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Tech News
Kevin Roose has departed The New York Times and his podcast Hard Fork to co-found a new tech podcast, Machine Gods, alongside Casey Newton. The launch coincides with Roose's new book, The AGI Chronicles, which examines the companies racing to build artificial general intelligence. In a Decoder interview, Roose discussed the transition to independent media and his reporting on AI's biggest players.
Michael Newton, an avionics engineer in Calgary, leads the open-source Recreate Apollo project, which uses a Raspberry Pi running the Virtual AGC emulator to power a full-scale 3D-printed DSKY display and keyboard replica. The build runs actual Apollo 13 Command Module software, recreating the interface astronauts used for navigation, autopilot manoeuvres and Earth entry.
In The Verge's Installer newsletter, editor David Pierce highlights Kevin Roose's new book 'The AGI Chronicles' and previews 'Machine Gods,' a forthcoming podcast from Roose and Casey Newton expected to debut next week. The piece also features a look at Roose's phone homescreen and app choices.
A new piece traces how Copernicus's heliocentric model, despite its own flaws, replaced a patchwork geocentric system by offering a simpler explanation for planetary retrograde motion. The author uses this history as a lens to explore why the universe expands, suggesting that today's cosmological models may face a similar shift once a deeper underlying framework is found. The discussion draws parallels between Copernicus's incomplete but directionally correct theory and the current search for a fuller explanation of cosmic expansion.
A discussion thread examines how medieval mathematicians like Scipione del Ferro hid discoveries such as cubic-equation solutions to protect their livelihoods, using secrecy as leverage in public problem-solving contests. The post traces this culture of concealment through the Newton–Leibniz calculus dispute, contrasting it with today's norm of open publication despite paywalls and peer-review issues.
Historians Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold examine how Isaac Newton, unlike most scientists who follow a decade-long 'ten-year rule' before major breakthroughs, made foundational discoveries in mathematics, optics and gravity within a single stretch of isolation during the Great Plague of 1665-66. Their new book, 'The Winding Trail to Newton's Principia Mathematica,' details the complex evolution of Newton's 1687 masterwork, which introduced his laws of motion and universal gravitation.
A WIRED science feature uses the classic double-slit experiment—first demonstrated with light by Thomas Young in 1801 and later with subatomic particles by Claus Jönsson in 1961—to explain why quantum mechanics defies human intuition. The piece argues that while physicists can mathematically predict quantum outcomes with great precision, the underlying behavior, such as particles acting simultaneously like waves and discrete objects, cannot be visualized in everyday terms.