PAU BARRENA/AFP/Getty Images And how it might change what cops can do with our smartphones. Cyrus is senior tech policy reeporter at Ars Technica, and is also an author and radio producer. On a warm summer’s day in 2008, police spotted a man walking outside his apartment in Santa Clara, California,…

W hat separates science from other intellectual activities? The search for a distinctive logical structure of scientific inquiry and for the essence of scientific truth goes back at least to David Hume’s concerns with the limits of inductive inference (does the fact that the sun rose yesterday mean…

T he secrets are hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering, windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a…

For anyone who’s ever marveled at Nintendo’s vivid, phantasmagoric, zoologically ornate video games, visiting the company’s understated home in Kyoto, Japan, can be disorienting at first. That such an outpouring of kaleidoscopic products comes from a place so devoid of color can be momentarily hard…

NASA will soon visit Hawaii's Lo'ihi volcano, which sits more than 3,000 feet beneath the Pacific Ocean, all in the name of one day hunting for life out in the solar system. The NASA expedition, called SUBSEA , endeavors to visit underwater volcanoes — which are often rich in colorful mats of…

Kevin Hong China's social credit system has been compared to Black Mirror, Big Brother and every other dystopian future sci-fi writers can think up. The reality is more complicated — and in some ways, worse. The idea for social credit came about back in 2007, with projects announced by the…

Images Etc Ltd / Getty Introducing Crazy/Genius, a new podcast from The Atlantic with Derek Thompson. Eight bold questions—and eight smart answers—about how tech is changing the world. Listen and subscribe to the podcast. Paul Stamets, a mycologist I had come to visit in Washington State’s Olympic…

Let me tell you the story of two investors, neither of whom knew each other, but whose paths crossed in an interesting way. Grace Groner was orphaned at age 12. She never married. She never had kids. She never drove a car. She lived most of her life alone in a one-bedroom house and worked her whole…

Or, How American Collapse is Made of a New Kind of Poverty umair haque May 23, 2018 Consider the following statistics. The average American can’t scrape together $500 for an emergenc y. A third of Americans can’t afford food, shelter, and healthcare . Healthcare for a family now costs $28k — about…

Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory — Brett Beasley explores a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse. Coloured aquatint, ca. 1862, depicting a man covering his mouth with a handkerchief, walking through a smoggy London…

The king of Pyongyang By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes The funeral It was a bitterly cold day in Pyongyang - 28 December 2011. Snow was falling hard as a long black Lincoln Continental car drove slowly through the streets. On the roof, on a bed of white chrysanthemums, lay the coffin of North Korea’s…

The national disdain for plastic has become a proxy for profound concerns about trust, privacy and the role of the state. By Matthew Campbell February 6, 2018, 12:01 AM EST

Anthony Kwan/Getty Images The social credit system in China has blocked people from taking more than 11 million flights and 4 million train trips. The social credit system is used to punish citizens for bad behavior with numerous blacklists preventing them from traveling, getting loans or jobs, or…

Oskari Porkka / Gilmanshin / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic On March 15, some time ago, several dozen famous politicians—sturdy men, duly elected senators who claimed to love their republic—attacked their chief executive while he walked into the Senate. They stabbed Gaius Julius Caesar…

Wandering the streets of Shanghai to admire the architecture, the head of one of the largest U.S. consumer banks recently found himself surrounded by a gaggle of teenagers. Entranced by their phones, they hardly made way for the banker. The teens were messaging, shopping and sending money back and…

Hannah Wolfe became a MoviePass Inc. member, hit the pricey theaters of New York, and began doing her part to drive the company out of business. Since paying the $9.95 monthly fee for the movie-a-day service in January, Wolfe has seen Black Panther and most of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and…

Every week in Tokyo’s Ichigaya district, about three miles northeast of the bright neon lights and swarming crowds in the heart of Shibuya, a driver quietly parks a black sedan-style car outside a gray office building. Before setting off on a short, 10-minute drive south, he picks up a passenger who…

