March 21, 2021
Quantum Phones Today, Quantum Communication Tomorrow?
Last year, Samsung developed the world’s first smartphone with quantum technology, installed as a security package. This year, Korean technology company KT launched its own “scrambler-free quantum smartphone” enabler. Quantum scrambling and quantum…
February 19, 2021
Fossil Fuel Death Count
We are on the cusp of ending our reliance on energy sources that kill us and kill the planet. But the cusp often feels like the longest part of the journey. Even as we can envision, and are materializing, a world where the majority of inputs to the…
February 18, 2021
Edgy Science Roundup
The lifeworld and deathworld meeting and overlapping; viruses evolving into unique protective bodily organs; ethical questions raised by VR communication “with the dead”; a nation’s official insistence that it isn’t building a time machine. In this…
January 27, 2021
Minecraft and Statecraft
Outschool, a supplemental class service for ambitious kids from k-12, is offering a course called Metrocraft. In it, students collectively design and build (in Minecraft) a city that they then govern. The class combines architecture, public…
January 27, 2021
Going-Where-No-One-Has-Gone-Before Roundup
Human flight is an iconic preoccupation throughout human history. Journey into inner space is lesser-known but still well-established in speculative science and literature. And human augmentation is part of both outward and inward super-travel…
December 27, 2020
Weird Musical Instrument Roundup
Have you ever heard of the Katzenklavier, or cat piano? It’s exactly what it sounds like: a design (and thankfully only a design) for a keyboard that sits “in front of a line of cages, each of which has a cat trapped inside.” Pressing a particular…
December 26, 2020
Why Did Facebook Lift Its Ban on Political Ads for the Georgia Senate Runoff?
Political advertising is both the greatest celebration of democracy and, presently, one of democracy’s most strained relationships. The courts scrutinize government regulation of political advertising more tightly than they do commercial…
November 24, 2020
Who or What Was the First Robot? A Debate
The definition of “robot” is quite controversial. The most common definition is that a robot is a machine capable of carrying out complex tasks or series of tasks based on programming from a human. But culturally, and in the science fiction…
November 17, 2020
Time Travel Roundup
Fittingly, for a year that many of us would like to fast-forward past or, alternatively, rewind and start different, 2020 has ushered in a massive shift in time travel discourse. Time travel into the past, once thought to be theoretically…
October 27, 2020
Will Ransomware Threaten Municipal Election Security?
Lucas Ropek put up a moderately long piece on Governing last week on the threat of ransomware attacks on state and local government websites, and the specific threat such attacks may pose for elections. Ransomware comes from the world of…