Quantum computers are not amazing because they’re revolutionizing everything in the world of computation. They’re still clunky, finicky, insanely expensive, and not too practical. They may very well ha...

How do you train self-driving software to safely pilot a vehicle through city streets? There are a few options; the first that probably springs to mind for most people is to spend countless hours actua...

After 1.5 Billion Years in Flux, Here’s How a New, Stronger Crust Set the Stage for Life on Earth . Our planet is unique in the solar system. It’s the only one with active plate tectonics, ocean basins, continents and, as far as we know, life. But Earth in its current form is 4.5 billion years in the...

Breakthrough NASA Study Discovers Surprising Key to Astronauts' Health in Space . Thanks to SpaceX, traveling beyond Earth now seems pretty tangible for us commoners. True, a ticket to the International Space Station currently runs $55 million (ouch). Technologically, however, the t...

As Algorithms Take Over More of the Economy, We Should Cede Control (Very) Carefully . Algorithms play an increasingly prominent part in our lives, governing everything from the news we see to the products we buy. As they proliferate, experts say, we need to make sure they don’t collude ...

Is the Pandemic Spurring a Robot Revolution? . “Are robots really destined to take over restaurant kitchens?” This was the headline of an article published by Eater four years ago. One of the experts interviewed was Siddhartha Srinivasa, at the tim...

Solar Power Stations in Space Could Be the Answer to Our Energy Needs . It sounds like science fiction: giant solar power stations floating in space that beam down enormous amounts of energy to Earth. And for a long time, the concept—first developed by the Russian scientis...

This Company Wants to Put a Human-Size Hologram Booth in Your Living Room . Over the last several months we’ve gotten very used to communicating via video chat. Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, and the like have not only replaced most in-person business meetings, they’ve acted...

Another Win for Senolytics: Fighting Aging at the Cellular Level Just Got Easier . Longevity research always reminds me of the parable of blind men and an elephant. A group of blind men, who’ve never seen an elephant before, each touches a different part of the elephant’s body to con...

MIT Report: Robots Aren’t the Biggest Threat to the Future of Work—Policy Is . Fears of a robot-driven jobs apocalypse are a recurring theme in the media. But a new report from MIT has found that technology is creating as many jobs as it destroys, and bad policy is a bigger threa...

The Trillion-Transistor Chip That Just Left a Supercomputer in the Dust . The history of computer chips is a thrilling tale of extreme miniaturization. The smaller, the better is a trend that’s given birth to the digital world as we know it. So, why on earth would you want t...

Who Should Get a Covid-19 Vaccine First? . If the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, as Galileo once declared, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought that truth home for the world’s mathematicians, who have been galvanized by ...

A 3D Printed Apartment Building Is Going Up in Germany . 3D printing is making strides in the construction industry. In just a couple years we’ve seen the tech produce single-family homes in a day, entire communities of homes for people in need, large munici...

McDonald's Is Making a Plant-Based Burger; You Can Try It in 2021 . Fast-food chains have been doing what they can in recent years to health-ify their menus. For better or worse, burgers, fries, fried chicken, roast beef sandwiches, and the like will never go out of st...

This Is How We’ll Engineer Artificial Touch . Take a Jeopardy! guess: this body part was once referred to as the “consummation of all perfection as an instrument.” Answer: “What is the human hand?” Our hands are insanely complex feats of evolution...

90% of the Global Power Capacity Added in 2020 Was Renewable . There’s been plenty of hand-wringing about the potential for the Covid-19 pandemic to distract from the ongoing fight against climate change. But the latest data from the International Energy Agency (I...

Smart Concrete Could Pave the Way for High-Tech, Cost-Effective Roads . Every day, Americans travel on roads, bridges, and highways without considering the safety or reliability of these structures. Yet much of the transportation infrastructure in the US is outdated, deter...

How an Ownership Economy Could Make Internet Platforms Work for Everyone . The way we transact with each other and conduct business has changed a lot in the last 10 years. For some of us it’s hard to remember how we used to find rides or places to stay before Uber, Lyft, and ...

You Can Buy This Electric Car for $7,999 in California . A tiny electric car that costs just $4,200 has been all the rage in China this year. The Wuling Hong Guang Mini EV generated over 15,000 orders within 20 days of its release in July, and added another ...

Why We Need a Collective Vision to Design the Future of Health . My mother died of Covid-19 at the age of 91. She was recovering from surgery in an assisted-living facility in Durham, North Carolina. While she had previously been healthy, the virus aggressively inva...

How Do We Remember Places? This Study Used Lasers and VR to Point the Way . The curious contraption at University College London bordered between scientific wizardry and a terrifying Black Mirror episode. It might have just proved a decades-long theory of how the brain’s GPS s...

The International Space Station Is Ailing. Its Replacement Will Shape the Future of Space Exploration . Humans have now had a continuous presence in space for 20 years thanks to the International Space Station (ISS), but the facility is unlikely to survive into the next decade. What comes next could shap...

There Could Be 300 Million (or More) Earth-Like Planets in Our Galaxy . The first planets discovered outside our solar system were strange, unfamiliar worlds. These were giants like Jupiter, hotter than Venus, tearing around their suns inside the orbit of Mercury. Astronom...

Flippy the Fast Food Robot Just Went Commercial, and It's Selling Like Crazy . No doubt about it, the pandemic has changed the way we eat. Never before have so many people who hated cooking been forced to learn how to prepare a basic meal for themselves. With sit-down restaurants...

This Baby Horse Was Cloned Using DNA That Was Frozen for 40 Years . When Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, she instantly achieved worldwide fame for being the first-ever animal to be cloned from an adult cell. Since then, she hasn’t had many competitors for the title o...