Motherboard's 30-minute film on the grassroots movement to make thorium nuclear power a reality.
Motherboard's documentary on Occupy Wall Street, hacktivism, and the hackers trying to build a distributed network for the Occupy movement and beyond.
David Rees is not kidding. He really does sharpen pencils for a living.
The hunt for the Higgs boson, god particle or goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end on July 4. Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world's largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the particle and its energy field. But the LHC didn't do it alone. The search has been a massive, costly and unprecedented international effort that began thousands of miles away, at another atom smasher beneath the Illinois prairie.
Bad, that is, in the Michael Jackson sense. ROFLCon, the brainchild of a few Harvard undergraduates, is a biennial gathering of the Internet's foremost makers of viral memes, their hardcore fanboys, and the net researchers who get excited about them (with a hefty dose of chin-rubbing, no doubt).
From military weapons expos in Jordan to idyllic SoCal beaches, we caught up with some of those who are building and selling unmanned aerial vehicles all over the world, and even convinced a few companies to let us take their flying spy robots for a spin.
The man who created Brazil's crazy space-age moon-capital. Oscar Niemeyer - an ardent communist and proponent of modern architecture who, alongside his buddy Le Corbusier, had co-designed the UN building in New York - to build a crazy spacepod city in the middle of the planalto.
Many of Alan Moore's comics have been adapted for the big screen, but not many of them have met with his approval. So he went and wrote his own screenplay, the first one he's ever written, which turned into the film Jimmy's End. Pairing up with director Mitch Jenkins they've created an experience not unlike Moore's celebrated Watchmen--a rich, multilayered film with a narrative that will reward repeat viewings and will live on beyond the rectangular box of the screen, spilling out into the real world.
Last summer, Motherboard met Mohammed and Nadia, a couple from Tripoli who had left their distressed home for six months to live in Jordan, where they hoped to conceive through in vitro fertilization with the help of one of the region's best doctors, and full government backing, as promised. Though they hadn't been hurt in the war, they considered it the government's duty to pay for their treatment. "We came here with their support, with their understanding that they would pay our bills," said Nadia.
Since starting her blog, "Generación Y," in 2007, Sánchez has become the Castro regime's most internationally visible opponent. Her site gets millions of hits per month, and hundreds of thousands of people follow her on Twitter, and she uses those platforms to shed light on life within the western hemisphere's last true dictatorship.
Motherboard visits the practice space of the band one day before the release of their eighth album PUMPS! and the start of a 6 week North American tour in support of it. We also capture their first show of the tour in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and talk with the band about their sound.
In HIGH COUNTRY, Motherboard heads to Denver--ground zero for cannabis legalization, and home to a booming tech sector in what could be called the Silicon Valley of weed--to inhale the newest high-tech highs. We visit the key players scaling up this new green tech, wrap our heads around all the money to be made, crack open the confusing science of America's No. 1 cash crop, and smoke dabs.
Meet Adora Svitak, a 12 year-old prodigy who has been declared "the most clever child in the world." She learned to read at three and published her first novel when she was seven. When Motherboard hung out with her in 2009, she said she sees herself as an "educator, poet and humanitarian." In this short video Adora interviews SETI astronomer Jill Tarter about her search for intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
MOTHERBOARD met up with Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov at his Global Future 2045 Conference in New York City to talk about immortality, spirituality, and the coming age of cybernetic avatar-based living.
In 1991, Cuba's economy began to implode. "The Special Period in the Time of Peace" was the government's euphemism for what was a culmination of 30 years worth of isolation. It began in the 60s, with engineers leaving Cuba for America. Ernesto Oroza, a designer and artist, studied the innovations created during this period. He found that the general population had created homespun, Frankenstein-like machines for their survival, made from everyday objects. Oroza began to collect these machines, and would later contextualize it as "art" in a movement he dubbed "Technological Disobedience."
Mark Pauline is the founder of Survival Research Laboratories, a mythical moniker among weird-techies, art-punks and general violence seekers across the globe. Pauline began his work in the 80s in the San Francisco punk and art scene defacing billboards and organizing public pranks. Through the decades, he has become a pioneer in technological and performance arts. His vaguely anthropomorphic creations are some of the most dangerous machines ever made, rivaling the military, but instead of turning their threats on us, the machines blow each other up and let us watch.
