Melting Ski Resorts Have a Snow Machine Problem

In late October, the snow elves—that is to say, employees—of the Zermatt Bergbahnen AG ski area in Switzerland fire up their secret weapon: a 30-ton snow-generating goliath known as Snowmaker. For 20 days straight it runs around the clock, churning out 1,900 tons of snow per day. That snow is then ferried up the mountain…

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A Remote Tanzanian Village Logs Onto the Internet

The village of Sagara B sits along a red dirt road in the baobab-dotted Dodoma region of central Tanzania, where half-desert savanna meets the Rubeho mountains. It's home to less than 5,000 people and is so remote no one ever bothered to set up an internet connection. Until four years ago.Over a week, engineers from…

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Billie Eilish’s Van Halen Knowledge Tops This Week’s Internet News Roundup

The last few days have been kind of crazy, right? As soon as Americans returned to work after the Thanksgiving weekend, their government got right back to work on impeachment proceedings against President Trump—and that was just the beginning. The president also flew to the UK last week to meet with NATO leaders who were…

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Elon Musk’s ‘Pedo Guy’ Trial, Uber’s Crime Report, and More Car News This Week

Zero-Gravity Tire Swap of the WeekThe awards go to the Red Bull Formula 1 team, which changed a tire within an Ilyushin II-76 MDK cosmonaut training plane—aka a “vomit comet”—in, yes, zero gravity. The team has the world record for tire swaps on land, at 1.82 seconds, and it did not come close to beating…

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The New Port of ‘Halo: Reach’ Is a Renaissance for the Series

The best thing about Reach, the Earth-like planet at the center of Halo: Reach's narrative, is its sky. In a world that's mostly familiar, the sky is alien. It is sickly shades of green and blue even on the brightest days, with lines of some cosmic phenomenon I can't name in the distance cutting waves…

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14 Great Gifts for Mom (2019): Gift Ideas for the Mother in Your Life

The category of "mom" encompasses a tremendous amount of variety. There are 60-year-old working moms who are obsessed with PC gaming, new moms who are barely thinking beyond the next feeding, and every mom in between. I'm a mom too, and in addition to listing the things that I desperately want this holiday season, I…

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