Quantum computers are not amazing because they’re revolutionizing everything in the world of computation. They’re still clunky, finicky, insanely expensive, and not too practical. They may very well have a big impact one day—but that day is not today. N

How do you train self-driving software to safely pilot a vehicle through city streets? There are a few options; the first that probably springs to mind for most people is to spend countless hours actually driving around on city streets (with a safety dr

Our planet is unique in the solar system. It’s the only one with active plate tectonics, ocean basins, continents and, as far as we know, life. But Earth in its current form is 4.5 billion years in the making; it’s starkly different to what it was in a mu

Thanks to SpaceX, traveling beyond Earth now seems pretty tangible for us commoners. True, a ticket to the International Space Station currently runs $55 million (ouch). Technologically, however, the triumphant splashdown of SpaceX’s astronaut-carrying

Algorithms play an increasingly prominent part in our lives, governing everything from the news we see to the products we buy. As they proliferate, experts say, we need to make sure they don’t collude against us in damaging ways. Fears of malevolent art

“Are robots really destined to take over restaurant kitchens?” This was the headline of an article published by Eater four years ago. One of the experts interviewed was Siddhartha Srinivasa, at the time Professor of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mell

It sounds like science fiction: giant solar power stations floating in space that beam down enormous amounts of energy to Earth. And for a long time, the concept—first developed by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in the 1920s—was mainly an in

Over the last several months we’ve gotten very used to communicating via video chat. Zoom, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, and the like have not only replaced most in-person business meetings, they’ve acted as a stand-in for gatherings between friends and reun

Longevity research always reminds me of the parable of blind men and an elephant. A group of blind men, who’ve never seen an elephant before, each touches a different part of the elephant’s body to conceptualize what the animal is like. Because of their l

Fears of a robot-driven jobs apocalypse are a recurring theme in the media. But a new report from MIT has found that technology is creating as many jobs as it destroys, and bad policy is a bigger threat to workers than automation. Ever since a landmark