EveAim

Ants didn’t take over the world by being stupid and cowardly. Case in point: Rafts of fire ants have been spotted floating around floodwaters in Houston, Texas, colonies banding together to weather super-storm Harvey. If your first thought was Please, no, you’re human, and that’s fine. Fire ants are an invasive species―they arrived in Texas…

It's almost 2019, and I'm still not sure where streaming is going. In March, popular Fortnite streamer and no-talking-to-girls-er Ninja invited the rapper Drake onto his stream, and racked up 1.5 million viewers in a record-setting display for Twitch, the biggest streaming platform in the videogame world. It was such a watershed event that many…

When you think about it, touch is a bizarre sense. Unlike sound or light, tactile properties can be difficult to quantify. You can measure decibels or lumens, but touch is a subjective sense with subjective descriptions, like rough or squishy or cold. Subjective until now, that is. A company called SynTouch, which spun out of…

If 2019 is going to be a big year for Star Wars—and it really is, with two TV shows and a movie on the way, as well as two theme park attractions and the usual ton of comics and tie-in novels—it really doesn't feel like it based on how the year is starting. Things are…

Every country on Earth, save for cough one, has banded together to cut emissions and stop the runaway heating of our only home. That’s nearly 200 countries working to keep the global average temperature from climbing 2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial Revolution levels. Phenomenal. But what if cooperation and emissions reduction aren’t enough? Projections show…

Samin Nosrat begins the final episode of Salt Fat Acid Heat with an apt metaphor: “Heat is the element of transformation.” Nosrat, a chef and author, is calling attention to one of cooking’s essential tenets—but also, slyly enough, to a new movement of food shows on Netflix and elsewhere that spurn the pallid and passé…

Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics—constraints on the behavior of androids and automatons meant to ensure the safety of humans—were also famously incomplete. The laws, which first appeared in his 1942 short story “Runaround” and again in classic works like I, Robot, sound airtight at first: Of course, hidden conflicts and loopholes abound (which…

Adderall, shmaderall. Certain biohackers prefer taking teeny-tiny amounts of psychedelic drugs to boost focus. But what exactly is a microdose, anyway? Here’s our semi-scientific guide. Hint: If you feel the trees breathing, you’re doing it wrong. Acid Microdose (5–10 mcg): Users claim that a microhit of LSD clears mental locks and helps with depression. It’s…

Every good story needs a villain. One of the best stories in recent memory was the debacle known as Fyre Festival, a music event promising supermodels and luxury that failed so spectacularly that two documentaries were released about it, both in the same week. The two films, Netflix's Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened…

At HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, materials scientist Hunter Martin and his team load a grey powder as fine as confectioner’s sugar into a machine. They’ve curated the powder recipe—mostly aluminum, blended with some other elements—down to the atom. The machine, a 3-D metal printer, lays the powder down a single dusting at time, while…