Radio Motherboard

En esta edición muy especial de Radio Motherboard, viajamos a la zona fronteriza entre los Estados Unidos y México para evaluar la viabilidad de "control remoto," una nueva táctica de contrabando en que los migrantes guía de contrabando a través de la frontera por teléfono celulares. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this very special edition of Radio Motherboard we travel to the US-Mexico borderlands to gauge the viability of "remote control," a new smuggling tactic in which smugglers guide migrants across the border by phone. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ever notice that the piano part from “Dancing Queen” is tucked into the end of MGMT’s song “No Time To Pretend”? Or that The Album Leaf kept the squeaking of an old piano pedal in the final recording of their song “The Outer Banks?” These are just a taste of the sonic details most listeners would miss before they’re revealed by Song Exploder, a podcast by  Hrishikesh Hirway  that has musicians lik...

Twitter is a place where anyone can say anything, to anyone, at any time. But what happens when you don’t want to hear what someone else has to say? What if someone is attacking you personally, or getting all their friends to attack you? On this week’s Radio Motherboard, we talk about when to block, when to mute, and we consult with the master of the Twitter debate, rapper Talib Kweli. Hosted on A...

Hollywood, 1992. Mark Snow was already a pro at TV scores—dramas, procedurals, comedies—when a producer recommended him to Chris Carter, a veteran of Disney TV movies who needed music for a new TV pilot, The X Files , an unlikely supernatural procedural inspired partly by Kolchak, The Twilight Zone, and Twin Peaks . As he sat in his garage home studio one day, stumped in his search for the right s...

Sometimes, it can be hard to know how to act around artificial intelligence.  In the first half of Radio Motherboard this week, staff writer Jason Koebler explores how people treat Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana when no one’s listening. (A small spoiler: Apparently, people like to harass it. One new challenge in AI programming is learning how to gently smack down haters.) In the second half...

So scientists are saying an earthquake—a quake that is so big and so powerful you probably can’t even properly comprehend it—is probably going to hit your city, hard. It could be five years out, ten years, fifty years, or it could be tomorrow. But it’s going to come. How do we go about organizing that kind of information in we brains? How do we understand it on a rational, sensible level? Then, wh...

The tyranny of the set-top box may soon be over. The way it works now, you’re forced to rent a cable box from the likes of Time Warner Cable and Comcast to the tune of about $230 per year. The very idea that in 2016 you need a dedicated piece of hardware, whether it’s Comcast’s X1 or Time Warner Cable’s latest “whole home” DVR, just to tune into Guy’s Grocery Games on Food Network is crazy on its...

Earlier this week, a federal judge in California ordered Apple to help the FBI brute force hack into the encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, setting up a legal showdown that could have far-reaching ramifications for the future of encryption and privacy in the United States. Here's what you need to know. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There aren’t many black characters in video games with speaking roles, which is why it’s controversial when some of them are voiced by white actors. The most recent example is Nadine Ross, the strong, black, female antagonist in the upcoming Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, who is played by a white voice actress. To some black players, the fact that major black characters—few and far between as they ar...

The hyperloop, Elon Musk’s futuristic, tube-based “fifth mode of transportation” has stoked imaginations unlike any recent transportation technology except for maybe self driving cars. Lots has been said about it—Musk called it a “cross between a Concord, a railgun, and an air hockey table,” while the media has latched on to the promised speeds of more than 700 mph and travel times between San Fra...

The Zano drone raised £2.3 million in one of the most successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns of all time. A year later all the money is gone, Zano’s creator is having a nervous breakdown, and its 13,000 backers are livid. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What does it take to get a good night’s sleep? In this episode of Radio Motherboard, managing editor Adrianne Jeffries talks to the greatest sleep hacker she knows: her little brother William. We cover blackout curtains, smart light bulbs, sleep headphones, the best white noise mixes, and sleeping in the office. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you live in India, or happen to have visited in the past month, you probably noticed the seemingly-ubiquitous advertising for something called Free Basics. It's what you might call a full-court press: full-page ads in newspapers, billboards, and movie theater trailers. Also, if you were to log into Facebook, you'd be presented with an ad (and  possibly if you were in the US, too ). The first th...

If you want high speed internet in most any spot in New York City, you’re stuck with Time Warner Cable. Or at least, that’s how it usually works. But increasingly around the city, citizens and small community groups are setting up their own locally owned and operated free wifi networks. This week on Radio Motherboard, we take a trip to a meetup where two nascent but potentially disruptive groups w...

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 id...

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 "...

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 neighborho...

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,...

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...

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 o...

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 lo...

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...

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 t...