Annalee Newitz

Iain M. Banks posts a sad, brave announcement of his impending death

Iain M. Banks is without a doubt one of the greatest writers of the turn of the century, both for his science fiction Culture series and his literary thrillers. He’s one of the architects of an idea that we take for granted in scifi now: the post-human who lives forever, aided by artificial intelligences, in…

FBI comes clean about infamous “UFO memo”

A couple of years ago, the FBI freaked out UFOlogists by making a ton of old documents public online — one of which was a memo sent to J. Edgar Hoover about a man who had seen flying saucers. It is the most popular document in the FBI Vault, accessed almost a million times. The…

Cult director Jess Franco, director of classic film Necronomicon, has just died.

io9 Book Club Reminder: Meeting 4/9 to discuss Tobias Buckell’s The Apocalypse Ocean

This month, we’ll be reading Tobias Buckell’s crowd-funded novel The Apocalypse Ocean. It’s the fourth book in his Xenowealth series — but don’t worry! It stands on its own. Caveat: you may love it so much that you have to go back and read the previous three when you’re done. I forgot to remind folks…

The comic book that can explain synthetic biology to anyone

Want to understand how synthetic biology might change the world? Here’s a scientific video for you. Too much? But wait, there’s also a comic book . . . Over at science e-book review site Download the Universe, Carl Zimmer has an interesting review of a new paper from synthetic biologist Drew Endy, as well as…

I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness

Cultural critic Evgeny Morozov has just written the essay equivalent of The Social Network. “The Meme Hustlers,” published yesterday in The Baffler, is a fictional-but-true account of a well-known Silicon Valley figure, O’Reilly Books publisher Tim O’Reilly. It’s also a story about the future that Silicon Valley pioneers want to build for the world, using…

Well hello, beautiful space station

After you’ve spent time on a wild-type world, with all its accidents of climate and uncontrolled vulcanism, nothing looks sexier than an artificial space habitat. Check out those spires and curves! Now that’s a place where a human could get comfortable. This ultra-sultry space station was created by concept artist Dmitry Popov, who has done…

How do we mourn the animals used in scientific research?

There is an incredible passage in Scarlett Thomas’ fantasy novel The End of Mr. Y, where our protagonist discovers she can go backward in time by traveling through the minds of lab mice. She jumps from present-day mice to their ancestors, moving from one caged creature to the next, absorbing all their fears, discomfort and…

Here are the stars we are most likely to visit after leaving the solar system

Astronaut and doctor Mae Jemison heads a group called the 100 Year Starship, which is devoted to making interstellar travel a reality in 100 years. The group takes donations to sponsor scientific and cultural projects that will take humans beyond our solar system. And they’ve just produced this gorgeous video, showing some of the stars…

Artificial plants could one day power your home

In the quest for alternative energies, there is one treasure that many scientists have tried and failed to find. That treasure is the secret of photosynthesis, the chemical reaction that allows plants to convert light into energy, releasing nothing but harmless oxygen in the process. But now a chemistry graduate student at CalTech, Emily Tsui,…

After the war, dinosaurs returned to New Zealand

If you venture far out into the forests, you’ll find something more massive than the old, rusting tanks and radiation zone containment bobbles. Locals call them dinosaurs. They’re an evolutionary curveball we never expected. This is an amazing post-apocalyptic New Zealand dinosaur illustration by Weta concept artist and Dr. Grordbort’s creator Greg Broadmore. You can…

This is my favorite new bizarro science scandal on the internet

Last year, a psychology researcher named Stephan Lewandowsky published an article based on an internet survey of climate change deniers. In it, he argued that his evidence strongly suggested that people who don’t believe in climate change also believe NASA faked the Moon landing, and that the US government created AIDS. Yeah. So that made…

These beautiful portraits of whales will make you weep at the wonder of the universe (no, really)

Bryant Austin is a portrait photographer. But instead of capturing people with his camera, he dives underwater to create these incredible portraits of whales. His photographs capture the entirety of these huge mammals’ bodies, or focus on the details of their expressive faces and eyes. There is something enormously powerful about these images of the…

What are the most beautiful places on Earth, as seen from space?

Commander Chris Hadfield has been tweeting photos from the International Space Station for months now, and many of his images are utterly gorgeous. Like this one, of a Bolivian lake whose shoreline looks like what Hadfield called “dinosaur teeth.” What do you think are the most photogenic features of Earth from space? Post your favorite…

Magazines have finally killed blogs — but in a way you never expected

When Google recently announced it was killing the RSS reader known simply as Reader, a small corner of the internet went apeshit. The rest of the internet asked, “What the hell is RSS?” The answer to that question reveals a lot about why blogs are doomed to be upstaged by the magazines they tried to…

Jeff VanderMeer gets movie deal for his forthcoming Southern Reach trilogy

Jeff VanderMeer is perhaps best known for his cult favorite Ambergris novels, including City of Saints and Madmen and Finch, which take place in a weird zone between gothic horror and political science fiction. Now he’s sold a new series, the Southern Reach trilogy, to Farrar Straus and Giroux, and gotten a movie deal on…

Breakthrough research suggests simple ways to reverse chronic pain

People who suffer from chronic pain often feel like the experience dominates their lives, and changes them profoundly. Now, a group of pain researchers and geneticists have discovered that this feeling isn’t far from scientific truth. Being in chronic pain changes the way your brain functions on a physical level. The good news is that…

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock, is here to answer your questions about why we’ve lost touch with the future

Today from 1-2 PM PDT, we’ll be joined by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, whose new book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now is getting rave reviews and making people’s heads explode. It’s about how, in our media-saturated, data-driven age, we are no longer able to plan for the future because we’re so stifled by the…

Reform School on Another Planet

It’ll be awesome to be on another planet, they said. It’ll teach you survival skills, they said. But you know what? Even if it’s in another solar system, it’s still reform school. And it still sucks. Especially on “visit the fire caves” day. Alice Duke is a concept artist who works in games, film, and…

6,000-year-old stone penis unearthed in Israel

Penis statues and figurines were popular in the ancient world (especially in Rome), but it appears that our infatuation with the phallus goes back even further. This bad boy is 6,000 years old. https://gizmodo.com/the-lost-city-of-pompeii-pictures-of-an-alien-world-f-5825459 Archaeologists digging in a railroad construction site managed to excavate the remains of a town from the time periods between 6000-4000…