The Year in Motherboard Features: Where Are They Now?

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The Year in Motherboard Features: Where Are They Now?

We covered a lot of ground this year, feature-wise. And the story is far from over.

We published a lot of stories this year. No small share of them were reported, longform features whose characters and forces-at-play have not settled since. They've gone on, each in their own way, and are worth revisiting.

I've compiled some of these features, with updates and in no particular order, below.

It's an incomplete list. We covered a lot of ground this year, feature-wise. We dropped a three-part series on sex and gender issues in space. We wrote about why a sci-fi author is pioneering NASA's efforts to build cloud cities on Venus; about the mission to save the internet by rewiring it using names, not numbers; about how technology has turned police and military dogs into cybernetic hunters; about "small war" theory and the bionic warrior. We profiled the spaceship engineers who build their own planes and the Hacking Team defectors. (Our coverage of the Hacking Team breach as that story evolved is of note, as well.) We published an exhaustive investigation of the Pentagon's faulty guns, which sometimes explode.

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Those are all worth your time. Like the selects pulled out after the break, they're the sort of deep reports, profiles, investigations, and essays that needle not just the What? but the Why? the How? and At what cost? They are stories about the thrill, promise, failing, and uncertainty of scientific discovery, machines, the Earth, games, space, the future, and beyond. Our purview is vast.

But zoom out. Together, they form a mosaic that reverberates a dead-simple principle at the core of Motherboard: that every yarn about science and technology is ultimately about people. About us. Human beings are the throughline of a shared narrative that just keeps going. The story is never over. Until then.

-Brian Anderson, Features editor


These Chimps Helped Us Find a Hepatitis Vaccine. Now They've Been Left to Die
by Kaleigh Rogers

In March, the New York Blood Center pulled the funding for the chimp sanctuary where 66 of its retired research chimps live, dooming them to starvation.

Photo: Agnes Souchal

Since we ran our story, donations for the chimps have continued to pour in, but costs have also risen. Two conservationists have been sent to Liberia to help out with the care of the chimps and keep an eye on their health, according to Kathleen Conlee, vice president of animal research issues for the Humane Society of the United States. HSUS also needs to invest in updating the chimps' water system, which gets damaged easily by the salt water, and replace an engine for a boat that allows caretakers access to the chimps. Conlee estimated they have enough donations to continue caring for the chimps for another six months. The New York Blood Center has still not responded to calls for it to reinstate funding. - Kaleigh Rogers

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The Cure Culture by Jason Koebler

I'm not mad my best friend died from a serious genetic disease. I'm mad society told her she would be cured.

Illustration: Rebekka Dunlap

When I published this story, the FDA had just approved Orkambi, a cystic fibrosis drug that treats the underlying cause of the disease for more than just a tiny sliver of those with a specific mutation (Orkambi does not work with all CF patients, however). Given the short history of its predecessor, Kalydeco, I expected Orkambi to be exceedingly expensive and difficult to obtain for those who need it most. Well, Orkambi costs $259,000 per patient, per year and will end up costing more than $10 million per patient over the course of his or her lifetime. Orkambi is tanking states' Medicaid budgets and Ireland, which has the highest incidence of CF in the world, has no idea what to do to help sufferers pay for the drug.

All of this suggests that, as medicine gets more personalized, pharmaceutical companies will have more leverage to prey on insurance companies and government safety nets. Need we look further than the story of Martin Shkreli, who purchased the patent to an AIDS drug and jacked up the price to what the market could bear? The system is rigged. If nothing changes, those who can afford the astronomical costs of specialized healthcare will get it, those who can't will die. It's that simple. - Jason Koebler

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Inside Graphene City, Birthplace of a Wonder Material
by Victoria Turk

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What can you actually do with the carbon-based 'miracle material'?

A prototype graphene oxide membrane. Image: Victoria Turk

Since we visited the UK's National Graphene Institute, research and business around the wonder material continues, though it'll still be a while before we see that graphene battery-powered car take to the streets.

The Manchester-based research hub has unveiled further collaborative initiatives with industrial partners, including Chinese tech company Huawei, which announced a partnership with the NGI on the same day as Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the centre.

The conversation continues to move away from graphene in particular to focus instead on 2D materials in general. In October, Kostya Novosleov, one of the Manchester researchers who was awarded the Nobel Prize for isolating graphene, was awarded a £4 million grant to support his research into combining 2D materials to fit design specifications in fields such as electronics.

