Annalee Newitz

15 Books That Will Change the Way You Look at Robots

What will robots really be like when they finally achieve a human level of intelligence and autonomy? No one knows for sure, but we’ve put together a list of books that will challenge and disturb your preconceptions about what robots might become. Illustration is a detail from an image by Lehanan Special note! For the…

Search for life is top priority in NASA’s 30-year astrophysics plan

NASA has published its 30-year plan for astrophysics, and its first priority is to look for habitable planets and life on other worlds. It will also focus on learning more about the origins of life and the structure of the universe. Image via ESA/NASA You can read the entire document online. It’s full of gorgeous…

These pictures of the “Necochea Beach Humanoid” will creep you out

This eerie humanoid figure has shown up in two different photos taken near large bodies of water in Argentina. Dubbed the Neocochea Beach Humanoid, this creature appears to float above the ground, towering over the other people in the image. Here’s the latest photo, un-enhanced, taken on a Neocochea beach in late November: Over at…

The line between species can become permeable

What separates two species? Sometimes the answer is simple, but sometimes the lines are blurred. That’s what’s happening in this image of a tiger and cheetah, by Spanish artist Jaume Montserrat, whose series “Empty Land” is a set of illustrations where the boundaries between two species are not quite what they seem. See more of…

The growing evidence that plants can think and communicate

Though plants have no brains, scientists have uncovered evidence that they do release chemicals that allow them to “communicate” with each other and animals. There is even evidence that plants can spread their messages over a vast region. Photo by Julia Ivantsova via Shutterstock Over at Quanta magazine, Kat McGowan has a fascinating article on…

A chart that sums up who had sex with whom during the Pleistocene

Call it the Pleistocene hanky panky chart. Now that scientists have sequenced a complete Neanderthal genome, we have more evidence than ever that early Homo sapiens had children with Neanderthals and Denisovans tens of thousands of years ago. This chart, from Nature, is part of a paper published this week by evolutionary biologist Svante Pääbo’s…

Nobody really knows why Saturn’s rings exist

Ever wonder how the heck Saturn got to have such enormous, perfectly flat rings? In this cool video from Universe Today’s Fraser Cain, you’ll discover that astronomers are wondering the same thing. In fact, it’s a huge debate. Scientists like Kevin Grazier, who worked on NASA’s Cassini probe to Saturn, are stumped by the rings.…

Here’s your sneak peek at the Scott Pilgrim creator’s new comic

Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic Scott Pilgrim was a terrific magic-realist view of early adulthood life in a world saturated with videogames. Now O’Malley has finished a new comic about a restaurant in a “fairy tale version of reality.” We have some exclusive panels from Random House. Seconds comes out from Random House in July 2014.…

Rate the hottest dragon in pop culture

You know you think about it. Don’t even pretend you don’t look at dragons in that way sometimes. Over at Vulture, pop culture aficionado Jordan Hoffman has ranked the greatest dragons from hottest to . . . least badass. His hottest dragon vote goes to Godzilla’s three-headed, flying space kaiju nemesis Ghidorah, which is absolutely…

Person of Interest is mashing all my Neuromancer buttons

In the mid-season finale of Person of Interest, we took some time to ponder Finch’s past and find out more about what motivated him to become a hacker. And then the show dropped a major, major bombshell. Spoilers ahead! As the episode opens, everybody is still freaked out and pissed off by Carter’s death. Finch…

Here are Nature magazine’s 10 people who mattered in 2013. They range from engineers making breakthroughs in cloning and solar cell efficiency, to a scientist who studies sexual assault trends and a diplomat who called attention to global warming. These are the people who are changing the world of science.

The life of the British upper class, 5500 years ago

Roughly 500 years before Stonehenge was erected, the people of the British Isles were already forming vast kingdoms ruled by a wealthy elite. A new study of one ancient British skeleton gives us a glimpse of what it was like to be a king in neolithic England. Researchers unearthed the skeleton from a massive ritual…

Listen to Wil Wheaton read from Warren Ellis’ horrifying love story

We’ve got an exclusive clip of Wil Wheaton reading from Warren Ellis’ Dead Pig Collector, out today. You may know Ellis from his Transmetropolitan comics, or from his latest novel Gun Machine. He knows how to write blood and guts and make you love it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GBCDOE0?tag=gizmodo08c-20 Here’s the blurb on the book, which you can…

Sneak Peek: Tonight, Person of Interest shows us the birth of a hacker

In this exclusive clip from tonight’s mid-season finale for Person of Interest, we are treated to a classic “birth of a hacker” scene from computer mastermind Finch’s past. We’ve also got the scene in the form of a comic book from DC Entertainment — also an io9 exclusive. I love watching young Finch as his…

Want to know about the future of drones in America? Here’s the official US Federal Aviation Administration report on how they plan to integrate UAVs into US airspace over the next few years. [PDF]

Happy Holidays! Have a free copy of my book!

I’m celebrating winter by giving away ten free, signed copies of my science nonfiction book Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. Everybody wants apocalypse and extinction at the holidays! Here’s how to get it. At noon PST, I’ll tweet a very easy question from io9’s Twitter account, and the first…

io9 Book Club reminder: Meeting 1/7 to discuss Ancillary Justice

In December, the io9 Book Club is reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. We’ll meet January 7 to discuss it, and we hope Leckie will join us later that week for a chat! Ancillary Justice is Leckie’s first novel, an incredible space opera wrapped in an a hive mind mystery, and it was one of our…

Crows could be the key to understanding alien intelligence

Crows are among the planet’s most intelligent animals, teaching their young to use tools for foraging and banding together to fight off intruders. Now, the first study of how abstract reasoning works in these birds’ brains could shed light on how intelligence works in a truly alien, non-mammal brain. https://gizmodo.com/the-mysterious-tool-making-culture-shared-by-crows-and-1460350033 https://gizmodo.com/corvids-the-birds-who-think-like-humans-5969515 Illustration by Tiger-tyger We’ve…

The “pause” in global warming comes from bad data

Global temperatures haven’t gone up in the last few years. Does that mean climate change isn’t happening? No. In this video, York University chemist Kevin Cowtan explains very carefully how he and his colleague discovered that the “pause” is a fiction, the result of bad data and bad statistical reasoning. Climate change deniers have jumped…

Here’s what China’s Yutu rover is doing on the Moon

This weekend, the China National Space Administration (国家航天局, or CNSA) landed its Chang’e-3 lander on the Moon, deploying the Yutu rover on a 3-month mission to explore the dark lava plains of Bay of Rainbows, northeast of Mare Imbrium. It will also leave a powerful telescope behind, to watch the stars. https://gizmodo.com/chinas-change-3-rocket-launch-is-one-of-the-sexiest-y-1474782565 Here’s the region…