George Clooney in Gravity . Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University , New America , and Slate . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. On Thursday, April 9, Future Tense…

1. Writers, praise the typographers and designers: our words are in their hands. 2. Bookshelves line the walls of my office. The room is small, and with the

By By all accounts, Marilyn vos Savant was a child prodigy. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1946, the young savant quickly developed an aptitude for math and science. At age 10, she was given two intelligence tests -- the Stanford-Binet, and the Mega Test -- both of which placed her mental capacity…

forward View The Photo Gallery Bentley’s connection with top tier opulence and handmade craftsmanship on four wheels is well established and storied, with models like their Flying Spur and Mulsanne already synonymous with the life less ordinary. But the Crewe, United Kingdom automotive manufacturer…

My family’s first computer was the Commodore VIC-20. Billed by its pitchman, Star Trek ’s William Shatner, as the ‘wonder computer of the 1980s’, I have many fond memories of this antiquated machine. I used to play games on it, with cassette tapes that served as primitive storage devices. One of the…

Làirig – ‘a pass in the mountains’ (Gaelic). Photograph: Rosamund Macfarlane E ight years ago, in the coastal township of Shawbost on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis, I was given an extraordinary document. It was entitled “Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary”, and it listed Gaelic words…

Charlotte Demonque is the community manager at FontYou, a Paris-based online co-creation platform dedicated to typography. This post originally appeared on the FontYou blog, and has been adapted with permission. With millions of beautiful typefaces scattering the Web, we felt it was time to lay…

Nie ma miesiąca bez informacji o postępach w rozwoju gogli wirtualnej rzeczywistości Oculus Rift, przejętych przez Facebook za sumę dwóch miliardów dolarów. Z kolei Microsoft zaprezentował na styczniowej konferencji prasowej swój „holograficzny hełm”, a koncern Sony przygotowuje się do ujawnienia…

forward View The Photo Gallery Compared to their 3D big budget counterparts games, indie titles like the gorgeous iOS puzzler, Monument Valley , the atmospheric dungeon explorer Below , and the mystical woodland side scroller, The Deer God can appear regressive in an era where fully immersive “open…

Nie ma Polski, skończyła się. Napadł na Polskę Mordor, napadły orki z Mordoru, i skończyła się Polska. Przeszły granicę, podeptały świeży asfalt, weszły do siedzib gmin i powiatów, rozwaliły meble ze sklejki, połamały urzędnikom komputery i płaskie ekrany kupione za unijne. Popaliły zakredycone…

Ze wszystkich, wielokrotnie analizowanych cech twórczości Brunona Schulza, od zawsze najmocniej cenię sobie muzyczność jego prozy. To ona sprawiła, że dwadzieścia lat temu, sięgnąwszy po raz pierwszy po wydane przez Bibliotekę Narodową opowiadania i eseje, dałem się porwać właściwie od pierwszej…

Montreal-based Les Ateliers Guyon designed a trio of time-bending, conceptual machines commissioned for a traveling exhibition by the Art Directors Club (ADC) of New York. Their request was to have three unique machines that spanned a time between the future and the past, piquing the senses of…

Uproszczona wizja świata ma pewnie jakąś siłę retoryczną, ale nie jest dobrym punktem wyjścia do działań politycznych. W źle rozpoznanym terenie łatwo niestety się pogubić i zacząć piłować gałąź, na której samemu się siedzi. A ten właśnie niebezpieczny sport, jak mi się zdaje, zaczął uprawiać…

I stare out the window from my tiny flat on the 300th floor, hermetically sealed in a soaring, climate-controlled high-rise, honeycombed with hundreds of dwellings just like mine, and survey the breathtaking vistas from my lofty perch more than half a mile above ground: the craftsman cottages with…

PORTLAND, Ore. — It’s Friday afternoon, and the funky, open floor office of Treehouse LLC, a fast-growing tech company, is empty. The lights are off. Rows of computers are silent. The food in the well-stocked pantry, the ping-pong table and video-game consoles untouched. And gone is Monty, the Great…

Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore Edgar Allan Poe; portrait by Gabriel Harrison, 1896 Edgar Allan Poe was and is a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day. He both amazed and antagonized his contemporaries, who could not dismiss him from the…

It has long been fashionable to say that the globe is shrinking. In the wake of the telegraph, the steamship and the railway, thinkers from the late 19th century onwards often wrote of space and time being annihilated by new technologies. In our current age of jet travel and the internet, we often…

Time poverty is a problem partly of perception and partly of distribution THE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by…

Stephen Hawking first met Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, at a conference in 1997. Moore noticed that Hawking’s computer, which he used to communicate, had an AMD processor and asked him if he preferred instead a “real computer” with an Intel micro-processor. Intel has been providing Hawking…

