If you could simulate any moment in history, what time period would you choose?
Time travel is still science fiction, but our powers of digital simulation are increasing every single day. Instead of waiting for a time machine, a team of researchers have created a gorgeous simulation of ancient Rome.
You can explore the ancient site with this gorgeous video from the Khan Academy, getting a guided tour from a history professor.
The great science fiction and fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett has died.
To remember his inspiring career, I built a free Spotify playlist collecting the great novelist’s favorite music. The list opens with the work of Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf, two artists that Pratchett listened to for writing inspiration.
Follow this link to listen to the playlist. Add any of your favorite music from Pratchett books in the comments section…
How will drones change the way crime works?
Future Crimes author Marc Goodman and Science Friday created the “Crime Headlines from 2025” hashtag this week, generating a stream of hypothetical ways to break the law.
We have always obsessed about the future of drone technology, so we collected all the examples of drone crime and punishment in a single Storify post.
What if you could tell stories with more than one ending?
Over at the Wise Sloth blog, you can download free Microsoft Word templates to create a choose your own adventure-style interactive book.
You can build your own free-form science fiction, fantasy and adventure stories, letting readers play inside your story.
How will driverless cars change the way we move and interact on our city streets?
At the University of Michigan, the new Michigan Mobility Transformation Facility actually gives researchers a glimpse of our cities of the future.
How can you make something beautiful in a world where it seems like everything has already been done?
Writer John Koenig created the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of invented words created to summarize complex feelings. “Vemödalen” is one of the most powerful words he created, summarizing the problems facing creators in a world crowded with digital materials.
He described this feeling: “the frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.”
What was your favorite Choose Your Own Adventure story?
Choose Your Own Adventure author and publisher R. A. Montgomery has died, leaving happy reading memories for readers around the world.
The beloved series from the 1980s helped millions of kids explore science fiction, fantasy and adventure stories.
What if you measured your lifetime against the slow drip of water inside a cave?
In Mark Twain’s great novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an evil character gets locked inside a cave without food or water. In a long passage, Twain pondered the nature of time–showing how truly small any human life is when measured against cosmic time frames.
What would a spacecraft look like that could travel through both time and space?
‘Contact In The Desert’ was a four-day conference in Joshua Tree last summer.
It brought together experts from around the world to explore “ancient astronauts, extra-terrestrials, human origins, crop circles, UFO sightings, contact experiences and the need to know.”
How would our sky appear if we could see one million stars glowing every night?
An international team of astronomers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to explore “a monster black hole lurking inside one of the tiniest galaxies ever known.”
The ominous mass throbs inside the M60-UCD1 dwarf galaxy, a corner of the universe that “crams 140 million stars within a diameter of about 300 light-years”–a bare fraction of the size of our own galaxy.