WTF is

You’re watching a movie. A criminal is trying to evade a crime scene in a sports car on the highway. A helicopter is following the car from above. The car enters a tunnel with multiple exits and the

One of the best tools we have to slow the spread of the coronavirus is, as you have no doubt heard by now, contact tracing. But what exactly is contact tracing, who does it and how, and do you need to

Early yesterday morning bitcoin's blockchain forked -- meaning a separate cryptocurrency was created called bitcoin cash. Right now, bitcoin cash is actually worth quite a bit -- on paper at least. So

How do things work? To find out, we observe them and we take them apart. But not everything is easily observed, and until recently some things couldn't be taken apart.

A newly famous transaction type we need to understand is called the “Initial Coin Offering.” An ICO is akin to an IPO, but in temporal reverse (sort of). Although confusing, it has recently acquir

Whenever you watch a video, post a picture, or send a message, those bytes are analyzed and tallied by your internet provider. But what if some of those data-heavy services just didn't count towards t

After more than a decade of being in the popular tech lexicon, people kind of get the idea of "the cloud," but most probably only understand a bit of it. That's because the cloud isn't a single concre

Long ago, people believed that the eye emitted invisible rays that struck the world outside, causing it to become visible to the beholder. That's not the case, of course, but that doesn't mean it woul

Everyone, even our new president, seems to be talking about “fake news” — just look at how Google searches have spiked over the past few months. But what does fake news actually mean? On one

For the authorities, encryption is a calamity. Where once they could pry open drawers to find incriminating letters, or force a company to reveal private records, now everything depends on the owner's

But if you don’t work in venture capital or finance, you might not know what all this means. So, we’ll break it down for you. Why are startups getting the money? Investors are giving the star

You may have experienced a chill as the words fell upon your ears, too. There’s a non-medical reason for this: liquidation preferences are created to ensure that investors get paid before anyo

At 10pm on June 23, 2016, the polls closed in the UK on a referendum on EU membership and the counting began. The next morning Europeans woke to the news that the British public had voted to leave the

If you've watched or been to a professional sports game in the past year you've no doubt seen advertisements for daily fantasy sports companies like DraftKings and FanDuel. In just a few years the ind

Cogito, ergo sum. We've all heard that famous assertion, foundation for a modern philosophy of self, consciousness, and individualism. But Descartes had it easy: for him, thought was self-evident —

Someone across the room throws you a ball and you catch it. Simple, right? Actually, this is one of the most complex processes we've ever attempted to comprehend - let alone recreate. Inventing a mach

Say you've inherited a rare genetic mutation that guarantees you'll get a certain form of cancer by the time you reach 50 years of age. And that this is most likely how you are going to die. But what

Maybe you heard your LinkedIn, Tumblr or Dropbox password was floating around there. Or maybe you read a news story about that guy who got busted for running Silk Road, that site that sold drugs and o

It’s no coincidence that Alan Turing, one of the most influential computer scientists of all time, started his 1950 treatise on computing with the question “Can machines think?”

You can’t go to a developer conference today and not hear about software containers: Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos and a bunch of other names with a nautical ring to them.[/tc_dropcap] Microsoft, Go