Annalee Newitz

Is Second Life about to die? Wagner James Au wonders about reports of the game world’s demise on his blog, while the rest of us wonder where we’ll go to act out Gor fantasies when all those Gorean islands are gone. Is it back to IRC?

The Movies You Must Watch To Understand Godzilla

Since he first rose out of the Pacific Ocean to destroy Tokyo in 1954, Godzilla has been an icon. But he’s also changed with the times, morphing from a terrifying death monster into a kid-friendly pal and back again. Here’s what you need to know about the Big G’s cinematic past to understand this complicated…

There Are Mechs in These Mountains

Sometimes, if you climb high enough, you’ll find an old, wandering mech in the snowy folds of the mountains. They’re still vigilant, still watching the skies, still reliving those long-ago decades when the Klaag invaded Earth with their massive synthetic lifeforms. This lonely mech is the creation of Kelly Christophers, a visual effects artist at…

Person of Interest Shows Us What Techno-Fascism Really Looks Like

On the season finale of Person of Interest, everything changed. The show’s present-day dystopia is looking darker than ever, and our main characters’ lives are about to be ravaged by a political threat they never knew was coming. Person of Interest has always skated the line between suspenseful realism and speculative worldbuilding. But this episode’s…

We May Have Solved the Mystery of the Dying Bees

For over a decade, a disease called colony collapse disorder has been destroying bee populations worldwide. Because bees pollinate many of our staple crops, their deaths threaten our food supplies. Now, new evidence is solidifying a case against the likely culprit in their deaths. Photo by Alex Wild Researchers have previously argued that colony collapse…

Antarctic Ice Sheets Are Collapsing — But When Will Sea Levels Rise?

Yesterday, newly-published scientific evidence revealed that the west Antarctic ice sheet is “collapsing.” In fact, this ice melt is pretty much inevitable, and will mean up to 4 inches of sea level rise. What most news stories left out, though, was the timeline for this change to our shorelines. Writing at DotEarth, environmental journalist Andrew…

This Is Why We Can’t Wait for Person of Interest Tonight!

Tonight brings the season finale of Person of Interest, and we’ve got an exclusive clip from CBS to whet your appetite for anarchy in the U.S.A. Collier’s privacy terrorist group Vigilance is putting the government on trial, while two AIs are about to go head-to-head. In this clip, which seems to take place right after…

The 9 Most Influential Works of Scientific Racism, Ranked

Former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade has just published a book about race and genetics that has stirred up debates over scientific racism that go back over 250 years. Where did his ideas come from? Here are nine major works of scientific racism that are still influencing thinkers today. First, a definition. By…

In The Tropic of Serpents, a Naturalist Studies Dragons and Politics

One of the many pleasures of reading a Marie Brennan novel is that a swashbuckling quest to find dragon eggs in the tropics is never just that. It is also a complicated political story of colonial incursion and ecosystems in peril. Welcome back to the world of Lady Trent, a naturalist with a dragon obsession.…

Woman Beaten to Death After Being Accused of Witchcraft on Facebook

At last Facebook has brought us back to the middle ages, just as we knew it would. A woman in the Brazilian city Guarujá, near São Paolo, was beaten to death last week after Facebook rumors circulated that she was a witch. A local news outlet, Guarujá Alerta, posted a rumor on its Facebook page…

The io9 Book Club Is in Session! Let’s Talk About Life After Life

Welcome to the monthly meeting of the io9 Book Club. In April, we read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. Jump into comments to get started talking about it! (Note: I was out last week, so the book club got delayed until today. My apologies!) For those unfamiliar with the io9 book club, here’s how it…

On Person of Interest, the U.S. Government Gets What It Deserves

Last night’s Person of Interest was the tale of three kinds of social justice. Three groups have challenged the US government’s legitimacy, and all three have come up with strategies for setting the country right again. Unfortunately, those strategies are about to collide in a major trainwreck. This season’s arc has closely mirrored actual events…

This Is What Tent Cities Will Look Like After Peak Oil

This tent could one day be your home. It will provide you with shelter from the elements, food, energy, and purified water. Meet the Urban Algae Canopy — perfect for all your environmental apocalypse needs. This prototype is the brainchild of Italian design firm Carlo Ratti Associati, and were previewed during last month’s Milan Design…

A Few Thoughts on the New Godzilla, Written By My 8-Year-Old Self

We’ve got a batch of new, high-res images from the upcoming Godzilla movie, and they’ve given us some of the best views yet of the Big G. I can’t really respond to them without regressing to an 8-year-old, so I’ll just let you know what my inner child thinks. First of all, I’d like to…

The Neuroscience of Anti-Science Activists

When confronted with facts that contradict our beliefs, there’s a solid evolutionary reason why we double down and refuse to change our minds. It’s called “motivated reasoning,” and it suggests that rationality is always a process of rationalization. Writing in Mother Jones, Chris Mooney describes the “science of why we don’t believe science”: The theory…

How Iran Became One of the World’s Most Futuristic Countries

When we think about futurism, often we imagine cutting-edge technologies like bionic arms or weather machines for colonizing Mars. But if we really want to make it for another few centuries, we’re going to need something that Iran has already got. To understand Iran’s breakthrough, we need to go back in time to 1993, when…

Bee Rustlers Are California’s Newest Outlaws

In the world of agriculture, bees are big business. California beekeepers often rent their hives out in mid-winter to farmers who need the insects to pollinate almonds and other crops. And that’s why bee rustling has become such a problem. Photo by John Schreiber Back in the nineteenth century, cattle rustlers would peel off a…

The One Cognitive Bias That’s Holding Back Genetic Research

Scientists may be awesome, but they’re still human beings — and they fall prey to the same cognitive biases as everyone else. Now, a group of researchers say they’ve discovered that the bias known as anthropocentrism is holding back genetic research and severely limiting our discoveries. Image of the protist Nassula by Gerd A. Guenther…

Neuroscientists Are Developing an Entirely New Way of Shooting Movies

One of the delights of watching Gravity is director Alfonso Cuorón’s habit of shooting important scenes in one, long take with no cuts. Now, a scientist believes that we can create an entire cinema of no cuts, using radically new methods borrowed from neuroscience. Over at Scientific American, Jennifer Oullette delves into the work of…

Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice has won the UK’s prestigious Clarke Award! We read the novel for io9’s book club, and Leckie came to chat with io9 readers about it.