In the early morning of April 21, 10 students from the University of Southern California’s Rocket Propulsion Lab piled into the back of a pickup truck with a 13-foot rocket wedged between them and drove down a dusty dirt road to a launchpad near Spaceport America, in southern New Mexico. When they arrived, their teammates […]
Read MoreYou can almost hear the gleam in Fred Kennedy’s eyes when he talks about the Space Development Agency, a new US Department of Defense organization. The agency's new director, Kennedy uses words like agile and innovative. He makes statements such as, "We’re going to break a little glass and be a little provocative." Not the […]
Read MoreSteven Ramirez says you can save the Black Mirror references. He’s already heard his work compared to nearly every dystopian movie about memory—from the campy Total Recall and the shadowy neo-noir of Minority Report to the tragicomic heart-string-pulling of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But when you visit Ramirez’s lab on the southern shore […]
Read MoreEveryone knows the time-travel rules: Don't go back and meet your previous self; don't crush on your mom; and, as tempting as it is, don't try to kill an evil tyrant. Despite their obviousness, these tropes are still trotted out in most time-travel movies—including, most recently, Avengers: Endgame. See You Yesterday considers that history and […]
Read MoreSince Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joke-tweeted the Boring Company into existence two and a half years ago, the fledgling tunneling tech company has dug one (test) hole, in the parking lot of SpaceX’s suburban LA headquarters; participated in at least one high-profile press conference with the mayor of Chicago; promised Dodgers fans it […]
Read MoreApple finally heard your keyboard complaints, USPS is ditching the drivers, and Google exposed some passwords. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines Apple is finally fixing its keyboards A year and a half after MacBook Pro users complained about their keyboards breaking, Apple is finally doing something […]
Read MoreEver wonder what makes a boomerang fly? World champion thrower Logan Broadbent says it's pretty simple. "Basically the best way to think of it is that each wing is an airplane wing," he says. "The top side is curved and the bottom side is relatively flat and that shape allows the boomerang to generate lift. […]
Read MoreLast year, Microsoft paid $7.5 billion to buy GitHub, the online home of thousands of open source software projects that power apps and sites ranging from Facebook to Walmart.com. The acquisition, along with IBM's $34 billion purchase of open source company Red Hat, proved that open source software can be big business. That's a little […]
Read MoreOver the past week, both Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the same appeal to American nationalism, with differing degrees of subtlety: Breaking up Big Tech will only help China. It’s a politically expedient plea as calls for regulating tech intensify amid growing concern about China’s tech prowess […]
Read MoreWhen the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s, most of the newly independent republics that emerged from the wreckage wanted little to do with their old colonial master. But as the decades passed, nostalgia for the USSR took root in some of these former Soviet satellites. Few pine for a return of the […]
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