2026-08-03

What Google Glass has taught us one year in

Google opened up its now iconic Glass for sales to a limited number of “Explorers” just over a year ago, and is allowing the general public to purchase Glass for $1,500 for one day only today. Like any substantial piece of technology that becomes pop culture, Google’s face computer has been the butt of jokes, subject to bans, spawned its own epithets, been blamed for attacks—and been the s [...]

2026-08-03

6 island-hopping routes that don't require a private boat

These six island-hopping routes rely on public ferries and fast boats, not chartered yachts, to link some of the world's best-known island clusters [...]

2026-08-03

Edward Snowden threw a bucket of hot water on Scandinavia’s quest to house the world’s data

Warmer summers aren’t the only thing marching into the Arctic these days—more hot, server-filled data centers are on the way as well. As more companies look to take advantage of colder climates and chilly water to lower the cooling costs of running thousands of servers at full capacity, Scandinavian countries are positioning themselves as data-center locations of choice. However, the geopoliti [...]

2026-08-03

Things get weird when objects get hooked up to the internet

With the flood of new connected services and devices on the market, knowing how future users might hook them together or find unexpected new uses is a challenge, no matter what Silicon Valley’s confident young bucks may tell us. A service called IFTTT is giving us an interesting peek into the practical, clever and slightly weird ways people want to use the Internet of Things (IoT). [...]

2026-08-03

If you thought election 2016 was horrible, then 2020 will be much, much worse

On this day four years ago, Barack Obama had just scored a comfortable electoral vote victory (332 to 206) over Mitt Romney. Reflecting on what felt like a slightly bonkers election cycle at the time, I put on my speculative hat as a futurist and penned a list of the 10 things that might get even weirder in the 2016 election. [...]

2026-08-03

Soon American highways could be overrun with self-driving trucks

With so much attention being paid to the development of self-driving cars (including whether Apple is getting into the game), little notice has been given to the prospect of self-driving leviathans of the highway—the long-haul truck. Industry watchers and tech fanboys are salivating at the potential of making their commutes or jumping between meetings in autonomous people-movers, yet, in terms o [...]

2026-08-03

To avoid another Brexit let’s stop treating citizenship as a birthright

Somewhere in the depths of the messy and multi-directional fallout of Brexit, an interesting counter-trend is crystallizing. Even as millions of voters around the world loudly embrace slogans like “Make America Great Again” or “Vote Leave, Take Control,” the notion of fixed national citizenship has probably never faced such a moment of reshaping. What started as a referendum on political m [...]

2026-08-03

The best bath towels, tested by Consumer Reports

A towel that shrinks or loses its softness ruins laundry day. Consumer Reports tested towels for softness, drying and shrinkage [...]

2026-08-03

The future of US air travel doesn’t look pretty

I had a terrible travel experience earlier this week, trying to get from New York’s LaGuardia Airport back down the east coast to my home airport in North Carolina. And I wasn’t alone. My misery was due to a massive summer storm front that swept eastward, causing damage and delays from the Ohio Valley to the Atlantic. That heavy weather threat triggered a last minute cancellation of my origina [...]