While reports of research breakthroughs continue to flow thick and fast, we're still waiting to see the promise of graphene properly realized in the form of practical applications that make it out of the lab. - Victoria Turk

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Paranoid-in-Chief by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierari

Yahoo's Alex Stamos wants to secure the entire internet.

Alex Stamos testifies before the Senate Homeland Security Committee in a hearing about consumer security and privacy on May 15, 2014, in Washington, DC. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Shortly after our piece was published, Stamos was lured away from Yahoo by Facebook. His departure came as a surprise for some, who had seen how he had become Yahoo' visible, passionate and very vocal new face. But leading Facebook's security was probably an opportunity he couldn't turn down. It was almost a match made in heaven. Stamos wants to make the whole internet more secure, and Facebook is slowly becoming the internet, for better or worse, so there's not a better place to make a real difference for more than a billion users. - Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierari

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The Girl Who Would Live Forever
by Brian Merchant

The story of the youngest person ever to be cryonically frozen, and the widening allure of the human-freezing industry.

Two-year-old Matheryn Naovaratpong. Photo courtesy of the family

Since we broke the story about Matheryn, or Einz, the youngest girl ever to be cryogenically frozen, the tragic tale of the resilient two-year-old has become something of a phenomenon. Her story was shared in news outlets around the world, and her scientist parents became minor celebrities in their native Thailand. The BBC made a short film about her, and The New York Times ran a major story about the cryogenic freezing process—arguably giving cryonics, and Alcor, the leading organization behind the controversial practice, its biggest moment in the sun in years.

As for Einz's family, they are doing their best to move forward. "We are getting better daily," her aunt tells me. "Sill having tears and missing Matheryn." - Brian Merchant

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The Drug Cartel IT Guy
by Brian Anderson

The story of Felipe Peréz, an IT specialist reportedly kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel and forced into a shadow hacker squad that engineers the gang's hidden radio network.

Felipe Pérez, an architect, disappeared in Northeastern Mexico in March 2013 while working for a regional telecommunications company. Photo courtesy Tanya Elizabeth Gonzalez Vaya

The Mexican government posted a $65,000 reward for information on the whereabouts of Felipe Peréz shortly after this story was published. But that's where things stalled.

Earlier this month I caught up Tanya, Felipe's wife. She told me she thought our story "had a lot of importance in spreading the word about what happened, because a lot of people saw it. Family and friends began to call me. It's important to me to spread and visualize this because people need to know what's going on.

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"About the case, there's no news," she went on. "There's no news with the bounty also. There's no progress. Everything is the same. It's going to be hard to find Felipe. If you come to Monterrey you can see that mothers, sisters, and wives never despair. Years can go by, but you never despair. We have our feet on the ground though, and we want justice. Justice and truth. God, I hope that someday we'll know where they are, if they are alive or dead. We just want to know the truth.

"Yesterday was my birthday and I have to stand up for the two kids we have. One is 5 years old, the other one is 3. It's really hard because you live with tragedy. You don't really know what's going on. You don't know if Felipe is coming back or not. I have hope, but I don't know. I don't know nothing. I have to find a reserve of strength. Believe me, the memory is alive. I remember him. He is present and we had these two little guys together. They are part of us. It's hard, but we have to do it. There's no other option. The kids are not guilty and we have to find a way because of them."

As of December 29, 2015, Felipe Peréz has been missing for 1,014 days. - Brian Anderson

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Mauna Kea's Last Telescope
by Becky Ferreira

Gods and telescopes clash on a sacred mountain in Hawaii.

Photo: Getty Images

Two days after we ran this story, the Thirty Meter Telescope's building permit was revoked by the Hawaii Supreme Court. "Quite simply, the Board put the cart before the horse when it issued the permit before the request for contested case hearing was resolved and the hearing held," according to the Court's official ruling. "Accordingly, the permit cannot stand."

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As of December 16, the TMT construction crews have been removing equipment from the site, but the fight is not necessarily over. The case has been kicked back to the Hawaii circuit court for further hearings, and the TMT community is "assessing our next steps on the way forward," according to TMT chairman chancellor Henry Yang. - Becky Ferreira

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The People Who Risk Jail to Maintain the Tor Network by Joseph Cox

Meet the operators.

