A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded ...

There are also features on such classic stand-alone comics as Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles by Jack Kirby; the first ...

The beehive beneath my office window quietly exhales legions of busybodies and then inhales them. On summer afternoons, when the sun seeps under the trees to backlight the hive, the approaching sunlit ...

Glicol is a free music programming environment that runs in your web browser — no installation needed. As someone who dabbles in music coding, I like how it lets you connect audio nodes (like ...

The first time Tom Ray released his tiny hand-made creature into his computer, it reproduced rapidly until hundreds of copies occupied the available memory space. Ray's creature was an experimental ...

Out of nothing, nature makes something. First there is hard rock planet; then there is life, lots of it. First barren hills; then brooks with fish and cattails and red-winged blackbirds. First an ...

In the world of scenario planning, the fact that something is unthinkable should not prevent us from considering it. The breakup of the Soviet Union was unthinkable almost until the day it happened.

The invention of autonomous control, like most inventions, has roots in ancient China. There, on a dusty windswept plain, a small wooden statue of a man in robes teeters upon a short pole. The pole is ...

You can spend a lot of money on an acoustic guitar these days and end up with an instrument that doesn’t improve with age, either tonally or aesthetically. With CNC machines and other robotic aids, ...

Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons and Futurama, once told me that he was inspired by my countdown clock, and wanted to use it in Futurama. In my version I found actuarial tables to calculate my ...

like in 20 years? Let’s listen to what technology says. First, technology has no preference between real and simulations.