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Featured articles from Futurism highlighting today's trending content.
Is Your Phone Working?
Scroll No More challenge: The Prompt - Imagine that every smartphone in the world suddenly stops working. Write about what happens next. One minute, everyone is texting, scrolling, swiping, posting, ordering, navigating, and checking the time. The next, every smartphone in the world is useless. Now what? For this challenge, imagine what happens when the thing billions of people reach for all day suddenly stops working. Maybe your story follows the first few chaotic hours. Maybe it's about someone trying to get home without directions, a relationship forced offline, a city figuring out how to function, or a world that's had months to adjust. You can go big or keep it small. Make it funny, hopeful, chaotic, dystopian, or surprisingly ordinary. Just follow the ripple effects and show us what people do when scrolling is no longer an option.
By Denise E Lindquist5 days ago in Futurism
Francis Halzen: The Man Who Turned Ice into a Telescope
Introduction Some scientific discoveries begin with a particle that nobody can see, while others begin with an instrument that nobody has yet built. Francis Halzen’s achievement connects those two challenges, turning an extraordinary idea about Antarctic ice into a new way of exploring the universe.
By Alan Spencer16 days ago in Futurism
Nicușor Dan: The Mathematician Who Took on a Country
Introduction Many politicians arrive in public life through law, business or a lifelong attachment to a political party. Nicușor Dan followed a less familiar route, beginning with exceptional mathematical ability and eventually becoming President of Romania.
By Alan Spencer16 days ago in Futurism
Walter Pitts: The Young Man Who Imagined a Thinking Network
Introduction Today, artificial intelligence can recognise speech, identify objects in photographs and produce convincing passages of writing. The machinery behind these achievements is enormously complex, but one of its early ideas was surprisingly simple. What if a brain could be studied as a network of small units, each responding to signals from other units?
By Alan Spencerabout a month ago in Futurism
Yunqing Tang and the Mystery of Numbers That Would Not Settle Down
Introduction Most of us stop thinking about fractions once we leave school. We remember that the number beneath the line is called the denominator, and we hope never to meet a particularly complicated one again. For mathematician Yunqing Tang, denominators became part of a much deeper question: could the fractions appearing in a certain kind of mathematical pattern remain under control, or would they inevitably grow more complicated?
By Alan Spencerabout a month ago in Futurism
Does a Photon Know Which Slit We Are Watching?
Introduction Richard Feynman offered a remarkable way to think about how light travels. To work out where a photon might be detected, his method considers every possible route between its source and its destination. The routes contribute to a calculation, and their contributions can reinforce or cancel one another.
By Alan Spencerabout a month ago in Futurism
Challenger: The Small Seal That Exposed a Much Bigger Failure
Introduction On 28th January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger rose from its launch pad in Florida. Seventy-three seconds later, the vehicle broke apart, and all seven people aboard lost their lives. Among them was Christa McAuliffe, a teacher whose planned lessons from space had brought particular attention to the flight.
By Alan Spencerabout a month ago in Futurism
The Conjecture That Fooled Mathematicians for a Century
Introduction Mathematics contains many conjectures that appear correct because they work for every number anyone has tested. However, an infinite sequence can behave perfectly for an extraordinarily long time before producing an unexpected result.
By Alan Spencerabout a month ago in Futurism
The old man with the map was having a great day
The silence came at 2:14 on a Tuesday. I was standing in line at the coffee shop on 4th Street, waiting for a cold brew, watching the guy in front of me tap his phone screen over and over. Behind the counter, the barista was holding an iPad, tapping the glass with a sharp clack-clack-clack.
By Annam M Gordonabout a month ago in Futurism