Robert J. White is the groundbreaking surgeon who in the mid-1970s- against all odds- pioneered the monkey head transplant, forever changing the face of monkey ownership as we know it. Wait, what's that? Your monkey still has its original head? Wow. Get with the program, choch.
Robert J. White is the groundbreaking surgeon who in the mid-1970s- against all odds- pioneered the monkey head transplant, forever changing the face of monkey ownership as we know it. Wait, what's that? Your monkey still has its original head? Wow. Get with the program, choch.
Colombian drug traffickers up the ante with homemade coke-smuggling submarines.
Garriott, also known as Lord British, now resides in a castle-like mansion outside of Austin, Texas, that's the dream home of any grown-up kid. But his favorite place to live is a five-bedroom fixer-upper 250 miles above Earth. In 2008, Garriott parlayed his success in the videogame industry into a lifelong dream: Fly to the International Space Station.
John Coster-Mullen is a truck-driver with minimal college education who taught himself how to build the most detailed replica of an A-bomb ever made. "The secret of the atomic bomb is how easy they are to make," admits Coster-Mullen.
Davidson is also the discoverer and curator of the "Silicon Zoo," a collection of infinitesimal drawings etched directly into the circuitry of mass-manufactured microprocessors by their designers, and running the gamut in shape and style from a 2mm-long Crayola crayon to a Waldo one-third the width of a human hair. It's like tiny graffiti for nerds (regular nerds, not graffiti nerds).
Stelarc is not interested in explaining what he is. In 2011 Motherboard met Stelarc, a Greek weirdo who lives in Australia and has been screwing with his body in the furtherance of art, technology, and cyborg rights.
Paul Hellyer recently stirred up global controversy when he testified before a half-dozen former US representatives that aliens exist. As Canada's former Minister of Defence, Hellyer is the first and only cabinet-ranking official from a G8 nation to publicly state a belief in extraterrestrials.
Matthew Deutsch is a singular teenager. He is not only afraid of dying, but he's made plans to put his brain on ice after he does so that he might be revived in the future. At 17, he is very likely the youngest cryonics candidate in the world.
Travel with Vice comics editor Nick Gazin to Atlanta for Dragon Con, a two-day bacchanalian orgy of sci-fi and comic book fans going bananas in the city's hotel rooms. We dive deep into the chaos with hundreds of cos-play and sci-fi fans, and then almost get arrested for talking to Carrie Fisher from Star Wars.
To make his point, Teller pointed to his first-hand experience with tyranny, first under the Communists and then the Fascists, who raised hell across Hungary before he fled in the 1930s for America. His scars weren't just psychic: a streetcar ran over Teller's foot during his early years, leaving him hobbling for the rest of his life.
In 2009, Motherboard's then editor, Sean Yeaton, did the world a small service and dusted off Mark David's Box of Tapes. The tapes are a hastily edited set of clips gleaned from old cable access shows recorded by the deceased Mark David. The first stack of plastic from the dingy box we've got the luxury of feasting our cold, glassy eyes on is 'Tech Talk.' Brought to you in five short parts, 'Tech Talk' explores the most cutting-edge technology from the year 1980. In episode one, guest Monsignor Ron Duffy of the Vatican's Robotics
Juan Manuel Gallegos has a full stable of rocket-powered conveyances in the backyard of his Morelos home/laboratory.
If there is anybody working in the field of robotics whose success we are equally amazed by and terrified of, it is Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai. While his colleagues are taking their cues from the more "sophisticated" side of sci-fi like Phillip K. Dick and THX-1138, Sankai has thrown out any pretense of goodwill, naming his company after the fictional cyborg firm responsible for the Terminator and trying to develop his own version of the exoskeleton from Aliens (which he's named HAL, no less).
This hectare of fine East Tennessean woodland is home to the nation's oldest and largest open-air collection of rotting corpses. Motherboard explores the Univ. of Tennessee Body Farm.
