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An electric car is a demanding thing. Sure, it doesn’t need gasoline or oil or nearly as much maintenance as a machine propelled by explosions, but dumping the internal combustion engine in favor of a battery and motors brings up a slew of fresh issues. Key among them, of course, is efficiency—the more miles you can squeeze from each kilowatt-hour, the better. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

That Johannes Gutenberg guy was on to something. He may not have been the first person to print texts on paper using movable type—systems in China and Korea predated his—but his printing press made it faster, and cheaper, to create a record of a thought. One by one, those thoughts spread across Europe, philosophy and science and poetry. They might have been a cause of the Renaissance, or simply a...

It was a rough week for Tesla’s share price. After bouncing back from a major dip it took when the Securities and Exchange Commission threatened to sue CEO Elon Musk, and him then agreeing to settle, it’s been on a new downward slide. And it seems to be because of Musk’s tweets, as usual. This time he appears to attack the SEC (calling it the Shortseller Enrichment Commision), and reserves his rea...

Early last year, Scott Blew was standing in line at a food truck in Los Angeles when he caught the glare of Fox News on a television out of the corner of his eye. This is ridiculous, he thought. He couldn’t even escape the deluge of the news, or the ubiquity of screens, on a jaunt outdoors to get lunch. You could consciously choose to put your phone away, to step away from your laptop, but then so...

Approaching an 85-mph corner at 150 mph, I’m glad my stomach is calm and my bladder is empty. The Audi R8 GT4 race car has a surprising number of nooks and crannies to hold and hide any substances that may escape my body, and my brain has enough to think about already without working a hefty cleaning bill into my finances. I need all the mental bandwidth I can get because I’m tearing around the 24...

Not sure what your curb has done for you lately? Not to worry. Your answer is arriving now, in the form of an equation devised by Uber and meant to help cities evaluate how efficiently they’re using this increasingly contested space. After years of neglect and scorn, this strip of urban infrastructure, long the sole domain of the meter maid, has gotten incredibly crowded. Bike- and scooter-share c...

The Department of Transportation is getting a little more creative about how it defines “driver,” Secretary Elaine Chao announced Thursday. In the third version of the department’s official stance on self-driving, the department said it would “adapt the definitions of ‘driver’ and ‘operator’ to recognize that such terms to not refer exclusively to a human, but may in fact include an automated syst...

We need to change the way we talk about videogame studios. But even more than that, we need to change the way we talk about them when they close. In the past year, according to PC Gamer, 10 major game studios have closed, each employing anywhere from a dozen employees to hundreds. From Capcom Vancouver, the developers of the Dead Rising series, to Visceral, an EA subsidiary responsible for the Dea...

The slow motion legal showdown between the feds, the state of California, and its climate-minded allies is on. While President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency works to roll back clean car regulations, California’s Air Resources Board convened late last week to pass a series of measures that confirm its determination to reduce vehicle emissions in the state, and its willingness to le...

Cruise, the self-driving car arm of General Motors, has an unexpected new ally in its bid to keep its corporate master at the forefront of an industry enduring its greatest period of change in generations: Honda. In a deal announced today, the Japanese automaker will help San Francisco-based Cruise and its Detroit owner develop and mass produce a new sort vehicle for a world in which human drivers...

When Snapchat launched in 2011, the app seemed like a flash-in-the-pan teen messaging fad. Its signature function—sending photo and video messages that would self-destruct after viewed—echoed the fugitive thrill of passing notes. Correspondences vanish before meddling grown-ups have time to intervene. That's changed in the past few years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/...

When @sweden began its grand experiment in 2011, Twitter had never seemed more full of possibilities. In New York, Twitter served as a digital bulletin board to organize protesters at Occupy Wall Street. In the Middle East, tweets served as the roots of the Arab Spring. Companies signed on to engage with customers; celebrities made accounts to grow their fanbases. Learn more about your ad choices....

