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What the World Would Look Like if All the Ice Melted

If we keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely, global warming will eventually melt all the ice at the poles and on mountaintops, raising sea level by 216 feet. Explore what the world’s new coastlines would look like.<p>This story appears in the September 2013 issue of <i>National Geographic</i> magazine.<p>The …

The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked

A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?<p>This article is the subject of legal complaints …

Luddites have been getting a bad rap for 200 years. But, turns out, they were right

Things did not end well for the Luddites. The group of weavers and textile artisans in early 1800s were crushed by the British government after resisting the destruction of their livelihoods by industrialization. History, in one of its callous twists, recast their story from a workers’ revolt for …

Is It Time to Break Up Google?

In just 10 years, the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization have all changed, save for one: Microsoft. Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Citigroup and Shell Oil are out and Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon and Facebook have taken their place.<p>They’re all tech …

Air strikes are not an effective tactic of war, but we keep using them anyway

Bombs over Baghdad? Largely ineffectual.<p>American military involvement in Afghanistan has been ongoing since 2001, making it the longest foreign war …

Great Migrations

Creativity will be the source of our next industrial revolution, not machines

Growth in the first industrial revolution was driven by engineering, the second through electricity and production lines, and the third by technology and information. The modern economies that will undergo a fourth industrial revolution will not be those that worship machines, but those that …

Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ – Abeba Birhane

According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ‘<i>ena</i>’, or selfhood, …

How Kids Learn to Leave People Out

<i>An investigation into the joy and pain of fitting in: With this series, we’re exploring the pathologies, hierarchies, and quirks of female</i> …

Guru per sempre

Da una parte c'è la morsa della crisi economica, dall'altra il boom dei guru digitali che sembrano avere una risposta a tutto. Nel mezzo arriva al …

Five numbers that will define the next 100 years

From energy to life expectancy, these crucial statistics could define Earth’s upcoming century.<p><i>(Click/pinch to enlarge)</i><p><b>How will the world’s population continue to increase?</b><p>There will be 11.2 billion of us by 2100, according to the UN’s most likely scenario. But this is a projection, not a …

The torture of Tokyo rush hour, up close and impersonal

The Odakyu Odawara Line carries one-and-a-half million people across Tokyo every single day.It starts in the suburbs southwest of the city and …

Designing Facebook for Mobile VR

Lessons from the making of the Facebook 360 app for Gear VR<p>The mission of the Facebook Immersive Design team is to enable people to experience …

How Aristotle Created the Computer

The philosophers he influenced set the stage for the technological revolution that remade our world.<p>THE HISTORY Of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a …

What He Could Do

What we are witnessing now is the birth of a new political order, and the more frantic a handful of media elites become, the more powerful that new …

The 100 Things We Need To Do To Reverse Global Warming

Paul Hawken’s new book Drawdown claims to have made a definitive list of the most effective global strategies for lowering our emissions. Don’t despair: they’re all totally achievable.<p>If you read anything about climate change, it’s not hard to become convinced that we’re screwed.<p>For instance, here …

Why the Planet Earth II Episode on Cities Is So Startling

It gives us a glimpse of our strange future.<p>It used to happen a lot: Teetering home drunk and disconsolate late at night through the shadowy semi-suburbs of north London, I would turn a corner and find, staring placidly at me on the street, the silhouette of a fox.<p>Looking directly into the eyes of …

Norwegian robot learns to self-evolve and 3D print itself in the lab

WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF<p>For the first time we are seeing how it’s possible for robots in the future to design and evolve, manufacture and assemble …

Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster

We increasingly let computers fly planes and carry out security checks. Driverless cars are next. But is our reliance on automation dangerously diminishing our skills?<p>When a sleepy Marc Dubois walked into the cockpit of his own aeroplane, he was confronted with a scene of confusion. The plane was …

Fake News Is About to Get Even Scarier than You Ever Dreamed

What we saw in the 2016 election is nothing compared to what we need to prepare for in 2020.<p>Less than a month after <b>Donald Trump</b> was improbably elected the 45th president of the United States, a strange story began to make its way across social media. In the quaint days before Russia’s dissemination …

How to Be Lucky - Issue 44: Luck

“Luck is believing you’re lucky.”—Tennessee Williams, <i>A Streetcar Named Desire</i>In 1995, a wounded 35-year-old woman named Anat Ben-Tov gave an …

Alternate Endings

Movies that allow you to decide what happens next.<p>Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, young directors who go by the joint film credit Daniels, are known for reality-warped miniatures—short films, music videos, commercials—that are eerie yet playful in mood. In their work, people jump into other …

How Jokes Won the Election | The New Yorker

Since November 9th, we’ve heard a lot of talk about unreality, and how what’s normal bends when you’re in a state of incipient autocracy. There’s been a lot written about gaslighting (lies that make you feel crazy) and the rise of fake news (hoaxes that displace facts), and much analysis of Trump …

I Don’t Read The News Anymore, And It’s Great

After Donald Trump won the presidency more than a year ago, I, like many of my friends, vowed to cease paying attention to news for a while, fearing …

Andrew Sullivan: My Distraction Sickness — and Yours

I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman in …

Can an Amazon Echo Testify Against You?

Could what you ask your Amazon Echo be used against you in a court of law? A murder case in Bentonville, Arkansas, is putting that question to the …

The moral challenge of military robots arises when we delegate fighting wars

Using drones or autonomous soldiers in modern warfare may avoid some of the awfulness but does it forfeit any ethical defence for fighting in the first place?<p>Long before undergoing any proper study of war, I remember believing I had the problem sorted. In primary school, I remember remarking to …

How to Design a Nuclear Warning Symbol that Will Still Make Sense in 10,000 Years

<i>Roman Mars’ podcast</i> <i>99% Invisible</i> <i>covers design questions large and small, from</i> <i>his fascination with rebar</i> <i>to</i> <i>the history of slot machines</i> <i>to the</i> <i>great Los</i> …