In spring of 2013, Texas-based start up TrackingPoint Solutions released the first ever precision-guided firearm, which is essentially a long-range, laser-guided robo rifle. Call it the gun of tomorrow: The technology is so advanced we've heard it can have beginners killing at extreme distances with single-shot accuracy in mere minutes.
Humanity just made a small, bloody step towards a time when everyone can upgrade themselves towards being a cyborg. Of all places, it happened in the back room of a studio in the post-industrial German town of Essen.
In 2005, artist Jennifer Kanary's sister-in-law committed suicide while suffering from a psychotic episode. This event led Jennifer to develop Labyrinth Psychotica, an experience designed to give people more insight into how it feels to suffer through psychosis.
Is Soylent the future of food? CEO Rob Rhinehart lived on his liquid invention for 30 days straight, and the feat propelled him to internet fame and fortune. So I decided to become the first person to repeat his feat—for a month straight, I'd try to live on nothing but the chemical cocktail, just like Rob. Along the way, I'd investigate the how an artificial food replacement might impact human health, Silicon Valley, and the world at large. This is the story of life after food.
We used the deep web to find out just how easy it was to buy guns, drugs, and other contraband online.
Cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, author of dozens of books on computer and real-world security, was tapped by The Guardian to help the newspaper decode the NSA documents disclosed by Edward Snowden. We met with him in Cambridge, Massachusetts to talk about the risks of widespread digital surveillance, the problem with thinking about those risks, and the ways that the public can demand change.
On August 31st, 2013, Nyad jumped into the shark-friendly waters of Cuba and swam some 110-odd miles—without the protection of a shark cage—to eventually reach the shores of Key West, Florida, some 53 hours later.
Doug Coulter used to build signal processing and radio gadgets for our favorite three-lettered intelligence agencies, but for the past decade or so, Doug's chosen to explore his engineering interests in the isolated backwoods of Virginia, absent from any pesky boss or sticky bureaucracy.
The more we learn about our brains, the more we discover just how fragile they are. When concussions happen, it's extremely important to manage an athlete's recovery to prevent him or her from getting further damage. That's where Sway Balance comes in. An athlete's balance is one of the most obvious things affected by a concussion, but using balance as a recovery metric requires objective data typically gleaned from highly expensive force platforms.
Our latest doc is about clinic in Los Angeles that uses virtual reality simulations to treat war veterans with PTSD. With host Jody Mitic, a former master sniper for the Canadian military, this short doc explores the efficacy of these systems to treat a highly mysterious mental condition.
In Pasaje 18 of Lima's Polvos Azules shopping mall, you'll find racks of DVD burners humming away while flourescent lights cast their glare across the glitter of thousands of bootleg movies in their telltale cellophane wrappers. If you want it to be, it's a scene right out of cyberpunk. But for many Peruvians, whose access to things like Netflix is hampered by some of the slowest internet speeds on the globe, bootleg DVDs remain a primary source for accessing current movie releases.
By reversing its aging process when it gets sick or injured, Japan's tiny Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is one of the only known animals that has figured out how to defeat death. Motherboard goes to Japan to visit the only researcher in the world who is studying the microscopic animal to see if humans can eventually do the same.
In the debut episode of our three-part series titled "Phreaked Out," we took a retrospective look at one day in August of 2006, when two Los Angeles traffic engineers, Kartik Patel and Gabriel Murillo, remotely accessed the city's traffic control system and tampered with the light sequences at four main intersections of the city, as part of a labor union protest.
In this episode of "Phreaked Out," we met some of the top security researchers at the center of the car hacking world. The goal isn't to make people crash: They highlight security holes in order to highlight flaws in car technology, intended to pressure auto manufacturers to be a few steps ahead of their friendly foes.
Over the course of our "Phreaked Out" series, we've seen how devices such as urban control systems, moving vehicles, and smartphones are not impervious to hacks when connected to a network—cellular or wi-fi. In our third and final episode,we check out a slate of real-time phone hacks to tackle the question of mobile phone security.