Two months after we published this story, reports emerged that a database for the Houston Astros was accessed in an unauthorized fashion. The New York Times described the action as a "hack," even though the rival baseball team seemingly just used a known password to enter the database.

Regardless, a few sports journalists, as well as this reporter, noticed the likely connection between the news and the raid involving Richard's Tor exit node months earlier. (The search warrant obtained by Motherboard showed that the FBI was investigating unauthorized access of the Houston Astros computer network.)

Since the piece ran, the number of exit nodes has fluctuated between 1,000 and 900. At the time of this writing, the number has stabilized at 1,000, funnily the same amount as when the article was published. It is unclear, however, whether any other operators have been raided, subpoenaed or otherwise harassed for providing a vital service in the fight for online anonymity. - Joseph Cox

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Crime, Punishment, and Russia's Original Social Network
by Casey Johnston

The fate that befell VKontakte may soon take down Facebook and Twitter.

Photo courtesy Pavel Durov

Pavel Durov's current company, the cloud-based chat app Telegram, faced renewed scrutiny from American and French officials in the wake of the November terrorist attacks in Paris. This roused debate about whether end-to-end encryption on our personal devices or messaging platforms should be allowed, and the extent to which technologies allowing for secure, self-destructing messages should (or should not) be subject to government surveillance.

As far as anyone can tell, Pavel Durov and his brother, Nikolai, developed and launched Telegram in response to the need for activists to communicate and organize; activists were increasingly unable to do so on Pavel's Vkontakte, Russia's original social network, with Vladimir Putin's allies wielding control. Killing it would cut both ways. - Casey Johnston and Brian Anderson

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VR Is BS
by Emanuel Maiberg

I tried the best virtual reality there is. I wanted it to work, but it doesn't.

I look like an idiot and I feel like an idiot. Photo: Emanuel Maiberg

I got a fair bit of hate for this story, but I stand by it. The reductive gist is that, despite the hype around virtual reality in general and at the Game Developers Conference specifically, I've yet to see the use case that will make it the paradigm-shifting consumer device Mark Zuckerberg and other technocrats believe it will be. As much as I loathe the term, it lacks a "killer app." It still does.

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I've tried many other virtual reality experiences since GDC, including those made to show off the final, consumer version of the Oculus Rift. Some, like Eve: Valkyrie, were novel for the five minutes I was allowed to play them. Others, which involved elaborate physical input devices, like Birdly or VirZOOM, were more convincing, but are not practical experiences you can bring home. They're more comparable to arcade machines.

More fundamental problems with these headsets, namely the poor image resolution, are making it into the final products. I still think this will bother the majority of the supposedly early adopting gaming audience.

At the time of the article, both Oculus and HTC, which makes the Vive headset, were confident that their devices will hit stores by the end of 2015. Both companies have since delayed launch to 2016. HTC is aiming for an April release, while Oculus has a more vague "early 2016" release window.

Could something change between now and when these devices launch? Will the killer app come only a few years after virtual reality is already on the market, as Angry Birds did for the iPhone? Maybe. I hope so. But for now, I still don't see it happening. - Emanuel Maiberg

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The Fight to Unmuzzle Canada's Muzzled Scientists
by Stephen Buranyi

Can voters in this fall's election be convinced that science matters as much as ISIS and the economy?

Protesters hold a mock funeral for science at The Death of Evidence protest in Ottawa on July 10, 2012. Photo: Antoine Morin/E4D

As a Canadian journalist, interviewing American government employees is an absolute delight. Not because I have a particular affinity for American politics, or find their Canadian counterparts boring, but the mere fact that, until recently, it's been far, far easier to get them on the phone.

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For what felt like an eternity, the Canadian federal government kept its scientists under lock and key. Media requests to scientists of all stripes were forwarded to PR flacks who filtered and edited both questions and replies. Getting a scientist on the phone to talk about a recent paper was nigh impossible. If you were lucky, you got emailed replies without attribution that managed to say very little at all.

Which is why, in August, we published a lengthy feature on how Canadian government scientists were preparing to fight back. That fall, there would be an election, contributor Stephen Buranyi wrote, and some of those who had been silenced were determined to make muzzling a high-profile political issue.

Whether or not their efforts worked, one thing is for sure: On October 19, the reigning Conservative government was ousted, and Justin Trudeau's Liberal government was sworn in. And almost immediately, things began to change.

