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From law-violating subatomic particles to entirely new, earth-like worlds, 2011 was an incredible year for scientific discovery. In the past 12 months, scientific breakthroughs in fields ranging from archaeology to structural biochemistry have allowed humanity to rewrite history, and enabled us to open to brand new chapters in our development as a species. More »
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There's nothing better than a wild UFO conspiracy theory — unless it's a UFO theory that wraps in a debunked comet, the Catholic Church, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. More »
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You can't really be a fully fledged sexist prat without also being kind of a bad scientist. The science supporting the idea that women are less rational than men is looking flimsier all the time. So it's probably not a surprise that the outrageously sexist science fiction story that blew up the Internet, "Womanspace", is bad science as well as bad gender politics. More »
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Yesterday, San Fransisco residents had a number of choices to make in their mayoral election. Using the new Ranked Choice Voting system, voters were called on to select their top three candidates from a field of sixteen instead of casting a vote for a single candidate. What exactly is Ranked Choice Voting, how does it work, and is it a better way conduct elections? More »
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Because we know you were dying to know. This video features Piers Gibbon — a British explorer, author, and National Geographic TV show host — describing the head-shrinking process long performed by the Shuar people of Ecuador and Peru. More »
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A child born today in a first world country can expect to live 80 to 90 years. But could your choice of profession play a role in increasing — or dramatically decreasing — your lifespan? More »
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Today saw the world's human population pass 7 billion for the first time ever — it's a huge landmark that's almost impossible for our limited brains to encompass. Luckily, National Geographic has been doing a year-long series about the growing population, and they've gathered some of their most arresting images, video and statistics into a free iPad app. More »
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The Guardian is currently featuring a great interactive applet that pumps out population metrics (including the total number of Earth's human residents) for the year you were born. More »
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Back in the days before satellites beaming the time at our phones, finding the correct time was a challenge. Once the Industrial Revolution turned each hour into a billable hour, it was necessary to standardize time across a whole city. Enter Ruth Belville, a real-life Time, ah, Lady, who kept London on schedule. More »
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We know that humans aren't the only species to develop cultures, as other great apes can learn social behaviors and pass them down through multiple generations. Now it appears we all evolved the capacity for culture at the same time. More »
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Yes, you're looking at a real Viking sword here — and it's over 1000 years old. This is just part of a new archeological discovery, the 16-foot tomb of a Viking warrior who came to Scotland and never went home again. The high-status warrior was buried with his boat and all his gear. More »
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The most firearm-friendly libertarian and gun-control centered politician can agree at least on one fundamental point: the need to keep guns safe and out of the hands of unprepared kids. Unfortunately, it looks like we're not doing a very good job of that. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5849673&view=rss&microfeed=true Remember how the internet was going to create a whole new class of creators, who were going to be supercharging our economy by noodling on their laptops? Those people are hurting, thanks to a one-two punch of economic meltdown and the phasing out of old jobs like "video-store clerk" and "newspaper writer." Turns out the Information Age isn't so hot for middle-class culture industry types after all. Former io9 reporter Scott Timberg has a great rundown of the lost potential of the "Creative Class" over at Salon.com. More »
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Randall Lee Church didn't believe his fellow inmates when they warned him about culture shock after he got out of prison — he thought they were just jealous. But then Church, who'd been locked up since 1983, emerged into a world that made no sense. More »
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Humans are the only animals who display loyalty to individuals we don't personally know. Scientists had assumed this was a new development made possible by the rise of centralized governments. But it might actually be part of how we evolved. More »
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Is the public being cut off from important knowledge in order to maximize profits? And does it always have to be that way? More »
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Like chimps and bonobos, humans live in social groups full individuals who help each other. Also like our ape relatives, we make war with outsiders. But our social groups can be millions strong. What makes humans so good at forming mass societies? More »
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In the 1980s, science fiction ruled over everything. Most of the biggest movies and books of the decade were scifi, and cyberpunk became the era's pop aesthetic. Here's how the 1980s changed the genre forever. More »
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What exactly is the half-life of celebrity? A new field called culturomics has the answer. Using the largest linguistic database ever created - Google Books - culturomics experts track things like "lexical dark matter," and how long fame really lasts. More »
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Are you sick and tired of walking past billboards that offer generic pitches to buy their products that aren't specifically tailored to your gender and age group? Well, fear not, because high-tech Japanese billboards are here to save the day. More »
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Awesome pop culture magazine Giant Robot is in trouble after what they call a "brutal" 2009. They're looking to raise $60,000 to make sure they can survive the year, and you can find details on how to help here. More »
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The US Space Program is in peril. As the government deals with its spiraling economic crisis, many are questioning the value of space exploration, and the new administration may consider scaling back NASA’s Ares and Orion programs. But a recent report from NASA reminds us that the Space Program has had a profound effect not only on our imaginations, but on the technological, economic, and social development of American culture. More »
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Iain M. Banks is the master of narrative zoom and pan: one minute he'll bring you in very close to a tiny moment in one person's life as she mourns the death of a brother, and the next you'll be spinning in deep space staring at a supermassive artificial world created by liquid-breathing aliens, millions of miles long, made of enormous braided tubes. Which of these minutes matters more? In Banks' new novel Matter, both do — and both are also tragicomically inconsequential. What always pleases about Banks' science fiction novels, many of which are set against the backdrop of a pan-galactic, A.I.-centric, socialist-libertarian society called The Culture, is that Banks always delivers substance and spectacle. You'll get the ethical questions, the sorrowful depictions of war, and the meditations on social evolution. But you'll also get world-shattering explosions, weird-ass aliens, and ancient technologies that are purely there to be fucking cool. More »
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To celebrate the release of Iain M. Banks' novel Matter, we've put together this handy primer for you on the Culture, the pan-galactic civilization whose members and ex-members are the subjects of so many Banks novels, including Matter. Not only do we have a rundown of every single Culture novel, but we've also got some important excerpts from an obscure essay Banks wrote in 1994 about the ideas behind the Culture universe. Get ready to enter a world where ships are sentient, humans live for half a millennium, and living on a planet is probably the most backward thing you can do. More »
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With Iain M. Banks' new Culture novel, Matter, coming out in February, it's a good time to revisit one of his lesser-known Culture novels, Inversions. One of the reasons why this book may not be as instantly-recognizable in the Culture pantheon as his space operas Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward is that it's not set in outer space. In fact, it's set entirely on a semi-Medieval planet where a Culture agent has been sent to study the natives — and has gone native herself. More »
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