Some say Dr. Alejandro Hernández Cárdenas' brew brings the dead back to life. A MOTHERBOARD documentary on life, death, and an unassuming Mexican dentist whose proprietary chemical formula rehydrates corpses for identification.
Our crew traveled to remote Liberia to discover 'Monkey Island,' an area inhabited solely by former lab tested chimpanzees who survived disease and two civil wars. We go to the island, interview the locals and meet the scientists involved in the testing facility 25 years ago.
Boyan Slat's story is not quite that of a 20-year-old Wunderkind who magically found a potential fix to a longstanding problem. It's perhaps more accurately described as a combination of personal dedication and trial and error. When going through his old prototypes for a technology that would passively scrub oceans of plastic, he's almost embarrassed of his early concepts.
In parts of Peru, there's an ancient culinary delicacy that consists of liquefying a rare frog. Drinking the concoction is said to cure a wide range of ailments, including bronchitis, tuberculosis, asthma, arthritis, even impotence.
There aren’t many places you can conveniently launch a homemade rocket. But a blustery Scottish moor, reachable only by winding roads that twist around reservoirs, wind turbines, and plenty of sheep, is one of them.
Earth is the only home we've ever known, and it's treated us well so far. But whether it’s climate change, an apocalyptic asteroid, or some horrifying disaster we don’t even know about yet, the Earth won't live forever.
Tang and freeze-dried ice cream is fun to consume for about five minutes of your life. When you’re 10. But when you’re floating in space, the limited culinary options leave something to be desired. In fact, astronauts on long trips typically don’t eat enough. That’s where SPOT and ROGR come in: a smart growing chamber and gardening robot, respectively, currently being developed by a graduate team at the University of Colorado Boulder.
When the bicycle became popular in the beginning of the 19th century in southern Germany, England, and France, it was the first machine that championed private transportation. Almost 200 years after the invention of the vélocipède and Drais’ dandy horse, personal mobility is one of the highest imperatives in a globalized world. Today, our streets are filled with fixed-gears, roadsters, rickshas, BMX, and electric bikes.
Ralph Baer, who developed the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, died in December of 2014 at the age of 92. Back in 2009, we chatted with Baer about his impact on the industry.
If you're a national army in the market for a brand spanking new jet, smart rifle, or drone, you might consider checking out CANSEC, Canada's premier defense trade show.
China is in the midst of a massive industrial and economic revolution which has required large expenditures of energy.
In 1946, importing 25 pairs of beavers from Canada to Chile in order to foster a fur trade in an economically lackluster territory of Patagonia seemed like a smart idea. However, no one would have imagined these incisor-toothed vermin would one day lay waste to Patagonia’s forests. Today, there are roughly 100,000 beavers in the region and their environmental destruction has allegedly led to the most transformative destruction of its southern ecosystem since the last ice age. We traveled to the southernmost tip of Chile to meet the beaver hunters in charge of crudely restoring order to its ecosystem.
There’s not much agriculture in the Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the North Atlantic, roughly equidistant from Norway, Iceland, and Scotland. Aside from the sheep that freely roam the fjords and a few root vegetables, the Faroese have always relied on the surrounding sea as a source of fish, seabirds, and the pilot whales they slaughter in a hunt known as the grindadráp, or grind.
Right now, in the 21st century, South Korean scientists are actually working to resurrect the prehistoric woolly mammoth using cloning technology and the flesh of perfectly preserved specimen once buried in Northern Siberia. The hope is that if they can find an active cell from the meaty leg of a 40,000 year old frozen mammoth, it could hold the keys to bringing back the extinct species.
In INHUMAN KIND, Motherboard gains exclusive access to a small fleet of US Army bomb disposal robots—the same platforms the military has weaponized—and to a pair of DARPA’s six-foot-tall bipedal humanoid robots. We also meet Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams, renowned physicist Max Tegmark, and others who grapple with the specter of artificial intelligence, killer robots, and a technological precedent forged in the atomic age. It’s a story about the evolving relationship between humans and robots, and what AI in machines bodes for the future of war and the human race.
