The MoviePass Reboot Is Here. But Will Moviegoers Want It?
The year has not been kind to MoviePass, and MoviePass, in turn, has been unkind to its subscribers. Its increasingly precarious financial position—parent company Helios and Matheson, lost $137.2 million last quarter alone—has prompted increasingly onerous restrictions on its service, from draconian anti-fraud measures, to surge pricing, to restricting available movies and showtimes so severely…
Alternatives to Cobalt, the Blood Diamond of Batteries
When John Goodenough created the first lithium-ion rechargeable battery at Oxford in 1980, he needed some cobalt. Experiments had already established that the metal is energy-dense, perfect for small batteries that need a lot of power.1 So Goodenough made the cobalt himself, heating the precursors at very high temperatures. Today, cobalt appears in most commercial…
Inside the Arena Where Drones Battle a Wall of 1,300 Computer Fans
Wind is the worst. It messes up hair, it blows stuff in eyes, and most famously and rudely of all, one time it made a bridge in Washington twist and undulate until it exploded. Alright, maybe that was the fault of the engineers, not the wind. But still, strong gusts have the potential to threaten…
Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hogwarts House? Slytherin, Naturally
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the polymathic creator of Hamilton, is currently out promoting his work in Mary Poppins Returns. But that doesn't mean he has no other allegiances. He is, for one, a big fan of Harry Potter—so much so that he even knows his Hogwarts house off the top of his head. "I both self-identify as…
How Is SpaceX Doing on Its Deep Space Ambitions?
2017 should have ended with SpaceX’s most dramatic launch yet: the long-awaited demo flight of its Falcon Heavy triple-booster rocket. It’s the vehicle that’s supposed to get the company into deep space someday, the cornerstone of Elon Musk’s “get us out of here” plan for saving the human race. Musk first targeted November for the…
Troubled Times for Alternatives to Einstein’s Theory of Gravity
Miguel Zumalacárregui knows what it feels like when theories die. In September 2017, he was at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Saclay, near Paris, to speak at a meeting about dark energy and modified gravity. The official news had not yet broken about an epochal astronomical measurement—the detection, by gravitational wave detectors as well…
Dead Cells Succeeds Where Its Competitors Fail
A clump of alien matter rolls through a hole in the prison wall, finds a body, and settles in. Suddenly, that body is me, and I scurry to the right, picking up my dropped money and weapons and slamming through doors until my pace is a full-on sprint. I run, roll, and slash from one…
Watch SpaceX Loft NASA’s New Planet-Hunting Mission Into Orbit
Update, 4:30 pm EDT 4/16/18: SpaceX announced it would stand down to conduct additional analysis before launching NASA's TESS mission; its next attempt is targeted for April 18 at 6:51 pm EDT. NASA’s newest galactic scout is ready for duty. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (dubbed TESS for short) is set to embark on a…
How to Watch the Oscars 2019
If you remember anything about the 1989 Oscars, it's likely because of a truly insane opening number that featured Snow White and Rob Lowe singing a parody version of "Proud Mary." (Also, if you remember anything about the 1989 Oscars, congratulations: You're officially too old to ever get a handle on TikTok.) The reason it…
The Life, Death, and Dream of a Research Diversity Crusader
On January 20, 2015, President Barack Obama took the opportunity of his State of the Union speech to announce a bold research project. Called the Precision Medicine Initiative, he said, it would harness the power of big data and DNA to the benefit of all. “We want to have a nation in which the accidents…