On the afternoon of September 23, 2014, a few minutes before his lecture at the Magma auditorium in Los Pueblos in Tenerife, Stephen William Hawking was rewriting parts of his speech. Hawking, who is unusual in being both a theoretical physicist working on some of the most fundamental problems in…

Still Life with Skull by Philippe de Champagne (1602-1674). (Wikimedia Commons) Imagine when our ancestors first started to look up at the stars and question their place in the universe. Why are we here? Are we alone? What happens to us when we die? It is difficult to know for sure at what point in…

It is 4.18am. In the fireplace, where logs burned, there are now orange lumps that will soon be ash. Orion the Hunter is above the hill. Taurus, a sparkling V, is directly overhead, pointing to the Seven Sisters. Sirius, one of Orion’s heel dogs, is pumping red-blue-violet, like a galactic disco…

Credit: ISTOCKPHOTO No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia”…

This blog is the third in a series of guest posts on technology and the brain to celebrate Scientific American Mind’s 10-year anniversary. The magazine’s special November/December issue similarly highlights the interface between code and thought in profiling a future, more digital YOU. Video games…

by Robert Herritt Luciano Floridi. (Photo: Jeon Heon-Kyun/EPA/Corbis) One day this past September, Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, sat down with a group of experts in Madrid to begin publicly discussing how Google should respond to a recent, perplexing ruling by the European Union’s Court…

Creativity is very messy. According to one prominent theory , the creative process involves four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. This is all well and good in theory. In reality , the creative process often feels like this: Or this: The creative process-- from the…

Imagine you’re a traveller in a strange land. A local approaches you and starts jabbering away in an unfamiliar language. He seems earnest, and is pointing off somewhere. But you can’t decipher the words, no matter how hard you try. That’s pretty much the position of a young child when she first…

The subject enters a room in which a 12-year-old boy is seated. A 20-minute conversation ensues. The subject quizzes the boy about current events and other topics to get a sense of his intelligence and personality. But the boy is not what he appears to be. Unbeknownst to the subject, the boy is…

I have good news and bad news. Which would you like first? If it’s bad news, you’re in good company – that’s what most people pick. But why? Negative events affect us more than positive ones. We remember them more vividly and they play a larger role in shaping our lives. Farewells, accidents, bad…

Wired WRINKLES IN SPACETIME: The Warped Astrophysics of Interstellar SCROLL DOWN Kip Thorne looks into the black hole he helped create and thinks, “Why, of course. That's what it would do.” ¶ This particular black hole is a simulation of unprecedented accuracy. It appears to spin at nearly the speed…

Your brain needs to forget in order to grow.

T he two robots, built by researchers in Singapore, had very different jobs. One was a nurse, designed to take a person’s blood pressure, provide basic medical advice, and offer to book an appointment with a doctor. The other was a security guard, equipped with a closed-circuit surveillance system,…

Credit: THINKSTOCK If you carried a gene that doubled your likelihood of getting Alzheimer's disease, would you want to know? What if there was a simple lifestyle change that virtually abolished that elevated risk? People with a gene known as APOE e4 have a higher risk of cognitive impairment and…

John Foster | Accidental Mysteries Board games have long been a part of our rich American culture. Since the early nineteenth century, board games have been a popular pastime of chance and skill. Many game boards were handmade for individual families, painted and designed to replicate games people…

Not long ago, Stephen Bradley, a New York tech entrepreneur, was looking to expand his company, AuthorBee, which aggregates tweets and Instagram posts and puts them together in story form. Instead of following people, readers can follow their interests-"Breaking Bad," for example, or the New…

It might be the most prestigious journal in physics, but the Physical Review Letters is no good at teasers. Early in November it published a paper entitled: Indications of a Late-Time Interaction in the Dark Sector . Hardly a great headline for what should have been, in the style of Alien v Predator…

200,000 brave and/or insane people have supposedly signed up for a one-way mission to Mars. But the truth about Mars One, the company behind the effort, is much weirder (and far more worrying) than anyone has previously reported. By Elmo Keep Illustrations by Josh Cochran Photographs by Daniel Boud…

Video / Economics Stop deferring to the experts. Economics demands everyone’s attention 11 minutes Video / Ethics If soldiers act with unjust aggression they are as culpable as civilian criminals 6 minutes Video / Making Make shelter: how to build an awesome hut only with naturally occurring…

e iπ + 1 = 0 Euler’s identity: Math geeks extol its beauty, even finding in it hints of a myste­rious connected­ness in the universe. It’s on tank tops and coffee mugs. Aliens, apparently, carve it into crop circles (in 8-bit binary code). It’s appeared on The Simpsons . Twice. What’s the deal with…