SALT LAKE CITY—The last ferry of the day departs in 20 minutes, but a group of cyclists remains 6.7 miles up a winding canyon. If they cut their ride short and start pedaling down now, they should make it. The guides leading the group face an even bigger problem: Jenn doesn’t want to turn around,…

An aerospace engineer thinks he knows how to transform renewable energy: by building the world’s largest plane. Mark Lundstrom, an MIT-trained rocket scientist and Rhodes scholar, has spent more than seven years with an engineering team designing the WindRunner, a gargantuan cargo plane. If…

Join us for some temporal shenanigans The Ars guide to time travel in the movies We picked 20 time-travel movies and rated them by scientific logic and entertainment value. Jennifer Ouellette and Sean M. Carroll – Nov 24, 2023 7:30 am | 595 The selected films span several decades to show how…

When the world around us stops making sense, I find comfort and clarity in bread. Lexie Smith is a baker who writes about sourdough and other breads at Bread on Earth. Feb. 16, 2024 Inside one tablespoon of active sourdough starter, the fermented culture made of flour and water used for thousands of…

Whether you’ve completed an Iron Man triathlon or barely managed three push-ups, Strava users will mash the “kudos” button for you Clive Thompson 6 min read· Aug 31, 2023 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size Photo by Viktor Bystrov on Unsplash The ills of social media are well known by…

Updated June 5, 2024 01:01PM The comedian Tracy Morgan once said, “bad news travels at the speed of light; good news travels like molasses.” Sadly, we all know it’s true. As a journalist, I feel it even more acutely, watching traffic numbers swell for stories about things that … suck. But if the…

Space should not be a garbage dump. Nevertheless, we have treated the sky as a wrecker’s yard for more than half a century, and the amount of space junk orbiting Earth has skyrocketed in recent years. Now filled with the decaying hulks of defunct rockets and satellites, our polluted orbital…

Credit...Illustration by Anson Chan Call it neopopulism: a bipartisan attitude that mistrusts the free-market ethos instead of embracing it. Credit...Illustration by Anson Chan Listen to this article · 16:57 min Learn more By David Leonhardt, a senior writer at The Times, has been based in…

The strategy is a three-legged stool consisting of tariffs, security restrictions and tech subsidies By Greg Ip President Biden announced new tariffs on China last week. Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg News The new tariffs President Biden announced last week aren’t economically significant. Symbolically,…

The New Yorker Interview Jerry Seinfeld on how to write jokes, the ending of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” and the world-historical struggle to invent the Pop-Tart. April 28, 2024 Photograph by Herb Ritts / AUGUST The cartoon of Jerry Seinfeld is that he is the comedian who goes on “about nothing.” The…

Brandon Blackwell was 22 years old when he decided to turn quizzing into a full-time job.Credit...Elias Williams for The New York Times The Great Read Brandon Blackwell, a 30-year-old from Queens, helped turn London’s Imperial College into a “University Challenge” powerhouse. Brandon Blackwell was…

This is not the post that I thought I was going to write about Noma, the massively influential Copenhagen restaurant that’s been declared “The Best Restaurant in the World” five different times. In fact, I didn’t even think I’d ever get to eat at Noma, especially when they recently announced that…

While the cycling industry and consumers are reverberating from Stages apparently laying off their entire workforce last weekend, the reality is that the Stages story is far from over. And equally, it was far from starting this past weekend. As Stages product owners know quite well, the company had…

Updated November 6, 2024 10:58AM Originally, I had a vision. It involved getting into a car with strangers. The idea struck me a few weeks before I left for Colorado, where I was going to report on the state’s notorious Interstate 70 traffic. Each winter, I-70 makes headlines and stymies skiers…

Opinion April 16, 2024 4 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm We Need to Make Cities Less Car-Dependent Reducing the need for car travel is better for health, the environment and public safety Barry Williams for NY Daily News via Getty Images In the 1970s a nation confronted a crisis of traffic…

FAFSA, S.A.I., N.P.C., CSS — the acronyms never end. And that’s just the beginning of the mayhem. Credit...Sean Dong By Jan. 18, 2024 Saving and paying for college is an endurance test, a forced march on an often 50-year parade, where strange numerical codes and senseless jumbles of letters mark a…

