Tornado Alley is Shifting Eastward—and We're Not Ready

In the days of old, creating a song required a composer, a lyricist, an arranger, a recording engineer, a band or orchestra. Today, in the pop world, a single person often handles those jobs in a sing...

8 Joulu 202352min

Planes contribute 9% of the world’s carbon pollution, but electrifying them has always seemed impossible; batteries have never been powerful or light enough to carry themselves. But in 2023, batteries...

24 Marras 202340min

The U.S. has fallen into polarized, partisan, political bickering. Online, liberals and conservatives seem to despise each other. But nobody seems to stop to ask: How did we get our liberal and conser...

10 Marras 202341min

Every month, over a billion people open their phones and fire up Google Maps. Its original function—offering driving directions, with real-time traffic tracking—was disruptive enough in 2008, when mos...

26 Loka 202332min

For the most part, we don’t hunt whales anymore, but we’re still killing them—mostly by driving ships into them. One species, the North Atlantic right whale, is now extinct in most parts of the world;...

13 Loka 202340min

On Christmas Day, 2021, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit a million miles from Earth—a huge and insanely ambitious machine, billions of dollars over budget and 14 years past dead...

29 Syys 202343min

People use all kinds of words to describe Elon Musk, from “genius” to “megalomaniac,” from “visionary” to “erratic”—but now there’s less reason to call him “enigmatic,” thanks to Walter Isaacson’s new...

16 Syys 202339min

In April 1978, MIT professor Amar Bose was flying home to Boston from Switzerland. But when he tried to listen to music through the airline’s headphones, he couldn’t hear a darned thing. He spent the ...

1 Syys 202341min