Newly appointed Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Navdeep Bains, put out a statement saying that scientists could speak about their work to whoever they wanted. Naturally, we called a few up. Canada's Environment Minister got a new title: Minister of Environment and Climate Change. At the Paris Climate talks, Prime Minister Trudeau declared that Canada was "back" and would "take on a new leadership role internationally."

At the end of November, I came across a bulletin from the Canadian Space Agency—an announcement that two Canadian science projects were on their way to the International Space Station later that week. At the bottom of the post was contact information for the two project lead's. Motherboard's Jordan Pearson phoned one of them up.

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What a difference a few months makes. -Matthew Braga

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The Loud Fight Against Silicon Valley's Quiet Racism
by Darold Cuba

How tech became a civil rights battleground.

Press Corps members jump in front of Platform balloons at Morehouse. Photo: Shannon Duncan

Since we ran our story, Platform founder Hank Williams, Jr. passed away just shy of turning 51. But not before seeing Google's Jack Drummond and Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey headline Platform Summit's 3rd installation at Morehouse College in Atlanta this October.

Meanwhile, various civic, corporate, and not-for-profits have gained prominent visibility due to their efforts, with Silicon Harlem (in Hank's childhood hometown, Harlem, New York) becoming one of the more dynamic initiatives, transforming Harlem into a new tech oasis with support from Google, Microsoft, and Congressman Charlie Rangel amongst many others. Rev. Jesse Jackson's efforts have continued to keep these issues at the forefront of not just the industry, but the mainstream as well, even Congress, as the Congressional Black Caucus launches the CBC Tech 2020 initiative to provide employment and retention solutions.

The systemic and institutional structures that cause the lack of diversity in technology in the first place have resulted in studies and think-tanks in psychology, sociology, and other areas of academia and business to identify, explore, and solve the problems associated with racism in not just Silicon Valley, but the broader Western world. - Darold Cuba

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The People Who Get Off to Crush Porn
by Virginia Pelley

Despite the high-profile arrest of the alleged founders of "Ebony Crush Goddess," crush porn remains nearly impossible to eradicate online.

Brent Justice continues to successfully delay his trial regarding animal cruelty charges in Texas; a new court date has been set for February. The federal case against Justice and Ashley Richards also is still pending.

Several bills addressing animal cruelty have been introduced in Congress, including The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act (H.R. 2293 and S. 1831), which will complement federal laws regarding animal fighting and crush videos by prohibiting extreme animal abuse that involves interstate commerce or occurs on federal property. The Animal Beta Project continues its work and has been in touch with law enforcement about several cases. - Virginia Pelley

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Man Hands
by Rose Eveleth

When a woman puts on a foot or a knee or an arm, she often finds that it's not quite right.

Illustration: Alex Cook

Since we ran this story, several prosthetics manufacturers have come out with devices designed specifically for women. In June, the company bebionic released the "bebionic small," which is 30 percent smaller than their original hand design. A prosthetics program at the University of Hartford is working on making a hand that can be fully customized in its proportions. Some people have pointed to the rise in 3D-printed prosthetics as a possible solution for the issue of sizing, but there are problems with that approach—most home 3D printers aren't robust enough to build something that's stable and reliable. - Rose Eveleth

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My Game of Life
by Jagger Gravning

How video games washed away my suicidal thoughts after my cancer diagnosis.

The author, post surgery. Photo: Jagger Gravning

Even in the best of circumstances it is embarrassing to write publicly about the condition of your colon, your suicidal thoughts, or your enjoyment of God of War.

But it was also very liberating and I received much support and well-wishes for my personal tribulations. Some gamers seemed proud that video games were evidently capable of the psychic impact I described. Others, perhaps less familiar with gaming, seemed quite astonished at the notion that commercial video games might be used as therapy and I was asked to explain myself.

I'm still without a cancer recurrence (knock on wood). I try to remember to smile more and I have discovered a newfound instinct to initiate hugs, even with acquaintances. Meanwhile, I wrote a screenplay that is being produced into a feature that I am directing and filming early next year. My wife is pregnant with our first kid, due in March. I still have to see my oncologist every 90 days to be told whether the cancer has recurred.

So, with all these fountains of anxiety gushing at once, I still deliberately wake up a bit earlier in the morning than I need to in order to give myself time to play video games with two cups of coffee. My current self-prescription is Splatoon, a Nintendo game about gangs of squid children who engage each other in turf wars with ink guns. - Jagger Gravning