Last year, Samsung developed the world’s first smartphone with quantum technology, installed as a security package. This year, Korean technology company KT launched its own “scrambler-free quantum smartphone” enabler. Quantum scrambling and quantum generation of randomness are vast improvements on conventional cryptography. In its basic sense, cryptography encrypts data by “converting plain text into scrambled […]

Bruce Bethke has a wonderful post describing what led to his creation of the word “cyberpunk” and his publication of a short story of the same name, forty-one years ago in 1980. He writes, “I would have bloody well trademarked the thing” if he’d known how revolutionary the word was  which is pretty un-cyberpunk, if […]

We are on the cusp of ending our reliance on energy sources that kill us and kill the planet. But the cusp often feels like the longest part of the journey. Even as we can envision, and are materializing, a world where the majority of inputs to the power grids are clean and renewable, many […]

The lifeworld and deathworld meeting and overlapping; viruses evolving into unique protective bodily organs; ethical questions raised by VR communication “with the dead”; a nation’s official insistence that it isn’t building a time machine. In this post, we look at some recent science on the edge — or several edges — of lifeworlds and deathworlds, […]

Human flight is an iconic preoccupation throughout human history. Journey into inner space is lesser-known but still well-established in speculative science and literature. And human augmentation is part of both outward and inward super-travel aspirations. Combine that with the excitement of DNA research and Canadian ice-river rats and you have a cross section of bizarre […]

Outschool, a supplemental class service for ambitious kids from k-12, is offering a course called Metrocraft. In it, students collectively design and build (in Minecraft) a city that they then govern. The class combines architecture, public administration, and politics.  Although the designers of the course likely didn’t intentionally make this connection, the class is similar […]

Have you ever heard of the Katzenklavier, or cat piano? It’s exactly what it sounds like: a design (and thankfully only a design) for a keyboard that sits “in front of a line of cages, each of which has a cat trapped inside.” Pressing a particular key causes pain to a cat, which then screeches […]

Political advertising is both the greatest celebration of democracy and, presently, one of democracy’s most strained relationships. The courts scrutinize government regulation of political advertising more tightly than they do commercial advertising; yet the companies hosting media and social media platforms are themselves under no obligation to allow any kind of advertising at all. They […]

The definition of “robot” is quite controversial. The most common definition is that a robot is a machine capable of carrying out complex tasks or series of tasks based on programming from a human. But culturally, and in the science fiction literature, a robot not simply such a machine. It also has added character — […]