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Why I Cheated the Internet: A Chat with the Geek Fabulist Behind "Human Bird Wings"
Maybe you’re among the six, seven, eight or I-don’t-know-how-many million people who have seen the video of that Dutch man-bird who fluttered about in a park with a camera attached to his helmet. Since the video launched some two weeks ago, the typical...
How Dinosaurs Loved: An Interview with Dr. Mark Norell on Dino Relations
Like almost any youngster, my love of dinosaurs was deeper than a tar pit and wider than the Cretaceous. Also like many, my love of dinosaurs and desire to learn about them faded before I reached the age when certain questions occurred to me. Sure it...
Sorry, World: Silvio Berlusconi's Fortune Teller Has Bad News
When he was just another millionaire businessman, Silvio Berlusconi consulted with Teodora Stefanova, an alien-communicating psychic, who told him he would become prime minister. Her reward for being right: fame, fortune and the chance to tell millions...
The Social Network for the World's 200 Most Powerful People: An Interview with TopCom's Matt Quinn
Back when the news dropped that the World Economic Forum had commissioned software giant Tibco to produce TopCom, a social network "supposedly designed":http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2090949/Facebook-worlds-richest-200-people-launched.html...
Congress Wants to Destroy Drug Crops with Fungi: A Q+A with Mycology Expert John Taylor
Back in December "I came across a 186-page government-ordered report":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/12/1/a-different-kind-of-mushroom-cloud-fighting-the-drug-war-with-killer-fungi that reviewed the scientific feasibility of using fungi as a targeted...
An Interview with Richard Garriott: Life’s a Game and Then You Die on Mars
Richard Garriott launched his career by creating giant, wild virtual role-playing games, and his whole life has looked like one ever since. In 2008, he followed in the footsteps of his father, the astronaut Owen Garriott, by joining the Russian Space...
An Interview with a Guy at CERN about Seriously, What's the Deal with the Higgs Boson
CERN in Geneva published the latest Large Hadron Collider (LHC) research results the other day regarding the elusive Higgs boson, a tiny building block particle that’s never been witnessed but its existence is crucial to quantum theory. It’s so crucial...
Here's Where the Internet Lives in NYC: Ben Mendelsohn On 60 Hudson Street (Q+A)
We love the Internet, but to most of us it's a megalithic behemoth of a cyber system that, despite our numerous attempts to define its boundaries, seems to keep expanding in a seemingly never-ending vacuum of digital space. This is why filmaker Ben...
Learning to Play the Theremin On the Skype: An Interview with Tom Grillo
While spending an afternoon watching as many versions of the Zelda theme song as I could on YouTube, I discovered the Theremin - or rather, I discovered some level-10 nerd-type playing the Zelda theme song on a Theremin. For the (hopefully) few of...
Why The Tevatron Will Never Die: Q&A
Fermilab's Tevatron collider will power down this afternoon after nearly three decades of subatomic particle collisions.
CHILL OUT THE INTERNET: Jaron Lanier Interview
*{From March 15, 2010}* For a white guy with dreads, Jaron Lanier is extremely productive. In the 1980s he coined the term “virtual reality” and among other things, established the idea of online personas through the use of avatars. The Encyclopaedia...
Space Is Whatever: A Suicidal Astronaut Photoshoot
I’m a sucker for costumes. I must have six bins full of them that I’ve collected over the years on November 1st, when they get marked down 80 percent. (The Klu Klux Klan outfit from the Big Brother White Issue is hard to explain to people. I’ve been...