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Alvaro Dominguez Virtual Reality Gets Real
The promises—and pitfalls—of the emerging technology
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NASA / Reuters Supper Club on Mars
Before people can colonize the Red Planet, they have to figure out what they'll eat once they get there.
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Vivek Prakash / Reuters Air-Conditioning From Outer Space
“Air conditioning and outer space have a history that goes back further than ballpoint pens that write upside down.”
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Enny Nuraheni / Reuters 3-D Printed Drugs Are Here
The FDA just approved the first pill produced by the technique, but historians say the manufacturing process probably won’t threaten big drug companies.
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Ingrid Burrington How to See Invisible Infrastructure
I spent a weekend at the International Utility Locate Rodeo, where people compete to find hidden cables, water mains, and gas lines.
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Ariel Schalit / AP Humans, Not Robots, Are the Real Reason Artificial Intelligence Is Scary
Intelligent weapons are too easily converted by software engineers into indiscriminate killing machines.
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Ian Bogost Don’t Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone
Our telephone habits have changed, but so have the infrastructure and design of the handset.
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John Cueno / The Atlantic The Test-Tube Chef
Hervé This, the father of molecular gastronomy, thinks the meals of the future should be constructed from chemical compounds.
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Álvaro Domínguez / The Atlantic Thinking Outside the Cube
How offices will change—for better and for worse
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Noah Berger / Reuters Why There Aren't Yet Nanobot Doctors
Scientists have long said that tiny robots would soon be able to conduct surgery and deliver drugs deep inside the body. Here’s why they’re still not a reality.
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Amr Dalsh / Reuters How Driverless Cars Could Turn Parking Lots into City Parks
A huge amount of urban traffic comes from cars circling for available parking. Robot fleets could change all that.
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NASA / Swamp Works Flying a Robot Into the Volcanoes on the Dark Side of the Moon
NASA is building drones to mine remote lunar and Martian regions.
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Darren Staples / Reuters How Fake Data Could Protect Real People’s Privacy
Synthetic datasets allow researchers to study social systems without compromising individual identities—but how reliable is the information they’re using?
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Mike Blake / Reuters Night Vision Without the Goggles
The tantalizing promise—and practical pitfalls—of eyedrops that let a person see in the dark.
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Clement / Flickr The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music
The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?
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Jon Gerberg / AP A Search Engine, but Not on the Internet
An Israeli company wants to build molecular spectroscopy into a smartphone so people can count calories, identify pills, and find out more about objects than can be seen by the human eye.
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Athit Perawongmetha / Reuters What Is a ‘Computer’ Anymore?
It used to be a person. Now it's a machine. What's next?
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Jan Nikita / Wikimedia How to Say (Almost) Everything in a Hundred-Word Language
Those who speak Toki Pona say linguistic simplicity can enable a more profound form of communication.
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Bill Ingalls / NASA / AP The Camera Behind the New Pluto Photos
How to build a camera that travels billions of miles from Earth
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Toru Hanai / Reuters Push Notifications Are as Distracting as Phone Calls
A new study indicates that people are very distracted just by receiving a text message—even if they ignore it.
