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How the Vietnam War Brought High-Tech Border Surveillance to America

From 1968 until 1973, the US military spent about $1 billion a year on a new computer-powered initiative intended to end the war in Vietnam. It went by many names over the years — including Practice Nine, Muscle Shoals, Illinois City and Dye Marker. But today it’s most commonly known as Operation Igloo White. Despite…

Independence Day Is Getting a Comic Series to Tie the Films Together

By the time Independence Day: Resurgence comes out next year, the original film will be 20 years old. That’s a lot of backstory to cover from how we got from aliens blowing up the White House to a “post-war” world and a united Earth Space Defense force—one we now know will be the focus of…

Jeb Bush’s Plan To Gut Net Neutrality

Jeb Bush just published a love note to big business that’d be amusing if it didn’t give me second-hand embarrassment at witnessing a governor slob-knob oligopolistic corporatism so explicitly. Bush wants to get rid of unnecessary government regulations. In making his argument against various rules, he tends to play up the idea that regular folks…

Over at Science of Us, Melissa Dahl reports on an interesting new study that suggests the distress some internet pornography users feel about their oh-so-private internet activity has far more to do with their worries about internet porn addiction than the actual amount of pornography they’re watching. Contact the author at [email protected].

The Frozen Wastes of Pluto are Eerily Familiar

Of all the things we thought we might see while speeding past Pluto, we weren’t expecting the icy world to look quite this much like our home planet’s frozen poles. This is the science so far of those eerily familiar landscapes. Geomorphology is the study of landforms—what they are, how they’re formed, and why they…

Totally spectacular flyover through the Veil Nebula

The Hubble Space Telescope took a new image of the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant from a star that exploded 8,000 years ago, and made this truly spectacular flyover visualization of the beautiful ripple in space that you can see below. In the 3D visualization, red is sulfur, green is hydrogen and blue is oxygen.…

Our Favorite Android, iOS, and Windows Phone Apps of the Week

Not every app of the week is always new–sometimes even updates to apps are deserving enough for some fresh attention. This week there are a few updates to old goodies in the Windows Phone world, Android users can choose to take a step back in time to the days of analog video recording, and iOS…

What Happens When You Put Acid on Uranium Ore? Find Out!

Pitchblende is a material that has helped scientists isolate plutonium, radium, and helium. Its major component, however, is uranium. And uranium reacts with acid. Dramatically. Pitchblende got its name centuries ago, when miners found black ore in the ground which had the color of pitch, but a density that made them suspect it was full…

This Energy-Sharing Solar House and Hybrid Car Are the Ultimate Off-The-Grid Fantasy 

What if you could live and drive without having to depend on traditional energy or fuel? That’s what a new prototype from Oak Ridge National Lab means to do–and it brings new meaning to “off-grid” living. Yesterday, Oak Ridge unveiled something called the Additive Manufacturing Integrated Energy demonstration project (AMIE), which it launched only one…

How to Find People to Play D&D With

To truly and properly enjoy a role-playing game, you need a group to play with. Finding a group—especially the right group—can be a major hurdle to participating in this really excellent hobby. This guide will help you find fellow gamers no matter your location or age. Every time we write about RPGs on io9, the…

Netflix Can Pinpoint Exactly When People Get Addicted to Shows

Data is a splendid thing. And Netflix being Netflix, the streaming service knows exactly what people are watching and when they stop watching. During a set period of time earlier this year, Netflix used that data to figure out exactly when people get hooked on shows. And it’s not the pilot. Looking at over 20…

All the awesome cars from Mad Max: Fury Road in one cool graphic

One of our favorite artists, Scott Park, illustrated 33 of the cars from Mad Max: Fury Road and they look great. You’ll see Furiosa’s War Rig and the Interceptor and the Gigahorse and more drawn in a really fun style. You can buy the actual poster here. Here’s a closer look at some of the…

Kim Stanley Robinson Is Here to Answer Questions About Aurora

This month, io9 read Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel Aurora. Today, from 10 a.m. – 11 a.m. (Pacific time), he’ll be joining us to answer questions about lives lived amidst interstellar travel, artificial intelligences, the familiarities and eccentricities of terraformed planets, and anything else you want to know. Start asking your questions about Aurora in…

Leaked Press Renders Show Off Every Last Detail of Google’s Next Nexuses

Welp, it’s about that time. We’re anxiously fidgeting over Google’s upcoming Nexus event on September 29. But luckily, right on schedule press renders of Google’s latest and greatest have popped up on the internet–and this time around, Android Police has the exclusive. The renders pretty much confirm all the leaks we’ve seen over the past…

The Inhumans Are Loose in the Agents of SHIELD Season 3 Premiere

Don’t particularly care to wait until September 29th to see new Agents of SHIELD? Well, good news, because here’s the first four minutes of the season 3 premiere, in which Skye/Daisy helps out a new Inhuman who is accidentally on a small rampage… but it turns out she and her Secret Warriors aren’t the only…

This delightful video of traveling to Japan is just so much fun to watch

Francisco Fuentes’ amazing visual diary of his trip to Japan is so awesomely captured and so well edited and so fun to watch that it makes me want to take a trip there immediately. It’s because every video in the series (there are 12 15-second videos) basically acts as a teaser for his time in…

The Story of the 1930s “Impossible Murder” That Utterly Fascinated Raymond Chandler

The murder of Julia Wallace in Liverpool in 1931 was of the rarest sort: a real-life killing that invoked some of the most well-worn tropes of Golden Age mystery fiction. Her husband, William Herbert Wallace, was the chief suspect, but the case confounded the courts—and enthralled the public. No less a figure than Raymond Chandler…

Apple CarPlay Review: Siri’s a Boring But Useful Travel Pal

The first time I saw CarPlay in action, I couldn’t believe it. You could plug your iPhone into the infotainment system and then get iOS on your dashboard?! It seemed like Apple finally found a way to turn an automobile into a rolling computer like Knight Rider. But after spending a few days using CarPlay,…

This Is the Oldest Case of Ritual Decapitation Ever Uncovered in the Americas

Archaeologists working in a rock shelter in Lapa do Santo, Brazil, have uncovered the remains of a 9,000-year-old ceremonial beheading. It’s now considered the oldest known case of decapitation in the New World. As a ritual practice, decapitation was widespread among Native Americans across the entire South American continent—a practice with deep historical roots. Prior…

How To Make Windows 10 Change Color to Match Your Desktop Wallpaper

Now that you’ve installed Windows 10 and mastered the basics of Microsoft’s new operating system, you’re going to want to start digging deeper into some of the customization options available—like automatically changing the system interface colors whenever you pick a new wallpaper image. Windows has a long and proud history of letting you tweak the…