Metal Wants to Float, Once It’s Etched With a Fricking Laser

A great way to anger the gods is to call your ship unsinkable. People thought the Titanic couldn't go down, and as Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio found out the hard way, that clearly wasn't the case. (Leo himself was also, in fact, quite sinkable.) But at the University of Rochester, scientists have defied the…

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Is Tesla’s Cybertruck for Real? The Jury’s Out

Watching Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen smash the Cybertruck’s supposedly unsmashable window with a metal ball may have been the most awkward moment of Thursday night’s presentation, but it wasn’t the most confusing. That came when Elon Musk wrapped up the debut of his new electric pickup truck, told the crowd of whooping Tesla…

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Banning Micro-Targeted Political Ads Won’t End the Practice

A few weeks ago, we were talking about whether companies like Facebook and Twitter should ban all paid political advertising from their platforms. Now the debate has narrowed to a secondary question: Where political ads are allowed, should their micro-targeting be prohibited? Google is the first to make this restriction formal policy: The company announced…

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Love Baby Yoda, You Must

No matter how frequently it happens, when people online love something obsessively, when they simply must stan, it always brings out the cynics. Their cynicism, in turn, will be understood as intellectual seriousness. As maturity. To wit: This week the internet pledged its fealty to Baby Yoda—the tiny alien from Disney+’s The Mandalorian—and was immediately…

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Addo

Within moments of arriving at Seattle’s Addo restaurant, I was handed a Nintendo Switch controller and a can of Georgetown Brewing Company’s Bodhizafa IPA.While chef Eric Rivera shuttled back and forth to the kitchen to bring out Puerto Rican snacks, Addo’s director of operations Ingrid Lyublinsky took another controller, jumped into a game of Mario…

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Maryanna Saenko and Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures talk SpaceX, the Boring Company, and . . . ayahuasca

Last week, at a StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, we sat down with Maryanna Saenko and Steve Jurvetson, investors who came together to create the investment outfit Future Ventures roughly…

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