Many of the biggest names in the technology industry are consumed with developing an artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Unlike today’s leading artificial intelligence software, an AGI wouldn’t need flesh-and-blood trainers to figure out how to translate English to Mandarin or spot tumors in an…

Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future. The video was made in…

Japan’s Preferred Networks Inc. has only one publicly available product, a whimsical application that uses artificial intelligence to automate the coloring of manga cartoons. Yet the four-year-old firm has become Japan’s most valuable startup, with a venture capital funding that priced it at more…

(Screenshot: ZDNet. Source: State of Georgia ) Four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you've probably never heard about before. In case you missed it, a senator last week sent a letter demanding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)…

After 26 years, Boston Dynamics is finally getting ready to start selling some robots. Founder Marc Raibert says that the company’s dog-like SpotMini robot is in pre-production and preparing for commercial availability in 2019. The announcement came onstage at TechCrunch’s TC Sessions: Robotics…

”We are the Windows company, after all,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told me. I was at Microsoft’s campus in Redmond a week before the Build developer conference, and I wanted to know what was going on with Windows after a reorg split the team into different divisions. Was Microsoft really preparing…

Parrots are very social creatures. In the wild, they live in flocks; in captivity, they like to cuddle and be spoken to by humans, and will even “purr” when held. But if a parrot is ignored or neglected, it will act out, gnawing on wood or tearing at its own feathers. “They’re like three-year-old…

When Eckart Frahm entered the New York City warehouse in 2016, he knew that a wealth of rare artifacts lay inside. Roughly 250 cuneiform tablets, looted cultural treasures dating from 2100 BCE to 1600 BCE, had been sequestered there by the federal government. Frahm, a professor of Assyriology at…

A female Gaius villosus Rainbow. (Courtesy of Leanda Mason) This is the story of the oldest known spider in the world and the people who knew her. The details are compiled largely from research conducted by Barbara Main and Leanda Mason, who knew her best over nearly half a century. She was born…

Estimates suggest that ninety per cent of American companies have been hacked. Illustration by Golden Cosmos One day in the summer of 2003, Shawn Carpenter, a security analyst in New Mexico, went to Florida on a secret mission. Carpenter, then thirty-five, worked at Sandia National Laboratories, in…

Ms. Jeannette’s taxi license from the late 1940s. On her first day on the job, Gertrude Jeannette, believed to be the first woman to drive a cab in New York City, got in an accident — on purpose. She had pulled up in front of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan looking for a fare but was cut off…

The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America’s military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign…

Articles By Rob Arnott Shane Shepherd Bradford Cornell APRIL 2018 Read Time: 15 min Download Key Points The word “bubble” is tossed around with abandon. We offer a rigorous definition for the word, and then test the definition against current markets. Several bubbles are evident today, most…

First Words Credit Photo illustration by Derek Brahney You can tell a lot about the cultural status of capitalism by how we refer to people who buy stuff. “Customer,” with its implicit deference — its suggestion that the buyer is always right — is now a relic of a bygone era. “Client” is formal and…

This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2018” collection. Discover more of our picks . We spend a third of our lives either sleeping… or trying to get to sleep. But in the world of 24/7 living and artificial light, our sleep is increasingly under threat. Many of us don’t get the recommended…

There is a borderland between waking life and the uncharted wilderness of sleep that we all traverse each night, but we rarely stop to marvel at the strangeness of this liminal world. If we do, we find that it is full of hallucinations both wonderful and terrifying, a mental goulash of reality and…

SEOUL—North Korea’s cyber army, long considered a midlevel security threat, is quietly morphing into one of the world’s most sophisticated and dangerous hacking machines. Over the past 18 months, the nation’s fingerprints have appeared in an increasing number of cyberattacks, the skill level of its…

James Bridle Nov 6, 2017 I’m James Bridle . I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want what I’m talking about here anywhere near my own site. Please be advised: this essay describes disturbing things and links to disturbing…