Ideas
Rosneft, Now the Biggest Oil Company in the World, Will Control Russia's Arctic
Rosneft, the Russian state-owned oil behemoth, just signed a deal to purchase TNK-BP, Russia’s third-largest oil producer, for $55 billion. The deal makes Rosneft the largest publicly-traded oil producer. It’s a boon for private enterprise, especially...
With "Public Access Me," Jonas Lund Wants To Show You Everything He Does Ever Online
Right now, at 11:19 a.m. EST, artist Jonas Lund does not appear to be at his computer. Perhaps he's gone to the bathroom or to get a snack or maybe he's still asleep. Open in his browser is just one page, a pile of code at Github. You can look for...
Yes, the World's Fastest Stroller Can Do Burnouts
Colin Furze is, according to his probably self-written "Wikipedia page":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Furze, a plumber, stuntman and filmmaker from Stamford, England, who also has an obsession with posting YouTube videos of himself hauling ass on...
Patent Trolling Is Draining the Blood from the Idea Economy, and It's Just Getting Worse
US Patent No. 6,599,460 is barely comprehensible and not even the slightest bit sexy. It has to do with preventing irregularities in a certain kind of injection molding; like, if you were making a cheap, thin drinking cup in a mold from liquid plastic...
Ketamine May Help Treat Depression By Rewiring Your Brain
Feeling depressed? Stressed out? Doctors at Yale say the quickest and most efficient form of relief could be a healthy dose of Special K – the horse tranquilizer, not the breakfast cereal.
Spider Silk Makes Great Microchips That Dissolve in the Human Body
Spider silk is pretty amazing stuff. Pound for pound, it's as strong as steel and more durable than Kevlar. It can be stretched to incredible lengths, but it's no more cumbersome than cotton or nylon. Because it's so awesome, scientists have long been...
In Which Big Game and Eugenics Go To Washington: or, Environmentalism Is Born (Part One)
In the aftermath of a rollicking dinner party in 1887, Teddy Roosevelt and his friends decided to start a club. It would be devoted to their shared passions: the thrill of the chase, pitting nature against human daring and ingenuity – a club for big...
Liquid Nitrogen Cocktails Look Cool, But You Might Lose Your Gut
Liquid nitrogen, the instant wart-removing, CPU cooling, cryogenic liquid that expands into gas at ratio of 1-to-694 in room temperature environments has now been linked with an unexpected gastrectomy (stomach removal) of a young woman near Lancaster...
Everybody Run: We've Created a Self-Aware Robot (But Also It's Kind of Cute)
It's often easy to find advances in robot technology a little bit unsettling, if not downright scary. Practically as long as man has been making machines, we've been worried that they'll evolve and one day take over everything. Of course, for this to...
The World's Cities Are Set To Grow Explosively and Maybe That's Not a Bad Thing
A study published last week in "the journal":http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/11/1211658109 of the National Academy of Sciences forecasts massive global urbanization between now and 2030. Researchers estimate total expansion of the planet's...
Andrew Blum Meets the Real-Life Internet on a Beach in Ireland (Video)
I love the fact that when an undersea fiberoptic cable that's thousands of miles long is laid miles-deep on the floor of an ocean reaches its eventual destination, that cable is brought ashore by a dude in a wet suit. Like, the only difference between...
Researchers Aim For Commercially Viable Green Crude in Four Years
Four years. This is the goal set by researchers at Texas A&B for the deployment of near-commercial-scale technology to conjure regular ol' oil -- the kind that might wind up at a gas pump -- from genetically modified algae. The task is as "simple" as...