“Mother Nature” took this week’s fall Apple event by storm. She appeared in the form of actress and producer Octavia Spencer, playing the role of a sardonic inquisitor who cross-examines CEO Tim...
People don’t take electricity for granted in Raquette Lake, New York, in the remote high peaks of the Adirondacks. In winter, when ice and wind often down the power line into the...
A few years ago, the discussion forum Hacker News, where engineers collectively decide what other engineers should read, developed a quirk. A new phrase had entered the coder lexicon, and it seemed...
All that Andrew McCalip wanted for his 34th birthday was a shipment of red phosphorus. It was a tough request—the substance happens to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is controlled...
Few people on Earth have reached closer to its center than Buzz Speyrer, a drilling engineer with a long career in oil and gas. It’s about 1,800 miles down to the core,...
Days after Meta launched its new app, Threads, this month, a software engineer at the company named Ben Savage introduced himself to a developer group at the World Wide Web Consortium, a...
In the field of computer science, there is perhaps no more fundamental task than to sort. Bubble, heap, merge—take your pick. The methods for reordering data inside a computer have been theorized...
Last month, at a livestreamed Tesla investor event that went short on new cars and long on grandiose narratives, a minor detail in Elon Musk’s “Master Plan Part 3” made big news in...
