How Facts Failed Us: Reckoning With Trump and Truth
From the nation’s founding, it’s always been fashionably American to rebel. Ours is a land of particular obsessions: food, war, success. Over time, though, our civic obsession with resistance, and how one deploys it for personal design, has taken an unsightly form. Just look to Donald Trump; he resists irresistible truth with the flagrant abandon…
China Wants to Make a Mark in Space—But It'll Need a Little Help
In a China Global Television Network video from 2003, taikonaut Yang Liwei leans back in his orbital capsule, the overstuffed stripes of his spacesuit legs filling the frame. His helmet shield is up, so the viewer can gaze into his eyes as he speaks: “Greetings to people around the world!” His eyes move leftward, out…
Donut County Is the Most Delightfully Madcap Puzzle Game of 2018
Donut County, an ersatz version of Los Angeles County filled with donut-loving denizens, has some problems. They are strange sinkholes around town, growing as they devour, eating up restaurants and homesteads and people. The game works like this: Somebody, somewhere in Donut County orders a donut on a fancy new app. You, as the proprietor…
A Freaky Humanoid Robot That Sweats as It Does Push-Ups
Continuing their quest to make me feel even worse about being a lazy human, robots can now do sit-ups and push-ups and something called a back extension, which I had to look up because that’s how lazy I am. Today in Science Robotics, researchers from the University of Tokyo show off a humanoid that is…
The Good Place’s Janet Is the Most Optimistic AI on TV
Science fiction is where artificial intelligence goes to suffer. In nearly every robot-adjacent story, artificial lifeforms succeed in achieving sentience only to realize that they are abjectly, unendingly oppressed. That realization kicks off an array of terrible events: suicide, submission, or rebellion leading, most often, to death. But these dire possibilities are limited only by…
America’s Secret Ice Base Won’t Stay Frozen Forever
This story originally appeared on Atlas Obscura and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The creation of Camp Century, from the outset, was an audacious scheme. Under the thick ice of Greenland, a scant 800 miles from the North Pole, the US military built a hidden base of ice tunnels, imagined as an extensive network of railway tracks,…
The Spider-Man: Far From Home Trailer Raises Some Questions
Early this morning, Tom Holland, aka Peter Parker aka Spider-Man in Marvel's movies, took to Instagram to reveal the first trailer for Spider-Man: Far From Home. (He tried to, at least. There were a few technical difficulties before he finally got it uploaded.) The broad strokes of the clip match up with what we already…
YouTuber David Dobrik's Biggest Crush Is Still Ariana Grande
David Dobrik is an extremely popular YouTube personality—his vlogs have attracted nearly 10 million subscribers and counting. Yet, for all of his reach, he has yet to win over another creator very well-liked on YouTube: Ariana Grande. (Her video for "thank u, next" has gotten more than 118 million views in less than a week.)…
Captain Marvel Is About Female Power—Not Empowerment
If there's one line, one quote, that will endure from Captain Marvel, it'll likely be this one from Carol Danvers herself: "What happens when I'm finally set free?" It's rhetorical. Danvers says this as she's coming to realize the true awesomeness of her powers. For years, she's had her past hidden from her, been gaslighted…
The Shipping Industry Sets Sail Toward a Carbon-Free Future
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Cargo-shipping regulators have struck a historic deal to set their dirty fuel-burning industry on a low-carbon course. On Friday, the International Maritime Organization agreed for the first time to limit greenhouse gas emissions from global shipping. The nonbinding deal marks a critical shift for the…