Is Trump's NASA Nominee Ready to Tackle Climate Change?
Science and the people who study it have taken a pretty big beating during the first year of the Trump administration. Trump has appointed climate science skeptics and outright deniers to head the Environmental Protection Agency (Scott Pruitt), the Department of Energy (Rick Perry), and the Council on Environmental Quality (Kathleen Hartnett). Trump’s nominee to…
HTC's Most Important CES Announcement Isn't the New Vive Pro Headset
This week at the Consumer Electronics Show, HTC unveiled a new headset as part of its Vive virtual-reality line. The Vive Pro isn't an entirely new generation of VR hardware, but it's an impressive incremental upgrade, boasting integrated audio, a 2880 x1600 display that matches Samsung's Odyssey as the highest-resolution consumer headset, and improved ergonomic…
Westworld Is Turning Into Lost—for Better or for Worse
I never should have started watching Westworld. Not because I didn’t think it’d be good. An HBO show based on a Michael Crichton idea starring Evan Rachel Wood with all kinds of artificial intelligence? Sign me up! The problem wasn’t that Westworld wouldn’t be enjoyable, it was that it’s the kind of show that invites…
Star Wars: The Last Jedi Will Bother Some People. Good.
There is a scene in Star Wars: The Last Jedi—I won’t say too much, but you'll see it yourself—where a young Asian woman does a brave, selfless thing to help the Resistance. It’s a very sweet, very Star Wars Hero Moment, but it's also an important one. Los Angeles Times film writer Jen Yamato called…
Stop Expecting Games to Build Empathy
What do games do for us—and what do we owe them for that? It's an odd question, but it seems to come up, in one form or another, whenever a gaming controversy hits the news. Gaming is no longer a young medium, but it's still somewhat opaque from the outside, which makes games an easy…
The Astonishing Engineering Behind America's Latest, Greatest Supercomputer
If you want to do big, serious science, you’ll need a serious machine. You know, like a giant water-cooled computer that’s 200,000 times more powerful than a top-of-the-line laptop and that sucks up enough energy to power 12,000 homes. You’ll need Summit, a supercomputer nearing completion at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. When…
From Get Out to Wonder Woman, These Were the 10 Best Movies of 2017
All told, 2017 was a surprisingly great year for movies. There were wickedly smart horror flicks like Get Out, wonderfully imaginative superhero movies like Thor Ragnarok, and brilliant dramas like Lady Bird. There was also a little thing called Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Not every flick was perfect, but there were a lot of…
This Gene-Editing Tech Might Be Too Dangerous To Unleash
To get to work in the morning, Omar Akbari has to pass through a minimum of six sealed doors, including an air-locked vestibule. The UC Riverside entomologist studies the world’s deadliest creature: the Aedes aegypti mosquito, whose bite transmits diseases that kill millions each year. But that’s not the reason for all the extra security.…
Is a Meme Born in a Private Account Still a Meme?
I write a lot about memes—the phenomenon, writ large. So it caught me off guard last week when, scrolling through Instagram, I found myself barred from the very thing I was reporting on. Major meme accounts were suddenly private, and left my follow requests dangling—for days and days. I was reduced to trawling through the…
What Biotech CEOs (and Their Funders) Learned From the Theranos Debacle
The collapse of the diagnostic company Theranos shook the world of venture-funded biotechnology. Theranos was a “unicorn,” valued by its investors at $9 billion at one point. That made its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, the youngest woman billionaire in the world for inventing a technology that, she said, allowed pharmacies and doctors’ offices to do a…