Impeachment trials are a rarity in the great American experiment: President Donald Trump’s is only the third to take place in over 200 years of US history. If you want to witness this historic event yourself, get ready to hunker down and check your local listings this week—especially given that Senate majority leader has both…
I love shoulder bags, from full-on messenger bags to smaller sling packs. Backpacks are better for heavy loads or all-day trekking, but for lightweight everyday needs, nothing beats a bag I can sling over my shoulder or across my body.Why? With a shoulder bag, everything I need is easily accessible and within easy reach. I…
Type Serengeti into Google Maps. The screen immediately zooms in on a large light-green section of northern Tanzania, displaying a few man-made roads and a red border. The birds’-eye-view graphics identify the mile markers, topography, and glamping accommodations of the iconic Serengeti National Park with remarkable precision. But a crucial element is missing. In such…
Wireless speaker company Sonos has long boasted about making products built to last, despite fast-evolving technology standards that sometimes render connected devices obsolete. Now, the Santa Barbara, California-based device maker has to abandon some of its older products.Four of Sonos’s products are losing software support starting this May. These are some of the company’s most…
Fourteen years ago, I was paralyzed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that left me unable to walk for nearly a year. Mine was an unusual case in its severity but the pathology of the condition is well understood: As in all autoimmune diseases, my immune system was behaving like an army gone rogue.…
Public transportation is sexist. This may be unintentional or implicit, but it’s also easy to see. Women around the world do more care and domestic work than men, and their resulting mobility habits are hobbled by most transport systems. The demands of running errands and caring for children and other family members mean repeatedly getting…
Unfolding right now across swaths of Australia is an ecological catastrophe, as massive, turbo-charged fires reduce whole landscapes to nothingness. Tens of thousands of koalas had no way of escaping. Livestock lie dead in fields. Innumerable animals have perished, with many species likely pushed to extinction. The few survivors could well starve or fall victim…
Last month, researchers at OpenAI in San Francisco revealed an algorithm capable of learning, through trial and error, how to manipulate the pieces of a Rubik’s Cube using a robotic hand. It was a remarkable research feat, but it required more than 1,000 desktop computers plus a dozen machines running specialized graphics chips crunching intensive…
Dyson Lightcycle Task LightMost modern task lamps consist of little more than a power cord, an LED, and a few strips of metal. But if anyone’s going to over-engineer such a simple object, it’s Dyson. With the Lightcycle, the British company applies the same delightful reinvention it brought to fans and vacuums. The lamp’s height…
Alexa, are you eavesdropping on me?I passive-aggressively ask my Amazon Echo this question every so often. Because as useful as AI has become, it’s also very creepy. It’s usually cloud-based, so it’s often sending snippets of audio—or pictures from devices like “smart” doorbells—out to the internet. And this, of course, produces privacy nightmares, as when…
