Archive
tech
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Agencies Around the World Are Planning Their Next Lunar Trips
Nine landers, five agencies and one patch of cratered ground the size of a county. The hardest part of the new lunar decade is…
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Akihabara has Never Been This Exposed to the World Previously
Cheap transistors built the district and anime built its second life. Now the crowd photographing Chuo-dori is the product. Shop owners under the tracks…
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Who Overwatches the Overwatch
Tens of millions of doorbell cameras now run classifiers that decide what counts as suspicious. The thresholds are trade secrets, and the thresholds are…
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Color Graphic Television is Something We Will Experience
Seventy years after NTSC hid colour inside a black-and-white signal, the industry has done it again: a universal standard, undeclared capabilities, and firmware quietly…
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The Power of Ten Requires Totally New & Radical Space
Every tenfold gain in sensitivity costs an observatory an entire building. A low white shed on the Atlantic coast explains why the dishes get…
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The Space Eye is Turning Towards the Mysterious Dyson Sphere Structure
A new infrared survey is quietly re-examining thousands of nearby stars for the waste heat a stellar-scale engineering project could not hide. So far…
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Splitting the Atom Was the Likely Turning Point in Energy Production
In December 1938 two chemists in Berlin found barium where barium should not have been. Everything about how the modern world makes electricity descends…
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Triple Double Lyrics: Competing With the Generation Finest
A fan-built scoring system borrowed from basketball is quietly reshaping how a generation of rappers writes, and how their audience argues. Not everyone thinks…
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The Dawn of Augmented Reality is Upon Us, Brace Yourselves
The optics finally work, the weight is almost bearable, and the batteries still are not. A look at what the current crop of augmented…
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