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March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
The opioid epidemic is ripping through America like a fire untamed. Blame big pharma, if you want. Blame cheap pain pills and cheaper heroin. Blame the mesolimbic reward system. Just don't wallow in it—the blame. Wallowing takes time, and with opioid abuse killing close to 100 Americans a day, time is in exceedingly short supply. […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
CrisprCon is not a place where spandexed, beglittered, refrigerator drawer fans come together for an all-you-can-eat celebration of unwilted produce. No. Crispr-Cas9 (no E), if you haven’t been paying attention, is a precise gene editing tool that’s taken the world by storm, promising everything from healthier, hangover-free wine to cures for genetic diseases. Like, all […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Two years ago today, a studio called Niantic released a game with a novel proposition: Go outside. Point your smartphone at the real world. Catch some monsters. Within a day, Pokémon Go was at the top of every app store chart. Within 200 days, players had spent a billion dollars on in-game upgrades—the shortest time […]
March 20, 2019 | | No Comments
It’s been less than a year since Elon Musk announced his plans to settle humans on Mars during a talk in Guadalajara, Mexico. On stage at the International Astronautical Congress, the billionaire invoked the lore of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Battlestar Galactica while describing a massive passenger ship loaded with the essentials—you know, […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Donald Trump is ruining television. Consider how the principal foci of TV seemed to shift when he became president—figuratively bullhorning his way into TV’s domestic interior in a way that has clogged the thematic daring on a number of shows across network, cable, and streaming platforms. Shows of every hue now engage the tempest of […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Last August, Masahide Sasaki and his team instructed a satellite to shoot laser beams at a suburb of Tokyo. No, not like that. The laser beam, made of infrared light, was invisible to the human eye. By the time it had traveled through hundreds of miles of outer space and atmosphere, the light was harmless: […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Virtual reality, as it’s been promised to us by science fiction, is a singular realm of infinite possibility. Star Trek’s Holodeck, Yu-Gi-Oh!’s Virtual World, Snow Crash’s Metaverse: Each is the all-powerful experience generator of its world, able to accommodate a character’s any desire. Novelist Ernest Cline sharpened this vision in his 2011 debut, Ready Player […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
In October 2016, the organizers behind a microbiome conference sent promo materials to some prominent scientists. Elisabeth Bik was one of them. With nearly 12,000 followers, her tweets could help publicize their upcoming event in San Diego. But when she scanned the lineup, she noticed that almost every speaker was a man. Add more women, […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
This week, Overwatch has a new hero, the Video Game Awards are here to give us something to argue about, and Telltale's ending becomes permanent. Let's get to it. Ashe Is the Newest Cowboy in Overwatch, a Game With a Surprising Number of Cowboys Games like Overwatch grow via the introduction of new characters, playable […]
March 20, 2019 | Story | No Comments
Space is indifferent to your suffering. It doesn’t care that it’ll freeze you to death unless you’re wearing a fancy suit, or that even before freezing you’ll suffocate in its vacuum. And it certainly doesn’t care how difficult it is for humans to get stuff done in the void: practical things like screwing in bolts […]