5it

5 Intriguing Things

May 14, 2014

1. Group video chat is dumb and hard. But group animated GIF chat is... awesome? "Imagine having a fixed time for recording yourself on camera - let’s say...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 12, 2014

1. Woods Hole lost its Nereus remotely operated vehicle on a 10,000 meter dive. "Everything was going fine. Two sets of pushcores were in the sample basket,...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 9, 2014

1. The obsolescence of the car chase. "Over the past few years, companies like Starchase have begun developing technologies like its 'GPS bullet' pursuit...

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5 Intriguing Things: Virginia Hughes Guest Edition

May 8, 2014

Editor's note: We have a guest editor today! Meet Virginia Hughes, an excellent science writer who (mostly) covers genes, brains, and drugs. She's got a new...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 7, 2014

1. The case against going to Mars. "The uncomfortable truth is that, despite the technical tour-de-force of our robotic reconnaissance, looking for water on...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 6, 2014

1. Meet the "snowflake babies," adopted as embryos. "As the use of IVF grows, so, too, will the number of embryos in storage. Physicians and patients reduce...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 5, 2014

1. An interview with Julian Oliver, an author of the The Critical Engineering Manifesto. "So what I want to do with my work — and I know this is the same for...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 2, 2014

1. The White House issued a report with the classic promise/peril framing about Big Data. One focus: discrimination by machine. "The detailed personal...

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5 Intriguing Things

May 1, 2014

1. Paul Ford proposes a software canon, and in the slot at the top, he places Microsoft Office. "What Office provides is a language for doing office things....

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5 Intriguing Things

April 30, 2014

1. Somehow I don't think chanting 'sharing is caring' helps the Airbnb cause. "'We know that this proposal would make it nearly impossible for regular people...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 29, 2014

1. Wages for Facebook, by Laurel Ptak. "Ptak’s own elegant, angry manifesto has bewildered as much as it has enlivened. Some people on Twitter wondered if...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 28, 2014

1. What Ray Kurzweil is doing at Google: teaching computers to read. "So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 25, 2014

1. Body hackers try to acquire animal powers. "Now, some prosthetics wearers, body hackers and amateur scientists are taking this to a different level. With...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 24, 2014

1. Finding habitable exoplanets is bad news for our long-term survival as a species because if there are lots of places to live but no aliens we can...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 23, 2014

1. What's up with tablets these days? Apple's earnings report today will tell us a little something: how many iPads they've sold and whether that number is...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 22, 2014

1. Surveillance by artificial intelligence... how else did we think law enforcement would process all that video footage? "Artificial intelligence is already...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 21, 2014

1. Astra Taylor's new book on what happened to the Internet, The People's Platform, looks really good. "I was struck by how ours is a diminished utopianism....

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5 Intriguing Things

April 18, 2014

1. How we misunderstand innovation... a meditation. "But there is another form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 17, 2014

1. The math of large numbers means that companies with lots of employees are going to try to optimize everything. "Technology means that no matter what kind...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 16, 2014

1. Beautiful feature on the future of streaming music. "If the recording industry has its way, music ownership will give way to a model completely based on...

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