To Board a Cruise Ship–and Never Get Off Meet the retirees who never stop moving.

    Let Robots Handle Your Emotional Burnout at Work But as robotics and computing evolve, some researchers foresee a future where technology can relieve the long-held emotional burden of some of these professions. They think we owe it to the service workforce to offer a new frontline of robotic protection. In fact, they think it’s far overdue–but does that actually mean just automating these jobs away?

    The Boundaries of Artificial Emotional Intelligence If our virtual assistants and emotional laborers are all turning out to be soothing, female-voiced AI, will it close certain gaps for human women? Or will it ratify them?

    Your Classroom Is Making You Fail Almost everyt traditional classroom design makes it harder to learn–yet the fixes are often simple.

    The Power of Play: A Reading List A crash course on how fun and leisure can change the world

    Batteries Not Excluded The supercomputer in your pocket and your next car rely on them–so what will we do if we run out of lithium?

    The Human Machine

    A series about the increasingly blurred lines between us and our machines.
    Ian Steadman
    Aug 23, 2017

    A Noxious Problem

    Smog in cities and smoke in the home cause a huge range of short- and long-term health conditions. Why is the world’s biggest public health crisis only getting worse?
    How We Get To Next
    Oct 24, 2018

    The ID Question

    Who decides who you are? You, or the world around you?
    Anjali Ramachandran
    Nov 22, 2017

    Beats: Space

    Space is where we project our dreams–and our nightmares–of the future.

    Beats: Food

    Food structures our day, and food systems shape our world

    Beats: Disability

    “Disable” is an active verb, and disability describes the social and environmental barriers that prevent access just as much as an individual body’s physical reality.

    Beats: Health

    Access to health care is as much a matter of public policy as it is the size of a person’s pocketbook; within a doctor’s office, many factors affect the quality of treatment.

    Mapped: The Shifting Soils of 2100

    Climate change will massively redistribute the world’s farmland.
    Duncan Geere
    Nov 20, 2015 1 min read

    Mapped: America’s Healthiest Cities

    Communities beat out states when it comes to keeping you well.
    Duncan Geere
    Apr 12, 2016 2 min read

    What Our Tech Ethics Crisis Says About the State of Computer Science Education

    The problem with “I’m just an engineer” isn’t the engineer’s inability to identify all relevant ethical implications–it’s that they don’t think it’s their job to do so.
    Casey Fiesler
    Dec 5, 2018 7 min read