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…

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…

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…

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…

Sign up here to receive Max Q weekly in your inbox, starting December 15. This week saw a ton of activity in the space industry, with multiple launches, key preparations…

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…

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…

Snapchat is preparing to launch a big new feature that uses your selfies to replace the faces of people in videos you can then share. It’s essentially a simplified way…

After more than a year of teasing, Apple finally unveiled the new Mac Pro at WWDC in June. The long wait was finally over — though Apple left out one…

During a joint press conference in London with President Emmanuel Macron of France this week, President Trump threatened to impose tariffs on French goods such as champagne, in retaliation for a new tax on large tech companies. As he spoke, Macron’s digital affairs minister, Cédric O, was in Washington, DC, trying to build support for…