I'm not sure if I should be feeling so comfortable in the apocalypse. That's the thought that keeps working its way through my mind as I play the first hours of Fallout 76 and its now-foundational rituals. As I leave the nuclear war refuge of the Vault. As I find ugly leather armor. As I […]
Do you know the tragic story of Hard Rock Park? I'll keep it quick: A decade ago, just as the 2008 credit crisis was hitting, a multi-million-dollar classic-rock-themed amusement park opened in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It featured rollercoasters dedicated to Led Zeppelin and The Eagles, a sensory-overloading ride based on The Moody Blues’ love […]
In a hallway of an engineering building at Stanford University, some devilish researchers have built a sprawling obstacle course. To make it through, competitors have to wind over sand, through a door, up some steps, and finally, through a forest of small pillars. Sounds like the Rube Goldbergian machinations of an grad student with too […]
We won, was the problem. WIRED tumbled into the mid-2000s in a whirlwind of validation and confusion. The main justification for our claim that the digital revolution would reshape the world had been brash confidence and what our founding editor in chief calls “militant optimism.” And then, somewhere around 2003, it turned out to be […]
America doesn't have good data on guns. Blame the Dickey amendment. First introduced in 1996, the legislation didn't ban gun investigations explicitly (it forbade the use of federal dollars in the advocacy or promotion of gun control), but Congress that year also cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the […]
I'm going to go ahead and spoil Alita: Battle Angel for you. Not because I'm a dick, but because revealing the ending tells you nothing about the plot and will ruin absolutely nothing about the film. It ends—drum roll, please—with Alita (Rosa Salazar), sword in hand, staring down her foe, her Big Bad. Then it […]
Let's be clear—airplanes are complicated. Sure, it's entirely possible to get a piece of paper and fold it in a particular way so that it flies. But the physics of flight isn't trivial. It's even harder to give an explanation of the forces on a flying aircraft in a short video—which is what I did […]
It was the mid-’80s, and Freddy Krueger was having an identity crisis. The recent A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge had performed well in theaters, but the sequel to the smart, wickedly funny original had irked fans by slashing away narrative logic in favor of a few gruesome kills. The future of the […]
It’s an interesting time to be making a case for philosophy in science. On the one hand, some scientists working on ideas such as string theory or the multiverse—ideas that reach far beyond our current means to test them—are forced to make a philosophical defense of research that can’t rely on traditional hypothesis testing. On […]
Sometimes, you just have to ponder the impossible physics behind Star Wars. Other times, you simply have to remember the words from 1980s comic book Ambush Bug: "Someone once told George Lucas that there is no sound in airless space. He didn't believe it. Today, George Lucas is a millionaire." So, what’s been happening in […]