The Hurt Locker got it only partly right. Just ask Brian Castner, a former bomb technician with the US military. He served three tours in the Middle East, two of which were spent leading an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, and deployed small remote-controlled robots to battle a blitz of insurgent-rigged car bombs and improvised explosive devices in and around Kirkuk, Iraq, in 2006. Castner and his crew grew so reliant on these machines, which can disarm explosives from afar, that they considered them part of the team. Years later, does he still feel an attachment to the machines? We met Castner to find out.
NASA’s top climate scientists study some of the world’s most advanced computer models in the same building that Jerry Seinfeld once ordered cereal for lunch. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies is perhaps the nation’s premier climatology hub, and it’s where director Gavin Schmidt attempts to predict what, exactly, will happen as humanity loads the earth with planet scorching greenhouse gases.
Motherboard meets John Romero, one of the creators behind Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake, breakthrough games that all but created the first-person shooter genre.
Crowd-funding campaigns can raise money for some pretty wacky projects, such as asteroid defense or images of brains on LSD. But rarely do you hear of campaigns raising funds for military equipment. Enter the People’s Project, a volunteer-led organization based in Ukraine that has a section currently raising funds for a military drone.
Motherboard spends a day with Martin Cooper, the father of the first ever portable, handheld cell phone.
In the series premiere, the safety of smart guns is discussed.
The Zika virus throws a spotlight on the endless battle to fight pandemics; a fight with a new front, deep under the sea.
A plastic surgeon who shares the details of surgeries is profiled.
Hackers aren't just looking to steal your bank account. Everything around you can be hacked.
Prosthetics are more advanced and useful than ever, leading to a new frontier of human augmentation.
In the Season 1 finale, physics rules everything, but it still can't explain everything.
Rhianna Lakin is the force behind the leading online community for women interested in drones. She’s proactively carved out a space for women in a male domin ated industry and is challenging drone pilots everywhere to use the technology for good. She’s hoping to use drones as a powerful tool to expose and combat d eforestation, aid in search and rescue missions and humanitarian relief, amplify the voices of protesters and inspire the next generation to do the same.
Pinball was once an American obsession. Now, the arcade classic is making a comeback, but the repair technicians skilled enough to repair these complex machines are limited. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard talks to two remaining pinball repair techs in New York to see what goes into keeping these highly specialized games running.
Douglas McCauley is a Santa Barbara-based marine scientist who is looking to technology for new ways to take on some of the ocean's biggest challenges. Along with his colleagues at the Benioff Ocean Initiative (BOI)—a UCSB-based collaboration between marine biologists, tech innovators, and citizen scientists—McCauley has helped develop numerous platforms to monitor threats to marine ecosystems.
When it comes to repair, farmers have always been self reliant. But the modernization of tractors and other farm equipment over the past few decades has left most farmers in the dust thanks to diagnostic software that large manufacturers hold a monopoly over. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard goes to Nebraska to talk to the farmers and mechanics who are fighting large manufacturers like John Deere for the right to access the diagnostic software they need to repair their tractors.
Every year there’s a race to become the first to tear down the phone, with teams from around the world flying to Australia—where it’s first released—to compete to be the first to look inside the world’s most coveted new phone. Motherboard embedded with iFixit, a California-based company whose primary mission is to make it easier for the average person to disassemble and repair their electronics, for its iPhone X teardown.
Every month for the past five years, Harlem residents have gathered to discuss digital privacy and how to best protect themselves from intrusive surveillance. Motherboard joined CryptoHarlem founder Matthew Mitchell at one of his crypto parties to see firsthand how he is empowering people of color, who he says are over-policed and heavily surveilled.
Living With Jaguars is a 360° film documenting wild jaguars in Brazil. Part documentary and part immersive game, Living With Jaguars explores historical and current tensions in a rural region where jaguars prey on ranchers' cattle and ranchers kill them in retaliation. Now, ranchers and jaguars must find new ways to co-exist - or risk the future of a species under threat.
Plattsburgh, NY is part of a long-standing power agreement that gives the city an allotment of some of the cheapest electricity anywhere in the world, but a recent influx of cryptomining companies and their energy-draining rigs have raised power prices at the expense of the general population.
Ralph Lundsten's recording studio is its own country.