Hey there! Nice to meet you, I’m from the future. I live in the 26th century, deep in the Anthropocene Era. Humanity is officially the greatest climate driver on Earth, and has been for awhile. It’s a dubious honor if you could see the planet from…
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Ford paid nearly $200,000 — well over MSRP — to own one of the first Tesla Model X CUVs to roll off the line, according to a report from Bloomberg. It’s common practice for automakers to buy competitors’ vehicles in order to drive them, measure them, and…
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New York City’s Rockaway Beach, like most beaches, looks out onto a seemingly endless stretch of blue water. Standing at the edge of the sand and peering outward, it’s hard to say what’s beyond the horizon. From NYC, one might guess a ship sailing a straight…
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Apple’s standoff with the FBI unfolded over the course of several weeks, but ended in a matter of days. That’s how long it took the FBI to find a way into a San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone and successfully exploit it without Apple’s help. So while that particular…
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The Nest Learning Thermostat does what a thermostat is supposed to do, turning your heat and AC on and off when you need it. And because it’s a learning thermostat, it does so without manual programming. This beautifully designed object has enough built-in smarts to plausibly…
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It’s May 2025, and you are headed to a business meeting on a blue-sky morning. The windshield’s electronic smart tint has kicked in to shield the sun’s glare so you can scan messages and the news stream on your heads-up display. Traffic is light—half the cars…
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“Hydrogen and air travel are a perfect match,” Hugo Eckener once said. Well, we don’t know if he actually spoke those words, but it’s the kind of thing the chairman of the Zeppelin Company probably said all the time, at least until enthusiasm for the combination…
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A couple of years ago, Andy Rubin—the celebrated creator of Android and until recently the head of Google’s mobile Internet efforts—helped his wife, Rie, build a bakery in a decommissioned train station in Los Altos, California. They called it Voyageur du Temps, French for time traveler.…
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A couple of years ago, Steven Weissman, an energy lawyer at the University of California-Berkeley, started to shop around for solar panels for his house. It seemed like an environmental no-brainer. For zero down, leading residential provider SolarCity would install panels on his roof. The company…
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