Food Bank News • May 19, 2023

Boosting Farmworker Wages to Cut the Food Line

It’s widely acknowledged in the hunger relief community that the people who grow the nation’s food also tend to be among the most food-insecure.

Popular Mechanics • February 22, 2023

There Are 389 Ways a Train Can Derail—Here’s What May Have Happened in East Palestine, Ohio

Popular Mechanics • February 15, 2023

Prison Islands Are Desolate, Lonely Places—And Their History Is Just as Bleak

What happens when an island is taken over, turned into a prison or penal colony, and later left deserted?

Popular Mechanics • January 31, 2023

Physicists Are Pretty Damn Sure We Can Travel Faster Than the Speed of Light, Research Shows

A faster-than-light “observer” would take general relativity to new quantum places.

Popular Mechanics • January 9, 2023

Reports Claim Humans Can Spontaneously Combust. Here’s What the Science Says

The culprit is wet hay, which is counterintuitive if you don’t know much about the underlying science; turns out, there are many ways for materials like hay to spontaneously combust.

Popular Mechanics • December 16, 2022

The Extraordinary Reason Why Crabs Are Taking Over the Animal Kingdom

In a new piece for The Conversation, evolutionary paleobiologist Matthew Wills revisits the internet’s favorite idea: carcinization.

Popular Mechanics • November 22, 2022

Together, We Can Avoid the ‘Great Filter’ That Ends Advanced Civilizations

• The “Great Filter” is a hypothetical disaster event that stops growing civilizations from reaching the stars and contacting other advanced civilizations. • A NASA scientist writes about the biggest risks to humanity—like climate change, pandemics, and artificial intelligence—in a new paper. • These are serious, frightening possibilities—but we can work together to prevent many of them. In , a scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) brings together an eclectic team of researcher

Unwinnable • October 27, 2022

Papers, Apples, Microphones, Chairs: Immortality’s Spatial Miscellany | Unwinnable

My favorite author, China Miéville, calls himself a “weird fiction” writer – a callback to the time before genre labels emerged, when anything “other” was simply weird. In games, there’s something even more satisfying about thinking about the idea of weirdness. Games can induce you to feel weird so viscerally. And this is where Sam Barlow’s game Immortality, which came out August 30 on Steam and Xbox GamePass, enters the discussion. In the game, you scrub forward and backward through footage, r

Unwinnable • October 22, 2022

Sponsored: Mind the Gap

This series of MegaGrant spotlights is made possible through the generous sponsorship of Epic Games.

Unwinnable • September 28, 2022

There Swings a Skull Completes the Bigger Picture with Grim Tidings

This column has superficial spoilers for There Swings a Skull: Grim Tidings. The game contains “immolation, smoking, hanging, drowning, spiders, apocalyptic themes, and harsh language.”

Unwinnable • September 21, 2022

Paradise Killer is On a Heavenly Trip

This is the fifth and final installment in my kickoff Paradise Killer series. So far, we’ve explored the game’s design and genre, use of space, nonlinear open world, and passage of time.

Unwinnable • September 8, 2022

Paradise Killer’s Biggest Secrets are Straight Up

Unwinnable • August 18, 2022

Roam Paradise Killer If You Want To

Even the hugest games can never be infinite, and everything in them is always constructed. But how do we create something that acts and “feels” as large as possible? On a reasonable budget? And how do we make it feel good? Talking with Oli Clarke Smith about open worlds.

Unwinnable • August 11, 2022

Reaching for Truth in Paradise Killer

In this column, I hope to explore the ways games play with space. Paradise Killer is a murder mystery set in a lore-stuffed open world adventure. To help me pull apart the world of Paradise Killer, I talked with the game’s creative director (and Kaizen Game Works cofounder) Oli Clarke Smith.

Popular Mechanics • August 5, 2022

Find Out How the Changing Hats Code in the Among Us Game Works

In the hit game Among Us, a group of players are dropped into a spaceship and given small tasks to do like maintenance and engine repair. But for one player, the “small task” is to kill all the others. We talked with Shahrin Khan from Innersloth, the makers of Among Us. She shared a piece of code from the game that will help us tell the story.

Popular Mechanics • July 20, 2022

Are UFOs Just Future Humans Watching Us?

Last month, a British astronaut when he referred to someone’s theory that unidentified flying objects (UFOs) in our skies may be future humans looking back at us. A quantum physicist tells us how that might be possible . . . Or not.

Popular Mechanics • July 13, 2022

Aliens Could Send Us Quantum Messages From Space, Physicists Say

Alien civilizations could potentially send quantum messages across a vast distance through space—something we might eventually be able to do, too, according to new research from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. A quantum physicist tells us what that means.

Popular Mechanics • June 27, 2022

Why People Keep Dying Trying This ‘Fractal Wood Burning’ DIY

In an alarming video, food scientist Ann Reardon discusses a dangerous craft hack called “fractal wood burning,” which creates striking designs in a slab of wood that look a bit like lightning strikes. An electrical engineer tells us exactly why it's so deadly.

Medium • June 16, 2022

Sexy, flexible swashbuckling with Jemma Topaz

"The amazing thing about games is that even choices that are ‘meaningless’ actually aren’t. Even if points A and B are the same, it actually makes a difference if you take 5 minutes or 50 minutes between them, 3 steps or 30, 7 words or 700. Or just choosing the right pronouns; it’s not a ‘game’ decision at all, usually, but it is definitely meaningful."

Medium • June 16, 2022

The charming, lived-in collage of Kate Bagenzo’s tarot game

"I am very bad at drawing, so I settled for a collage-style early on. I use public domain photographs and illustrations and vector art from wherever I can find it. My biggest inspirations are those clipart illustrations you see in social studies or math textbooks. Maybe it’s a form of nostalgia?"