Annalee Newitz

What would Earth be like if humans had never existed? New Scientist wanted to find out. This video is their speculative tour of an Earth that never included Homo sapiens. Would the world really be all that different?

8 Incredible Facts You May Not Know About Human Evolution

Homo sapiens evolved about 200-150,000 years ago in Africa, but our story as a species stretches back much further than that with early human ancestors. And the evolution of Homo sapiens is itself a tangled tale, full of unanswered questions and gothic family melodrama. Here are a few facts you may not know about the…

Google is Jesus in the only good plot development on Revolution

At this point, the post-apocalyptic American politics on Revolution have become the “torture and sadism” subplot. So now all we have left to enjoy is the nanotech plot – and luckily, last night’s episode delivered in that department. Here’s the best scene. We got a little back story on the Patriots’ chief scientist, whose father…

Did a UFO cause this plane to crash in Argentina?

A mysterious crop duster crash in Argentina has yielded bizarre evidence of a UFO! See it there, in the upper right corner of the picture? Could aliens be trying to send us a message about the problems of factory farming? Reports Inexplicata: An unidentified flying object – presumably a “flying saucer” – was photographed by…

Here’s what it’s like to live with an invisible disability

What happens when you have a disability that’s so embarrassing that sufferers are afraid to talk about it? Tessa Miller has written an incredible essay about life with irritable bowel disease, shedding light on what it means to live with an invisible disability. Miller, who writes for io9’s sister site Lifehacker, posted her article on…

How a car mechanic’s invention could save thousands of women’s lives

An Argentine car mechanic named Jorge Odón has used a plastic bag as the centerpiece of a simple device that has the potential to save the lives of women whose babies have gotten stuck in the birth canal during labor. What’s incredible is that it’s taken this long for doctors to move beyond using often-deadly…

65 of the greatest fantasy adventure books

Joshua Glenn has been rescuing classic science fiction and fantasy books from dusty vaults for years. Now he’s getting excited about the “adventure” subgenre — he shared a list of great science fiction adventure yesterday, and today he’s got a list of fantasy adventures. https://gizmodo.com/the-top-101-science-fiction-adventures-listed-in-chron-1463897780 Over at Hilobrow, Glenn lists 65 of his personal favorite…

In the shade of the Möbius strip bridge

Soon, the planned community of the Meixi Lake District in Changsha, China will be graced by a bridge modeled after the legendary mathematical concept of the Möbius strip. The Mobius strip is a surface with only one side, often modeled by twisting a long, rectangular piece of paper and attaching both its ends. Image by…

Viral Journalism and the Valley of Ambiguity

Once you’ve worked as a writer and editor in the world of social media for a decade, the way I have, you start to notice patterns. For example, there are some stories that will never go viral, even if they are brilliant in every measurable way. That’s because they lie in the “valley of ambiguity,”…

The cognitive bias that allows people to justify genocide

Why would we rather justify our bad deeds than apologize for them? Social psychologist Carol Tavris has just written a great essay on the “design flaws” in our brains that cause us to lie to ourselves about horrific mistakes we’ve made — and then make them again. Decades after Isaac Asimov imagined that psychohistory would…

If you’ve ever wondered what a mindfuck looks like, now you know

Meet Siphopteron species 1. It’s a species of sea slug, recently discovered by Rolanda Lange. To procreate, two members of the species get together, stick organs into each other’s heads, and fertilize. That’s right — nature has at last provided us with a perfect example of the mindfuck. I think “skullfucking” might be another word…

Your friends on Facebook may already be robots

Why bother writing anything on Facebook when you can just outsource your personal comments to a bot? That’s the idea behind a new app that reads your past Facebook updates and automatically generates new ones for you. Writes Will Oremus over at Slate: Just go to a fun little hacked-together website called What Would I…

What are cities doing to humanity?

Humans have been living in cities for thousands of years, and now the majority of humans on the planet live in urban areas. Are you curious about how cities have changed us, or how they might affect the future course of our evolution? https://gizmodo.com/10-civilizations-that-disappeared-under-mysterious-circ-5928085 https://gizmodo.com/cities-are-the-future-of-human-evolution-493082761 I’m going to spend the next six months writing for…

Is Jared Diamond racist?

Even Jared Diamond’s most avid supporters have been raising eyebrows at his new book, The World Until Yesterday. But University of New Mexico American Studies professor David Correia thinks this book is the most convincing evidence yet that Diamond isn’t just played out — he’s racist. Correia has written a very scholarly article about the…

The falcon who came folded into your bank statements

Normally you wait weeks to open your bank statements. But for some reason, this time, you tore into it. The pages with their spreadsheets felt heavy in your fingers. And somehow, when you unfolded them, this bird also unfolded. This is just one of the many incredible portraits of birds that Paula Swisher has drawn…

Now you can understand Fourier transforms — like a boss

If you’ve spent any time on the Internet, at some point you’ve heard the phrase “Fourier transform.” It’s it’s a mathematical discovery that’s baked into everything from MP3s to quantum physics. Once you understand it, the world is your oyster. Luckily, Aatish Bhatia has a terrific article in Nautilus that will explain it all to…

Evolution is steered by aggressive competition between females

One of the classic images from evolutionary theory is of two males smashing each other up to compete for the chance to fertilize a female. Scientists have spent over a century studying this kind of male competition, but new discoveries reveal that competition between females is just as important. The problem is that female competition…

An alternate history where Twitter is genuinely disruptive

Jim Munroe, director of Ghosts with Shit Jobs, is back with a strange, Utopian short film. It’s a mashup of an actual interview with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. In an alternate history, Dorsey realizes that Twitter has become corrupt and gives it back to the people by making it open source. https://gizmodo.com/a-brilliant-satirical-indie-flick-about-the-future-of-5910464 Writes Munroe: I…

The horrifying truth about Google’s secret project

For weeks, the internet has been buzzing about Google’s sexy secret project, a massive barge piled with customized shipping containers floating in the San Francisco Bay. Was it a secret data center, soon to be outside national jurisdiction? A rejuvenation lab for Ray Kurzweil? No. The truth is much worse. Photos by Daniel Terdiman It…

10 stories where technology is indistinguishable from magic

Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction holds that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The magical space-age design of Asgard in the new Thor movie seems to have taken its cue from this idea in a major way. Here are ten other stories where machinery seems to have merged with sorcery. Art…