Elon Musk is kinda worried about AI. (“AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization and I don’t think people fully appreciate that,” as he put it in 2017.) So he helped found a research nonprofit, OpenAI, to help […]
In 2011, the storied space shuttle flew for the last time. Three spacecraft survive in retirement as specimens in museums around the country. But the program isn’t dead yet: Many of its parts are popping up as zombie components in […]
Last night, NASA reached out one final time to the Opportunity rover on Mars, hoping the golf-cart-sized machine would phone home with good news. Since June, the robot has been unresponsive, likely because a planet-wide sandstorm coated its solar panels […]
In November 2016, a team of scientists from the Medical Research Council in Gambia visited primary schools armed with hundreds of beige-colored nylon socks. Handing them out to children there aged five to 14, the researchers instructed them to wear […]
Fire is chaos. Fire doesn’t care what it destroys or who it kills—it spreads without mercy, leaving total destruction in its wake, as California’s Camp and Woolsey fires proved so dramatically this month. But fire is to a large degree […]
I remember the first time I had to deal with a faulty relay. My garage door opener had stopped working, and my kids were tired of going out in the rain to open the garage door manually. (It's my job […]
In 2003, San Francisco set the lofty objective of getting to zero waste by 2020. By that timeline, the city should soon be performing a ceremonial burial for the last pair of broken headphones and closing down its moldering landfills. […]
One day humans will have a permanent presence on the moon. Right? One day it's going to happen. So, how are we going to live on the moon? And maybe a more important question—how are we going to move around […]
If aliens are trying to talk to us (or even if they are not), Jill Tarter will be the one to find them. She cofounded the SETI institute in 1984 and ran its research center for many years. She was […]
It’s not every day that industrial machining sends you into a fit of joy. But today could be that day. If you spend time on the internet, you might have come across GIFs of metal parts fitting together so precisely […]