Hulu's Political Dramas Are Winning the Streaming Game
Last September, Hulu became the first streaming service to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama when its original series Handmaid's Tale bested traditional network heavy-hitters like Westworld, Better Call Saul, and This Is Us. When it won, it seemed to be in part because it was the right show at the right time: the dystopic…
You Too Can Fly a Spacecraft Around Mars—With Physics!
Recently, I gave my introductory physics course a fairly standard problem, based on the Matter and Interactions textbook. I've modified the question, but it goes something like this: Here's a diagram showing the spacecraft at the two different positions (along with a vector indicating the velocity). I suppose I should state that the only significant…
Meet the Star Wars Fans Building a Full-Scale Millennium Falcon
In the world of Star Wars fandom, there are fans, and then there are fans: the cosplayers, the Funko completists, the crawl-reciters. And then there's Greg Dietrich, who has spent the last six years of his free time building a full-size replica of the Millennium Falcon’s iconic cockpit in a garage in Huntsville, Alabama. Today,…
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…
Can Soccer-Playing Robots Kick It? Yes They Can!
The world may not agree 100 percent on what to call it, but we can all agree that soccer/football is indeed the Beautiful Game. Not just from an individual athleticism standpoint, but also the teamwork: Soccer is a lovely ballet, only with more kicking and tripping and hooliganism. Which makes the robots of the RoboCup…
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…