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2015 was a banner year for science fiction; Motherboard's resident sci-fi editors, Claire Evans and Brian Merchant, review the year of Mad Max, Ex Machina, and, yes, Star Wars. These are the top stories about the future of 2015. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transhumanism, the idea that humans should use science and technology to extend our natural abilities, is the religion of the 21st century. It's a concept that has been around since the 70s, but seems to be resonating with a growing number of people. Whether it's because of the rise of smartphones, the idea of the quantified self, disillusionment with the world, or something else, transhumanist ideas have been gaining traction in the last 10 years with no signs of stopping. Hosted on Acast. See ...
The New York City subway is sprawling system, with more than 5 million people per day (and sometimes many more, on special occasions) passing through more than 460 stations. There is probably someone who knows more about the intricacies of the system than Max Diamond, but whoever it is, I don't know him or her. Diamond is a transportation engineering student at the City College of New York and a "rail fan"—he studies budgets and plans, delves into contracts and historical minutia, and, of course...
Ever heard of a cryptoparty? It’s a gathering of people interested in privacy and encryption. You’ll often hear of cryptoparties in association with other techy, geeky spaces or organizations, and they’re usually dominated by computer-savvy nerds who are often male or white or both. But recently, Motherboard attended a cryptoparty in a less obvious place: Harlem, the predominantly black neighborhood in New York City. Wait. Maybe Harlem is the perfect place to find a cryptoparty. The New York Cit...
Earlier this fall, we brought you the curious story of a long lost lunar rover prototype tested by NASA in the 1960s. At the time, we decided to keep some of the details off the record, but for this week's podcast, we delve deep into the rover's history and it's journey from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to a scrap yard in Alabama. This episode of Radio Motherboard unfolds as it moves along, so in the interest of not spoiling it, we'll just get right to it. Thanks for listening! Hosted on ...
It's Lit Up week at Motherboard, which means we're talking about drugs. And what's more fun than that? Weekend/gaming editor Emanuel Maiberg and managing editor Adrianne Jeffries pop some Alpha BRAIN and OptiMind to try and perk up the podcast. We drag in Steve Cronin , a self-taught nootropics expert, to talk about the smart drug craze. We also speak to Rod Breslau, an eSports journalist, to find out whether all this hand-wringing over doping at tournaments is really justified. Show notes: 1:12...
Earlier this week, Motherboard published a year-long investigation that revealed the Pentagon has been sending defective gun parts to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. In more than 60 cases, the barrels of guns have literally exploded and, in at least one case, a soldier was seriously injured. Radio Motherboard talks with reporter Damien Spleeters about how he was able to make sense of thousands of pages of documents from the Defense Logistics Agency and with features editor Brian Anderson about...
Did you hear? Fallout 4 , the video game for people who are serious about video games , is finally out. Do you care? If you're reading this rather than obsessively exploring a post nuclear disaster Boston, maybe not. Or maybe you're just taking a break. The game is the latest "AAA" release from Bethesda Softworks, a studio that's scored a devoted fan base thanks to its extremely deep, extremely long, and extremely customizable open world games . But the truth is, most gamers will never play it. ...
One time, I misjudged the depth of a creek, stepped in, and was literally in over my head. Not that much of a problem, except I had various electronics in my backpack. As thousands (millions?) of people have done, I stuck my phone and camera in a bowl of rice and waited. A few days later, I pulled them out. Neither worked. Of course they didn’t. Rice is not a magical phone saving device, as Trent Dennison, a nurse turned iPhone repairman will tell you. Dennison is one of the very few people in t...
It's been an astoundingly good couple years for television shows and movies that fit into the Motherboard orb of interest. Whenever people ask me what Motherboard is, I tell them we write about stories that are like Black Mirror, but real. Now, I've got to add Mr. Robot to my short list of major series that perfectly fit the Motherboard aesthetic. We were slightly late to binge watching our way through USA's harrowing hacker series, but now that (some) of us have watched it all the way through, ...
It's almost Halloween, so Motherboard is exploring the very nature of fear. Why do we still get scared by things that no longer represent any threat to us? How has technology changed how we feel fear? And what happens in a culture that reveres death? This week, Kaleigh Rogers and Jason Koebler talk with Naomi Bishop, a freelance writer who recently spent time with the Tana Toraja people in Indonesia. In Tana Toraja culture, it's common for families to dress up and take care of the dead corpses o...
When you log into Facebook, you'll see a list of "suggested friends." They're full of people you went to high school with, random colleagues, and a bunch of people that you do sort of know ... but why does Facebook know that you know them? Motherboard contributor Kari Paul talks to us about her investigation into how Facebook and other social networks learn things about you that you've never purposefully given them access to . Short Circuit editor Nicholas Deleon talks to us about watching the D...
Two major, solar system-shaking things happened this week. 'The Martian' came out, and we're all thankful that it ended up being a very good film. And Motherboard killed comments. These two things aren't even remotely related, but you're in luck if your interests include major sci fi motion pictures and the future of media. After announcing we were ending comments, there was a bit of a firestorm online and we just so happened to be recording the podcast as the hot takes came on Twitter. So, for ...
Radio Motherboard talks to Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet and Google's "internet evangelist," about the company's plans to fly internet-providing balloons over the developing world, encryption and security, and a horrifying scenario where our kitchen appliances start trying to hack our financial institutions. We also discuss Peeple, the "Yelp for People" app that's getting everyone riled up this week, a brand new scary Android vulnerability, and we end with a dramatic reading of a...
Scientists have just proven for the first time that it's possible to engineer yeast to make THC, arguably the most important chemical in marijuana. But do we want to get high using lab-made drugs when the real thing works so well? On this week's Radio Motherboard, we talk about the future of both synthetic drugs and lab-grown natural ones, Senior Editor Brian Merchant tries to make us care about fossil fuel divestment that could save the climate, producer Jaimie Sanchez tells us about cliff divi...
