In the Atomic Age, the US had plans to bomb everything from hurricanes to polar ice caps.Keystone/Getty ImagesSunday night, Axios’s Jonathan Swan broke news that Donald Trump—among his many often random musings—appears to have considered one of the worst-but-most-persistent ideas in public policy: Nuking hurricanes.The idea has evidently surfaced multiple times in the administration, as…

Whether you’re looking for a mountain bike, a car replacement, or a convenient commuter, there’s an electric bike out there for you. According to the market research firmNPD Group, ebike sales skyrocketed by almost 91 percent in 2017 over the previous year. That's a lot of bikes.Ebikes are versatile, they burn less fossil fuel, and…

We’re in a strange period. Expectations for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker continues to build—it’s only a few months away!—but there’s a lot more going on in so many other areas of a galaxy far, far away that it’s easy to lose track. Read on for news on no less than four different streaming…

In the Los Angeles megacity, 10 percent of the total road surface was responsible for 60 percent of road emissions. All told, the researchers calculated the city is spewing 176 million tons of CO2 per year total.Getty ImagesHovering above the iconic Hollywood sign is Southern California’s other icon: smog. After decades of gains fighting the…

Philippe Wojazer/AFP/Getty ImagesThe US and China won’t be the only ones affected in the trade war raging between the two countries. As companies scramble to find ways around the ever-increasing tariffs that the world’s two largest economies impose on each other’s goods, other countries are being drawn into a conflict that might have no winners.The…

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.Early this summer, the tech entrepreneur Austen Allred was on Reddit, as he often is, when he noticed something suspicious. The coding forums he frequents, where people usually talk about JavaScript bugs and command line functions, were being suffocated by…

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.Alex Zhang is shredding on the piano. He sits at a shiny black Steinway grand and rocks back and forth as his fingers fly across the keys, a flurry of blurred digits that leap from one end of the keyboard…

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.The protagonist of Rebecca Roanhorse’s short story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian ExperienceTM” is a bit of a sad sack. A guide for a VR tourism company in Sedona, Arizona, he leads “vision quests” in a digital guise taken straight…

This story is part of a series on how we learn—from augmented reality to music-training devices.Our in-house Know-It-Alls answer questions about your interactions with science and technology.Q: How do machines learn?By now you must have heard the good news about our savior, artificial intelligence. It makes you look better in selfies, prevents blindness, and can…

With the App Store’s big makeover in fall 2017, Apple attempted to shift consumers’ attention away from the Top Charts and more towards editorial content. But app developers still want…