2010 was a brutal year for fossil fuel industry workers. The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon killed 11 rig workers, and an accident at Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch claimed the lives of 29 coal miners. The fallout to the disaster, caused by an
Can a place be "undiscovered"? Wrap your brain around this: for the past few days geographers, Internet speculators and conspiracy theorists have been making much ado about a place that scientists exists according to Google, even if scientists who ha…
Despair, ye riders of mass transit! Don't you know that subways and buses are dreary, cramped mobile compounds, the movers of the poor and downtrodden? No wonder everyone is so taken with images like these, "Michael Wolf's fine portraits":http://phot…
Facebook has been getting a lot of flack lately over EdgeRank, its algorithm that decides who will see your latest post show up in their Newsfeed. After the formula was rejiggered in September, some have seen their reach plummet as much as 50 percent…
Today, Neft Daslari is a crumbling dystopia, a vast series of oil platforms slowly being eaten by the waves of the Caspian Sea. Like all good dystopias, it was once an industrial marvel—a veritable floating oil city, home to 5,000 workers, a movie th…
Following days of mortar and rocket attacks from Gaza, Israel today launched a brutal, tightly orchestrated assault on Hamas that killed nine people and wounded 40 others. Among the dead was Ahmed al-Jabari, the org's military chief. It was the large…
Backed by "Pure Net," a Salafist Muslim grassroots organization, conservative Egyptian public-prosecutor Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud has decided it's time to finally "enforce":http://transitions.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/11/12/egypts_ominous_attack_on_po…
Forget Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks high horse, and Hollywood victim Kim Dotcom and his attempts to rebrand himself as an Internet freedom crusader. This is John McAfee, the perfect anti-hero. This is the man whose name we know because of the ant…
Hey look, big brother's coming to Wal-Mart. The Japanese company NEC has designed "affordable facial recognition tech":http://www.diginfo.tv/v/12-0209-r-en.php to be deployed in big box stores; it's supposed to "gather consumer data" to help owners f…
Eco-horror has been around forever, and the premise propelling the genre couldn't be simpler or more primal: man tampers with nature—or worse, ruin nature—and nature straight-up ends man. Films adhering to that golden formula first started cropping u…
There's nothing like the airport to remind us that, despite college degrees, fancy shoes, or six-figure incomes, we need to be handled like cattle in order for the system to flow smoothly. We queue to get your ticket, wait patiently in security lines…
Yeah, it's a familiar refrain by now; Apple is a cult. Its shiny products and aesthetic inspire slavish devotion amongst fans, its Stores are bastions of eerily synchronized helpfulness, and workers are willing to accept lower wages and fewer benefit…
Forget about jetpacks. And we're never going to see time travel, teleportation, spaceships with warp drives, or the inside of a worm hole. But cheer up, futurists—lifelike androids, nuclear fusion power, and lunar colonies are still in the cards.
So this pretty much sounds like the most cyberpunk description of a video game ever: "Bad Trip is an immersive interactive system that enables people to navigate my mind using a game controller. Since November 2011, every moment of my life has be…
The International Energy Agency has released its annual World Energy Outlook, and one finding in particular is making all the headlines: By 2035, the United States will be the world's largest oil producer. Yeah, thanks to fracking, we'll be able to g…
Obama got reelected, so a bunch of rich assholes say they have no choice but to fire their employees. There are now "reports trickling in":http://twitchy.com/2012/11/08/layoff-bomb-detonates-large-corporations-join-small-businesses-in-announcing-mass…
Just a quick suggestion: follow as many NASA twitter feeds as you can. Today, scientists from its IceBridge mission embarked on an 11-hour flight over West Antarctica, and they live-tweeted the whole thing. Yes, with pics and a nice Q+A session to bo…
Sandy rolled over the lot of us east coasters, taking us unawares. Whoever would've imagined we'd see the day when New York City itself was swamped; lower Manhattan flooded in car-carrying waters? Climate modelers, that's who. Over the last decade…
Generally, my assumption of the ins and outs of crime scene forensics is a mythicism of field detectives performing high-tech feats in order to solve a mystery with some encrusted semen. I'd only expect that investigation units have access to some aw…
Here's a warm blanket for you to nestle into this weekend. The Washington Post has been running an investigative report on the U.S. military's shadow wars throughout the Horn of Africa. These special operations have become the preserve of hulking, so…
Visiting Tokyo last year was bittersweet. I had originally bought tickets to visit Japan just a few days before March 11th's wicked quake and tsunami tore through Fukushima and northeast Honshu, leaving a ballpark-figure of 20,000 Japanese missing, s…
Here's the thing with regard to relative coolness: it's good to be cool and it's hip to be square; no one likes to party with losers and if you'd like to have a say, it's important to stay on top of trends. Being cool is different than being "popular…
Here's a short 10-minute film by Floris Kaayk called 'Origin of Creatures.' As a connoisseur of all things dystopian (and utopian), I found the premise pretty irresistible: Humans, have devolved into single-limbed or organed variants of their former
