Remember MS-DOS computers? Show the C prompt to anyone born after 1990, and they’ll probably look at you like you’re wearing a tin foil hat. To execute the simplest of tasks on your computer, you had to know a whole language of commands. It was like asking “regular folk” to be Python coders just to binge cat memes — you know, basic computing ...

Don’t you hate interruptions? One moment you’re cruising along, the next, you’re dead in the water. Stranded. All momentum lost. That feeling of being in the zone, fully immersed and focused, is sometimes referred to as the flow state. In this world of attention deficit and people’s focus being pulled in a hundred different directions all at once, ...

Regulation is a tricky thing. One’s first instinct may be to roll his or her eyes at the thought of having progress stymied in the name of bureaucracy. And it’s true, there can be a lot of frustration in regulatory compliance. On the other hand, when someone falls gravely ill due to eating bad chicken or not being able to locate the medicine they ...

What’s a modern car without an ECU? A pile of parts that won’t move. What’s a computer without a CPU? A blank screen. What’s an HVAC system without a thermostat? Thousands of dollars of equipment that won’t stop cooling or heating once the ideal temperature has been achieved. In other words, technology turns pretty useless without a brain. When it ...

Once upon a time, the combustion engine was a threat to everyday life as man knew it. Somewhere, a resentful stagecoach driver shook his fist at the prospect of him and his horses losing their jobs to this newfangled “horseless carriage.” In hindsight, of course, resistance would have been ridiculous. The automobile revolutionized humanity as we ...

Sports and athleticism sometimes have a tenuous relationship. Sure, there are the freak athletes who dominate their sport: Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders, and Jim Thorpe come to mind, each two-sport stars. But then there are the players who aren’t physical specimens that rise to the top of their profession. Thirty-seven place kickers stand atop the ...

You are what you eat. Which for some of us, means we are lasso-toting, cowboy-hat-wearing cream-filled golden sponge cakes. Yee-haw. For others, their body is a temple — everything that goes in must be pure organic brain or muscle fuel grown with the greatest of eco-responsibility in mind. For most, we’re somewhere in between. We’d like our ...

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. To be sure, this is a powerful, poignant refrain that is easy to fathom when you imagine said chain is only six, even 12 links long. But what if your chain consists of 50 links? Thousands of links? Imagine you had a chain with enough links to span several continents. Now finding the weakest link ...

In the 1960s, George Jetson showed us the sexy side of the future. We were promised flying cars that could fold into briefcases and robotic maids (top that, Back to the Future 2!). The joke of the whole thing — the same basic joke they used about the primitive world in The Flintstones — is that all that cool future tech was blasé to George and ...

Humans have been imagining the future in a variety of ways for quite some time now. We’ve dreamed everything up, from flying cars to funky clothes to space travel. Another trope is artificial intelligence (AI). For centuries, we’ve imagined coexisting with independently functional machines, automatons, and robots. Published more than 130 years ...