, a team of researchers showed up at Romy Camargo's house with a better-than-average holiday gift. The front of the nondescript silver box lowered—like one of those spaceship doors from Star Wars, minus the dramatic clouds of vapor—to reveal a fetching robot, with cameras for eyes and a flatscreen for a hat.…
The 15 New Fall Shows We're Most Excited About
Not all that long ago, September brought with it a year's worth of small-screen novelty. Broadcast networks would refresh their lineups, the vast majority of which would run out their various shows' 22-episode orders, and then the reruns would begin. Other than a few midseason replacements come January, that was it; that's how TV worked.…
Why Men Don’t Believe the Data on Gender Bias in Science
Earlier this summer Google engineer James Damore posted a treatise about gender differences on an internal company message board and was subsequently fired. The memo ignited a firestorm of debate about sex discrimination in Silicon Valley; this followed months of reporting on accusations of harassment at Uber and elsewhere. Sex discrimination and harassment in tech,…
Fortnite's Marshmello Concert Is the Future of the Metaverse
By the standards of outdoor EDM performances, Marshmello's DJ set on Saturday came up a little short. Ten minutes isn't usually enough time for festival-goers to congregate in front of a stage, let alone build up to a good crescendo—but the Pleasant Park crowd had been waiting for the gig for days, and so everyone…