Pollution Rising from Factories in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

Magnetism Can Reveal Levels of Local Air Pollution

A chemical analysis of an area can find out how much pollution is in the air. But there's a much less expensive method that could help poorer communities.
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-1984-0216-004,_VEB_Elektronik_Gera,_Ingenieure.jpg

How Computer Science Became a Boys’ Club

Women were the first computer programmers. How, then, did programming become the domain of bearded nerds and manly individualists?
Performance of Color-Based Versus Semantic Segmentation

Botanists Use Machine Learning to Accelerate Research

A new artificial intelligence program called ARADEEPOPSIS will help botanists rapidly classify plant phenotypes.
A finger pressing a doorbell, circa 1950.

When the Push Button Was New, People Were Freaked

The mundane interface between human and machine caused social anxiety in the late nineteenth century.
An illustration of the Whole Earth Catalog over a 90s computer graphic

The Whole Earth Catalog, Where Counterculture Met Cyberculture

Long before Facebook or Twitter, an L.L. Bean-style catalog for hippies inspired the creation of one of the world’s first social networks.
Disintegrating Head Of David On Pink Background

What’s the Deal with Crypto Art?

Thirty years after the invention of blockchain, an artist sold a JPG using that technology for nearly $70 million. Huh?
Bell Rocket Belt

The Rise and Fall of the Jet Pack

Well, mostly the fall.
Test tubes

The Invention of the Test Tube

Chemists learned to blow their own glass vessels in the nineteenth century. It definitely beat using wine glasses.
Monochrome vintage engraving drawing human brain with wind up key

How Technology Got Its Modern Meaning

If we give technology credit for changing history, does that mean we give ourselves less?
Artificial intelligence. Male open head with cyberbrain inside.

Are the Posthumans Here Yet?

Implanting machine components into human bodies, argues one scholar, could make for a better society.