This week is ALL FRONTS, Motherboard's deep dive into what a future of forever war looks like. On this episode of Radio Motherboard, we talk about what it means to always be at war and how technology and automation have made it possible to stay in a perpetual state of war. We also talk about why fast food restaurants are finally moving away from antibiotic-pumped meat, a weird Quebec phenomenon called "pizzaghetti," and sonogenetics, a newly discovered technique that allows researchers to contro...
If you've been listening to Radio Motherboard the last few months, thank you very much: It's been a bit of a roller coaster as we try to figure out a format and recording setup that works best for us, and it's been a blast experimenting. This week, we're experimenting again, as we try out a shorter, more segmented format that's hopefully a bit snappier than some of our more recent episodes. This week, we tackle the iPhone 6S release, talk about whether basic income will ever become a reality, an...
If you're American, it's easier than ever to go to Cuba, a country that's remained, mas o menos, off limits for the last 60 years or so. In fact, you can go to cheapair.com, buy a ticket, fill out a couple forms confirming you fit into one of several broad approved categories of person (you probably do), and hop on a flight direct to Havana. But should you? As we've explored in a series of stories over the last couple weeks, Cuba is still very much an island ruled by an authoritarian regime, wit...
Who goes to the Pokemon World Championships in 2015? Well, we did, for one—mostly to find out who else was there. Well over a decade after its heyday, Pokemon is still going strong. There's now nearly 800 Pokemon, but there are still lots of kids, teens, and older nerds trying to catch 'em all. We caught up with some of the best players of both the card game and the video game at Boston's World Championships to see how the community has changed over the last few years. Hosted on Acast. See acast...
Uber drivers set their own hours, file taxes independently, and often own their cars. They don’t get health insurance from Uber and they don’t wear uniforms. And yet, Uber controls much of what they do by setting prices, handling their tips, and micromanaging them through its driver rating system. Are these drivers independent contractors, working for a strict boss? Or are they employees, entitled to benefits and covered expenses? A law firm has filed a class action lawsuit against Uber in Calif...
Brian Shiro really wants to go to space. He wants to go to space so badly, in fact, that he’s applied to NASA’s astronaut program. Twice. Both times he fell just short. He’s hoping the third time’s the charm. Until then, he’ll be heading up Astronauts4Hire , an appropriately-named astronaut contracting service. Wth A4H, Brian hopes to open doors for aspiring astronauts to the burgeoning commercial space industry, and also provide flight and simulation training to pad their resumés. I first learn...
We travel to the crater of the first atomic bomb with one of the youngest and last surviving Manhattan Project scientists. This is his story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
When did you get rid of your last computer or cell phone? It was probably pretty recently—we replace our technology all the time. But it's not this way for everyone: A contingent of diehard retro computing enthusiasts are still programming, hacking, tinkering with, and playing games on the Apple II, a 38-year-old computer originally released in 1977. And every July, about 70 of these diehards head to Rockhurst University in Kansas City for KansasFest, a conference dedicated exclusively to all th...
For the last six months or so, you've been listening to us talk at you about simulated universes and head transplants and transhumanism and all sorts of topics (and we thank you very much for that). But we haven't really told you all that much about ourselves. This week on Radio Motherboard, there is no guest, there is no topic, and there are no real rules. Instead, we bring through a whole bunch of Motherboard staffers (as in, whoever was available at the time) to learn what exactly it is they ...
It’s now been just over a year and a half of the biggest Ebola outbreak in history. We’ve dabbled in vaccines , but the best prevention method is still abstaining from contact with symptomatic patients, and the best treatment is still basically hydration. We’ve figured out that Ebola survivors seem at least temporarily immune , making them ideal health workers, but we still haven’t perfected treatment protocols and caretakers are still dying from the disease . This week on Radio Motherboard, we ...
In October 2012, the gossip site Gawker published an edited video of Hulk Hogan having sex. In response, the former pro-wrestler sued the company. It's now going to court in a case that could have wide-ranging consequences for the First Amendment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this most American of holidays, it’s a good time to take a look at how we select the people who run this ol’ country many of you call home. Like everything else, social media and technology are playing a huge role in campaign strategy. Much was made of President Obama’s digital campaign, and for good reason: He lapped Mitt Romney in reaching people online with the help of his CTO, Harper Reed. Reed and Dylan Richard, the Director of Engineering for Obama’s campaign, joined us this week to tal...
We assume that the next world war will be a technological one, but the United States and its potential adversaries are increasingly developing tech designed to blast enemies into the past. In Ghost Fleet , real cybersecurity and war experts Peter W. Singer and August Cole explore what would actually happen in a war between the United States and China . There's drones and hacking, sure, but what happens when our space capabilities are taken offline? What happens if China hacks all the microchips ...
We're all living two lives. We've got whatever's going on in the physical world, and then we've got our online personas—our Facebook and Twitter profiles, our Gchat lives, our Reddit accounts, our OKCupid and Tinder profiles. How do you make sense of it all? And how are we supposed to find love when everyone lives in two separate worlds? Comedian Aziz Ansari calls our smartphones the "world's largest singles bar," and he's not wrong. At any moment, we can text whoever we want, check out of reali...
What happens to our brains and our psyche when a huge portion of humanity spends their lives persistently jacked in to their computers, their tablets, their smartphones, their screens? We don't really know—in a sense, we're performing one massive uncontrolled experiment on most of the developed world. This week, we've been exploring everything mankind knows about the brain and technology's effect on it. Nathalie Nahai, the "web psychologist," has been doing this for her career. She's researchers...
