Without the cost of maintaining physical stores, online retailers could offer lower prices and larger assortments than their brick and mortar counterparts, and people could by them in less time than it took to gas up the minivan. A “nice little Saturday” no longer had to entail epic marathons to warehouse-style superstores. If Sting knocked…
It’s not just the best-selling gadget ever created: It’s probably the most influential one too. Since Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, Apple has sold close to 1.5 billion of them, creating giant businesses for app developers and accessory makers, and reimagining the way we live. Millions of people use an iPhone as their…
The History of Data Breaches Data breaches have been increasingly common and harmful for decades. A few stand out, though, as instructive examples of how breaches have evolved, how attackers are able to orchestrate these attacks, what can be stolen, and what happens to data once a breach has occurred. Digital data breaches started long…
That same year, some guy named Elon Musk, about to be rich from selling PayPal, announced a plan called Mars Oasis. With his many monies, he wanted to amp up public support for human settlement on the Red Planet, so that public pressure would impel Congress to mandate a mission to Mars. Through an organization…
Personal data is also used by artificial intelligence researchers to train their automated programs. Every day, users around the globe upload billions of photos, videos, text posts, and audio clips to sites like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. That media is then fed to machine learning algorithms, so they can learn to “see” what’s in…
Humanity just can’t make up its mind about cannabis. For thousands of years, humans have used the stuff as medicine or to travel on spiritual quests. That, though, didn’t quite suit the British, who banned cannabis in colonial India. Then in the 20th century, the United States government declared war on marijuana, and most of…
If we could find them, we could end our history-long loneliness, and we could imagine—through the example of their very existence—that we, too, could make it to some kind of higher, more heavenly reality. That is not quite how scientists tend to frame their work. And they do not tend to say that it requires…
Depending on who you ask, blockchains are either the most important technological innovation since the internet or a solution looking for a problem. The original blockchain is the decentralized ledger behind the digital currency bitcoin. The ledger consists of linked batches of transactions known as blocks (hence the term blockchain), and an identical copy is…
Not so long ago, stories about cyberwar started with scary hypotheticals: What if state-sponsored hackers were to launch widespread attacks that blacked out entire cities? Crippled banks and froze ATMs across a country? Shut down shipping firms, oil refineries, and factories? Paralyzed airports and hospitals? Today, these scenarios are no longer hypotheticals: Every one of…
Big secrets come in small packages. Take cells, like the ones shedding off the inside of your cheeks and into your saliva right now. These days it’s not that hard to crack them open, shake out the DNA coiled inside, and read the genetic code they contain. Those strings of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs…
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