5it

5 Intriguing Things

July 16, 2014

1. Robots in everything: beet farm edition. "The Ladybird recently moved out of the lab and into a test field, spending three days monitoring the vegetative...

---

5 Intriguing Things

July 15, 2014

1. Inside a FedEx logistics center where they sort 1.5 million packages a night. "When the packages hit Input, they're put onto one of three belts, the top,...

---

5 Intriguing Things

July 14, 2014

1. The New York Daily News takes a happy traipse through the NYPD's surveillance technologies. "He recounted a recent CompStat session where bullet...

---

5 Intriguing Things

July 10, 2014

1. This little essay is, ostensibly, about how much Union soldiers loved coffee, but it's really about closing the distance between their time and ours....

---

5 Intriguing Things

July 9, 2014

1. Sensors everywhere really mean analytics everywhere. "The company says that it provides e-commerce style metrics for brick-and-mortar stores using sensors...

---

5 Intriguing Things

July 8, 2014

1. Food and memory, food and Mars, food and pretending to be on Mars. "Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) is a four-year project: a...

---

5 Intriguing Things

July 7, 2014

1. Meet the claustrum, which may be the seat of consciousness within the brain. "Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single...

---

5 Intriguing Things

July 2, 2014

1. What happens when the rich can live to 120 years old? "What if the mantra ‘80 is the new 50’ could apply to us all? But the coming longevity gap might set...

---

5 Intriguing Things

July 1, 2014

1. The person now running Google Glass is not exactly who you'd expect. "The Glass job would seem to be tailored for yet another young male engineer...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 30, 2014

Welcome, readers of David Carr's New York Times column! It's great to have you here. A quick orientation: 1) If you want to get in touch, all you have to do...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 26, 2014

1. A major prostitution portal was seized by Federal authorities. "Some law enforcement officials hailed the move as a victory against sex trafficking. But...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 25, 2014

1. Proto-beliebers: there was an insane fan community on Prodigy centered around New Kids on the Block. "We traded bootleg analog content with a new...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 24, 2014

1. Nils Barricelli, the father of research into digital life forms. "Barricelli programmed some of the earliest computer algorithms that resemble real-life...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 23, 2014

1. How Google lobbies on the state level, where a lot of the action is. "Google this year has retained a quartet of lobbyists in Maryland to remove any...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 20, 2014

1. Movement is also thinking, even Robin van Persie's. "The idea of 'muscle memory' encourages this – allowing us to cordon off feats of motor skill as a...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 19, 2014

1. The occult phone. "The key to the telephone as miracle, metaphor, and medium for ghosts lay in what Hubert and Mauss called the 'numerous slits' in...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 18, 2014

1. Roboticists should learn from cartoons. "A companion robot is something you'll want to have because it does valuable work for you–but only if it also has...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 17, 2014

1. Designer Min Ming Lo looks at the different icons that mean "share this thing" on different operating systems. His favorite is pre-2011 Android's old Y....

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 16, 2014

1. Coal reaches its largest share of the global energy market since 1970. "Coal has reached its highest market share of global energy consumption for more...

---

5 Intriguing Things

June 13, 2014

1. A geneticist and blogger sequenced his son's genome in utero. "An infant delivered last week in California appears to be the first healthy person ever...

---