With a little know-how, you can get yourself a Steam Machine right this minute. Valve’s second big foray into first-party PC hardware isn’t a sequel to the much-imitated Steam Deck portable, but rather a desktop computer called the Steam Machine. And while it could go on your desk, Valve…
Chimps can take in new evidence, evaluate its strength, and change their minds. When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we…
Exquisitely preserved fossils come from a single site in Wyoming. Edmontosaurus annectens, a large herbivore duck-billed dinosaur that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous period, was discovered back in 1908 in east-central Wyoming by C.H. Sternberg, a fossil collector. The skeleton, later housed at the American Museum of…
We’ve seen schoolbuses and big pickups do V2G; how about a smaller car? Not everything about the future sucks. Like electric cars. Sure, there’s one thing that dinosaur-burners do better—short refueling stops—but even the least efficient EV is still multiple times better than its gas equivalent. So much better…
Hydrogen and solar power the rally infrastructure, but navigation is low-tech. I’ve been involved with the Rebelle Rally since its inception in 2016, either as a competitor or live show host, and over the past 10 years, I’ve seen it evolve from a scrappy rally with big dreams to…
“This does not meet the release conditions for a safe manned return.” Wrapping up 204 days in orbit, three Chinese astronauts flew back to Earth aboard a Shenzhou spacecraft Friday, leaving three crewmates behind on the Tiangong space station with a busted lifeboat. Commander Chen Dong, concluding his third…
Ongoing struggles with AI model instruction-following show that true human-level AI still a ways off. Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, sometimes…
Sequencing an ancient creature’s RNA opens up a new window into extinct life. A young woolly mammoth now known as Yuka was frozen in the Siberian permafrost for about 40,000 years before it was discovered by local tusk hunters in 2010. The hunters soon handed it over to scientists,…
Life with humans changed dogs in some dramatic ways, and it didn’t take long. Our best friends come in a fantastic array of shapes and sizes; a Borzoi looks nothing like a Boston terrier, except for a certain fundamental, ineffable (except to taxonomists) doggyness about them. And it’s been…
Early warning system being developed by universities may slow the plant pathogen. A Chinese plant scientist at the University of Michigan, who drew national attention in June 2025 when she was arrested and accused along with another Chinese scientist of smuggling a crop-damaging fungus into the US, pleaded guilty…
