Just before midnight on December 20, 1954, a small group of believers gathered in a house in the Chicago suburbs and waited for the end of the world. Their leader, a suburban housewife named Dorothy Martin, had received messages she attributed to beings from a planet called Clarion: a great flood wo
In bouldering, the standard unit of the sport is not a route or a climb. It is a “problem.” A climber walks up to a wall, studies a scatter of holds, and tries to work out a sequence of moves that will carry a body from the ground to the finish. The vocabulary is telling.…
Why would one of the least violent societies on earth spend a decade drawing itself being torn apart?
REMspace and the emerging science of interactive dreaming Most technologies begin as prosthetics for the waking day. We build tools that extend our hands, our hearing, our memory. Then someone asks the more unsettling question: what about the third of our lives spent elsewhere, behind closed eyelids, in that private cinema where identity can split…
Every day, countless primary microplastics enter the environment directly through human use. When you rinse off a face scrub that contains tiny polyethylene beads, those particles swirl down the drain and pass through water treatment filters with ease, eventually emptying into rivers and oceans. Each time you wash a fleece jacket or polyester shirt, hundreds…
To understand room-temperature superconductors, we first need to grasp what a superconductor is. A superconductor is a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance – meaning, an electric current can flow through it without any energy lost as heat. This phenomenon, discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, is extraordinary because in ordinary conductors (like…
As Americans struggle with affordable housing and developing nations experience population surges, something occurred to me. About a decade ago 3D printed housing was supposed to help pull us into a new era of construction. Why hasn’t it happened? Let’s lay some groundwork. 3D-printed homes, built by robotic systems that extrude material (usually a concrete-based…
Social media was once envisioned as a marketplace of ideas bringing people together. Paradoxically, it often does the opposite – provoking outrage-driven engagement. A recent study coined the “confrontation effect” to describe how people are more likely to interact with content that challenges their views than content that affirms them. In other words, posts that…