Future Shock In The Countryside
Conflicting populations already struggle against the seasonal chaos of floods and droughts. The large industrial centers that power fossil-fuel pollution are at risk—the Pearl River Delta is one—but disproportionate consequences are poised to fall upon areas that did little to contribute.
Silicon Valley’s #MeToo Moment Didn’t Change Anything
Despite tech’s reckoning with equality over the past few years, the industry’s storied history of inequality carries on. A small sampling: Only 11% of executive positions in Silicon Valley are held by women, and women make up only 9% of partners at the top 100 venture capital firms.
Can Sea Water Desalination Save The World?
Ocean water is saturated with salt, and undrinkable. Most of the freshwater is locked away in glaciers or deep underground. Less than one percent of it is available to us. So why can’t we just take all that seawater, filter out the salt, and have a nearly unlimited supply of clean, drinkable water?
Playtronica Turns Your Body Into An Instrument
The world we live in is afraid of touch and interaction, so Playtronica decided to highlight it – turn human skin into a musical instrument. Now you can experience the future of human touch and do it with style.
Studies Shoot Down Tech’s Harmful Effects on Kids—So Now What?
It looks like grownups can disregard the fear-mongering about the ill effects of digital media on kids. A 2017 study in Child Development found “little or no support for harmful links between digital screen use and young people’s psychological well-being.”
How A Volcanic Eruption Helped Create Modern Scotland
Over seven terrible years in the 1690s, crops failed, farming villages emptied, and severe famine killed up to 15% of the entire population of Scotland. Soon after, the formerly independent nation joined Great Britain. Now, researchers suggest volcanic eruptions thousands of kilometers away may have helped spark this political transformation.
Unfold: The App That Lets You Create Beautiful Stories
Unfold is an app and toolkit for storytellers. It’s used by celebs, influencers and other Instagram power users. Create beautiful and engaging stories from minimal and elegant templates. The app is available for iOS and Android.
This Is What The Earth’s Climate Will Look Like In 2050
We know that Earth will continue to warm. We know that the adverse impacts of climate change are disproportionately larger as we go to higher temperatures and that the risk of irreversible and disastrous changes increases. We know that sea levels will continue to rise and that melting of ice caps will continue.
Antarctica Melting: Climate Change And The Journey To The ‘Doomsday Glacier’
Icefin has reached the point at which the warm ocean water meets the wall of ice at the front of the mighty Thwaites glacier – the point where this vast body of ice begins to melt. Glaciologists have described Thwaites as the “most important” glacier in the world, the “riskiest” glacier, even the “doomsday” glacier.
How The U.S. Betrayed The Marshall Islands, Kindling The Next Nuclear Disaster
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated 67 nuclear bombs on, in and above the Marshall Islands — vaporizing whole islands, carving craters into its shallow lagoons and exiling hundreds of people from their homes.
Swarms of Teeny Robo-Tractors Will Outmaneuver Tesla’s Driverless Cars
While Elon Musk’s Tesla and Waymo Cars get all the attention — and regulations — autonomous vehicles for farming face fewer tech barriers and could be just as important.
India Plans To Build An All-seeing Database To Track Citizens’ Every Move
India, the world’s biggest democracy, built a massive database containing information and biometrics of its citizens in the form of Aadhaar back in 2009. Now, it’s planning to build a new database that will continually track the lives of 1.2 billion people living in the country.
The Diabetes Patients Who Hacked A Pancreas
While diabetics anxiously awaited the release of commercial systems, tech-savvy diabetics and their loved ones worked on do-it-yourself systems. How could a bunch of hackers, working in their free time, create something medical manufacturing companies had yet to put on the market?
The State Of Qatar’s Hack Of Democracies: A Global Cyber-Crime Operation
In one of the largest state-sponsored computer hacks ever detected, Qatar’s proxies cyberattacked more than 1,400 high-status and ordinary citizens who were exercising their free-speech rights in democracies across North America, the Middle East, Asia and Europe, according to U.S. court filings.
The Productivity Paradox
Higher productivity means the expectation of rising wages and abundant job opportunities. In a time of Facebook, smartphones, self-driving cars, and computers that can beat a person at just about any board game, how can the key economic measure of technological progress be so pathetic?
Synthetic Media: The Real Trouble With Deepfakes
Keeping on top of manipulated videos and images is no easy feat. Scientists trace the roots of their proliferation, dig up new techniques to counter digital forgeries and warn of the growing dangers ahead.
The Internet’s Second Revolution
The second half of humanity is joining the internet. People in countries like India will change the internet, and it will change them. You have a whole bunch of languages that don’t enjoy very good support in terms of web browsers or input. And you have a whole bunch of people who can’t actually read or write.
Tim Westergren, Digital Radio Pioneer, Returns To Break The Music Industrial Complex
Disillusioned after leaving Pandora, Tim Westergren set out to create a better kind of streaming platform. His new Sessions app helps musicians get paid. Can he save struggling artists while redeeming himself?
Where The Bodies Are Buried
Mexico’s drug war has left tens of thousands of casualties in secret graves. Now, the mothers of the missing are digging them up, armed with iron rods and quadcopter drones.
How Air Pollution Is Doing More Than Killing Us
Emerging studies show that air pollution is linked to impaired judgement, mental health problems, poorer performance in school and most worryingly perhaps, higher levels of crime. These findings are all the more alarming, given that more than half of the world’s population now live in urban environments.
Staring At A Digital Black Hole
On the morning of November 16, 2019, we, the exiled Iranians, woke up and like billions of other internet addicts in the world immediately checked our phones, only to realize that Iran had been cut off from the global internet.