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How Photos Were Transmitted by Wire in 1937: The Innovative Technology of a Century Ago
When did you last send someone a photo? That question may sound odd, owing to the...
An Introduction to the Astrolabe, the Medieval Smartphone
Image by Anders Sandberg, via Wikimedia Commons Asked to imagine the character of everyday life in...
The Armored-Knight “Robot” Designed by Leonardo da Vinci (circa 1495)
Image by Erik Möller, via Wikimedia Commons Those of us who were playing video games in...
Isaac Asimov Predicts the Future in 1982: Computers Will Be “at the Center of Everything;” Robots Will Take Human Jobs
Four decades ago, our civilization seemed to stand on the brink of a great transformation. The...
Science unearths fossil fakery
A celebrated reptile fossil discovered in the Italian alps in 1931 is mostly fake. The Tridentinosaurus antiquus was...
Grasshoppers are being terrorised by robot dinosaurs
When a research team struggled to find a live dinosaur to test an evolutionary theory, they...
Before ChatGPT, There Was ELIZA: Watch the 1960s Chatbot in Action
In 1966, the sociologist and critic Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which diagnosed...
Why Perpetual Motion Machines Never Work, Despite Centuries of Experiments
According to the laws of physics — at least in simplified form — an object in...
