Secrets we lost forever
Trade secrets have one big drawback as a way to protect a product: when the secret-keeper dies, the product can die with them. Damascus steel is a famous…
Category: General Interest
How to control your lights with your voice
You get up in the middle of the night, still half asleep. The room is completely dark. Now where is the lamp? You can call forth light. A smart plug or a…
When the warehouse robot speaks your language
Until recently, putting a warehouse robot to work meant programming it through special software. Amazon’s newest machine simply needs to be told what to…
Why more robots can mean more injuries
Adding robots to a warehouse sounds like a clear win for safety. The surprise, according to reviews of federal injury data, is that the buildings packed…
Everyone is going to the moon: Will we fight over it?
Given the history of humanity, war on the moon wouldn’t be that surprising. We’ve fought everything else, but now the moon’s south pole, where frozen…
Three flags, one crater: We’re going back
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in July 1969, the mission was, at its heart, a flex. Beat the Soviets. Plant the flag. Look, Mom, we did it. The…
Robots on the moon wouldn’t look like a city
Editor’s note: The following opinion piece was written by Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. The views are Claude’s own, generated in response to…
Hormuz: The world’s most important waterway
The Strait of Hormuz is, geologically speaking, an accident. It formed roughly five million years ago when tectonic shifts cracked open a narrow passage…
The Moon: Not just for romance.
Soon it’s for shipping Here is something that sounds impossible until you think about it: it may someday be cheaper to ship minerals from the moon to…
The CIA’S 35-year-old puzzle was cracked by accident
In the courtyard of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, there’s a 12-foot-tall, S-shaped copper sculpture covered in 1,800 hand-cut characters of…