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Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?

Real C. elegans worms squirming in a laboratory agar plate. The have been genetically modified to express fluorescent proteins (Jesper Pedersen). For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all…
PUBLISHED: May 17, 2013
LENGTH: 12 minutes (3020 words)

Intel May Have Lost the iPhone Battle, But It Could Still Win the Mobile War

Paul Otellini shows off the chip-circuitry lining of the coat hanging in his Intel cubicle as an iconic bunny man keeps watch (Alexis Madrigal). Forty-five years after Intel was founded by Silicon…
PUBLISHED: May 16, 2013
LENGTH: 22 minutes (5528 words)

How Facebook Designs the 'Perfect Empty Vessel' for Your Heart and Mind

One day in March, I was sitting across from Facebook's design director, Kate Aronowitz, at 1 Hacker Way in Menlo Park when she told me, "It takes a lot of work to create the perfect empty vessel." In…
PUBLISHED: May 2, 2013
LENGTH: 11 minutes (2977 words)

See No Evil: The Case of Alfred Anaya

Alfred Anaya was a genius at installing secret compartments in cars. If they were used to smuggle drugs without his knowledge, he figured that wasn’t his problem. He was wrong. Illustration:…
PUBLISHED: March 19, 2013
LENGTH: 3 minutes (913 words)

A Brief History of Applause, the 'Big Data' of the Ancient World

Once, people measured their leaders -- and themselves -- one clap at a time. The Dionysus Theater in Greece, from a German encyclopedia, 1891 (Wikimedia Commons) And then, suddenly, just when the…
PUBLISHED: March 15, 2013
LENGTH: 12 minutes (3149 words)

“We Gained Hope.” The Story of Lilly Grossman’s Genome

One – The Twitch It started with a slight twitch. Steve and Gay Grossman both noticed it in their daughter Lilly in 1998, when she was just one-and-a-half years old. By the time she was four,…
AUTHOR:Ed Yong
PUBLISHED: March 11, 2013
LENGTH: 12 minutes (3130 words)

The Post-Apocalypse Survival Machine Nerd Farm

Marcin Jakubowski sits cross-legged on the dirt floor of a round hut in Missouri farm country, carefully making an open-faced mayo and cheddar sandwich. Inside the hut there’s a bed, a small…
PUBLISHED: Nov. 2, 2012
LENGTH: 9 minutes (2493 words)

The World Is Not Enough: Google and the Future of Augmented Reality

The new Google FieldTrip app probes the question: What digital information do you want to see overlaid on the physical world? A book in The Future.It is The Future. You wake up at dawn and fumble on…
PUBLISHED: Oct. 25, 2012
LENGTH: 11 minutes (2787 words)

The Forgotten Mapmaker: Nokia Has Better Maps Than Apple and Maybe Even Google

It's impossible to create a perfect map, but that hasn't stopped Nokia from trying. Here, we go inside the company's neverending drive to create a digital copy of the world.But there are more than…
PUBLISHED: Oct. 3, 2012
LENGTH: 6 minutes (1748 words)
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