Robert Goddard at chalkboard

Robert H. Goddard, the Forgotten Father of Rocketry

Robert H. Goddard is acknowledged by many as the "father" of rocketry, but it's a strange paternity since he had so little influence on his contemporaries.
Star Trek: Discovery

What Star Trek: Discovery Can Tell Us About Tech and Social Progress

What makes Star Trek essential for any contemporary tech user is its role in helping us understand our relationship to technology.
Piper Cub plane farmers

An Airplane in Every Barn?

Why airborne farming hasn’t been cleared for take-off.
frame capture

Facing Ourselves Online

The photographic pressure to curate our faces is inextricable from the online pressure to curate our lives; to present and perform.
DNA Strand

Using DNA As a Memory Drive

Scientists have successfully encoded a simple movie in bacteria DNA, and played it back. Using DNA for data storage is not as crazy as it sounds...
Prince Rupert Drops

Prince Rupert’s Drops of Mystery

400 years of trying to solve the mystery of Prince Rupert's Drops, bizarrely hard beads of glass that have long captivated scientists.
Hurricane Harvey

Does the Internet Help or Harm Our Ability to Weather Natural Disasters?

Does our technology help us deal with disaster? Or does it put us at risk by creating the illusion that we are immune from disaster?
Unite the Right rally

Is Doxxing the Right Way to Fight the “Alt-Right?”

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, people with similar names to white supremacists involved in the march were also caught in the crossfire.
Mother and daughter using smartphone

6 Ways to be a Digital Mentor to Your Kids

What’s involved in being a digital mentor? People have been asking me various version of this question in ...
NYC movie theater air conditioning

Can We Live Without Air Conditioning?

Air conditioning is a profoundly paradoxical technology: the hotter it gets the more we use it, and the more we use it the hotter it gets.