The first novel by YouTube star Hank Green, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, is about a young woman named April who becomes an internet celebrity after posting video of a mysterious alien robot. She quickly discovers that being famous has a lot of downsides—something Green and his friends have learned the hard way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There aren’t many ways to make traffic jams productive. You can make phone calls, listen to audio books, or practice your calming breathing exercises. But none of them help you escape the reality of being trapped in a metal box, surrounded by thousands of other metal boxes, all performing a dance forwards, slowly, foot by foot, across the asphalt. A Saudi Arabian inventor, Nasser Al Shawaf, decide...

In early August, Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a fateful tweet: “Am considering taking Tesla public at $420. Funding secured.” On Saturday, two days after the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Tesla CEO Elon Musk for “false and misleading” statements made on Twitter, Musk, Tesla, and the feds reached a compromise—a settlement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcas...

The irony of Elon Musk’s latest legal drama is grim. He wanted to take the car maker Tesla private, because he hates the bureaucracy, red tape, and regulation that comes with being a company owned by shareholders, traded on the stock market. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Amazon’s Forever debuted earlier this month, it announced itself with a kernel of discord hidden within. Viewers reaching the show’s sixth episode found it stripped of its main characters—June (Maya Rudolph) and Oscar (Fred Armisen), a married couple trapped in unchanging circumstances—and instead angling its view in a different direction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoice...

What would it take for you to give up your car? An all-access pass to a bicycle, maybe, plus some safe lanes to ride it in? A smartphone, stocked with apps for cheap ride-hail services? A competent public transit system? A chauffeur, willing to drive you around instead? Lyft, the ride-hail company that has always said that its goal is to get more Americans out of their personal cars, would like to...

In a white and grey laboratory, where neat runs of orange cables on the walls provide a relief of color, a three-bladed propeller spins on the front of a Cessna “Iron Bird” test frame. It’s eerily quiet, free of the buzz you expect from a propeller-propelled aircraft. Just the whoosh of air, like a ceiling fan spinning at full speed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adcho...

In the early ’00s, few web endeavors seemed less bound for long-term glory than CollegeHumor.com. The site launched in 1999 as a video and sight-gag repository “dedicated to grinding your academic efforts to a halt.” Early on, that meant lots of bro-friendly distractions, like photos of students passed out on lawns/), naughtily titled JPEGs, and video series like “Husky Dave the Fat Guy”. Learn mo...

The arrival of iOS 12 means you can now use Apple's long-awaited suite of Screen Time tools. The new features, which appear under Settings > Screen Time, are designed to give you a better idea of how you're spending time on your phone and limit the time you spend on certain apps. It’s all part of a greater push by tech companies to mitigate the ways personal devices are engineered to be addictive,...

When Ole Kirk Kristiansen imported a newfangled contraption called a plastic-injection-­molding machine to Denmark in 1946, people thought he’d lost his mind. Kirk Kristiansen was a master carpenter who made wooden toys sold under the brand name Lego (abbreviated from leg godt, Danish for “play well”). The machine cost nearly 7 percent of the company’s annual revenue, but Kirk Kristiansen reckoned...

Cycle commuting is hot. Warm, at least. Depending on where you’re living. Each year, the League of American Bicyclists, a nationwide cycling advocacy organization, takes a look at the annual commuting numbers out of the American Community Survey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Peter F. Hamilton, one of Britain’s leading science fiction authors, has been hard at work on his massive seven-volume Commonwealth series since 2003. His new novel Salvation, about a world where teleportation is cheap and easy, is a major change of pace. “It’s something I wanted to do as a writer, just to keep fresh,” Hamilton says in Episode 327 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn m...

Amazon is all-in on Alexa, and this week, it revealed a new set of voice-enabled products ranging from a a wall clock to a doodad that goes in your car. The star and symbol for this bold new wave of Alexa devices? The AmazonBasics Microwave. At a glance, it looks identical to every other 700W microwave, but it has some new tricks. By touching the Alexa button on it, you can ping a nearby Echo spea...