Subscriber-only Newsletter Peter Coy March 29, 2024 By Opinion Writer This week I interviewed Pat Gelsinger, the chief executive of Intel, which is one of the most important companies in the United States. President Biden seems to think it’s singularly important, anyway: His administration has…

By Reddit user Pitazboras, a movie timeline for Oppenheimer with running time on the x-axis and chronological time on the y-axis. I haven’t seen the movie, so I cannot speak to the accuracy. But it seems confusing. All Christopher Nolan movies probably deserve a timeline graphic. See also: a…

One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for…

Oil-and-gas companies are accelerating investments in geothermal energy, betting the technologies that fueled the shale revolution can turn the budding industry into a large producer of clean power. Chevron CVX 0.22%increase; green up pointing triangle, BP BP 0.88%increase; green up pointing…

Dear Mr. Driving Examiner in the Blue Ford Fiesta, I’m Lily Brubaker’s dad. If you don’t remember, you failed her on her driving test yesterday, and I got really angry. I’m sorry for jabbing my finger in your face like that. I shouldn’t have yelled at you or called your hat “dumb.” But I had no…

Space sickness What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back? “If you guys don’t give me a chance to repair my instrument, I’m not going back.” Eric Berger – Jan 22, 2024 6:00 am | 322 The STS-51-B mission begins with the liftoff of the Challenger from Pad 39A in April 1985.…

Credit...Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan The explosion of the e-commerce economy has created an opportunity for thieves — and a conundrum for the railways. Credit...Photo illustration by Pablo Delcan By Published Jan. 23, 2024Updated Feb. 4, 2024 Of all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned…

Can age actually make you a better endurance cyclist? Getting older is inevitable but how much does it affect cycling performance? Some of the greatest endurance athletes may not be able to reach high powers, but they sure can churn out the mileage. Si investigates the correlation between age and…

Almost exactly a year after legislation funding the atomic bomb was approved, the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.Credit...Associated Press The Great Read Watching “Oppenheimer,” a journalist wondered (perhaps a bit obsessively): How did the president get the $2 billion…

66. Cutting out milk. While staying with friends who didn’t drink milk, I grumblingly used their oat milk for my coffee and discovered I was free of the intestinal cramps that had plagued me. I had no idea you could become lactose intolerant later in life.

I don’t know about you but I spend a BIG chunk of my workday in my browser (I use Chrome). It’s where I draft landing pages in Google Docs, send emails in ConvertKit, publish blog posts in WordPress and check sales numbers in SamCart. Everything I create becomes ultimately a link, a URL that needs…

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. For the past few years, parents, researchers, and the news media have paid closer attention to the relationship between teenagers’ phone use and their mental health.…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. I. A Small Earthquake At 2:03 a.m. on Monday, September 26, 2022, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, an explosion tore open one of the four massive underwater conduits that make up the Nord Stream pipeline. The…

nIn the early ’10s, Twitter was at the height of its power. The company had yet to turn a profit, but it had played a crucial role in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, which was nearly as effective for recruiting. While it would never reach the scale of its competitors, the platform dominated…

Larry Page and Elon Musk were on opposite sides in the debate over the risks of artificial intelligence.Credit...Hokyoung Kim The people who were most afraid of the risks of artificial intelligence decided they should be the ones to build it. Then distrust fueled a spiraling competition. Larry Page…

Miss Taylor Swift is the Person of the Year. She is the best thing that has happened in America in all of 2023.

On Memorial Day weekend in 2022, Kate Arnold and her wife, Caroline Flint, flew from Oklahoma City to Cabo San Lucas for a little R&R. They had five kids, the youngest of them five-year-old twin girls, and demanding jobs as obstetrician-gynecologists. The stresses of all this were mounting. That…

There’s also zero. That’s the approximate number of minutes a typical American like you or me spends wondering about the weather information we access every single day via print newspapers or public radio stations or the hour-by-hour forecasts delivered courtesy of the phones we carry. The…

How Electricity Is Changing, Country by Country By Nov. 20, 2023 Carbon-free electricity has never been more plentiful. Wind and solar power have taken off over the past two decades, faster than experts ever expected. But it hasn’t yet been enough to halt the rise of coal- and gas-burning…