—Steven Renderos is the chief director of Media Justice
Tech buzzwords are clanging by way of the halls of Washington, DC. The Trump administration has promised to “leverage blockchain know-how” to reorganize the US Company for Worldwide Improvement, and Elon Musk’s DOGE has already unleashed an inside chatbot to automate company duties—with larger plans on the horizon to take over for laid-off staff.
The chief order that created DOGE within the first place claims the company intends to “modernize Federal know-how and software program.” However jamming hyped-up tech into authorities workflows isn’t a formulation for effectivity. Profitable, secure civic tech requires a human-centered strategy that understands and respects the wants of residents.
Sadly, this administration laid off all of the federal staff with the know-how for that. And if this administration doesn’t change its strategy quickly, Americans are going to undergo excess of they most likely understand. Learn the complete story.
Meet the researchers testing the “Armageddon” strategy to asteroid protection
In the future, within the close to or far future, an asteroid concerning the size of a soccer stadium will discover itself on a collision course with Earth. If we’re fortunate, it’ll land in the midst of the huge ocean, making a good-size however innocuous tsunami, or in an uninhabited patch of desert. But when it has a metropolis in its crosshairs, one of many worst pure disasters in fashionable instances will unfold. Properties dozens of miles away will fold like cardboard. Hundreds of thousands of individuals might die.
Fortuitously for all 8 billion of us, planetary protection—the science of stopping asteroid impacts—is a extremely lively subject of analysis. We already know that a minimum of one technique works: ramming the rock with an uncrewed spacecraft to push it away from Earth.
However there are circumstances by which giving an asteroid a bodily shove won’t be sufficient to guard the planet. If that’s the case, we may need one other technique, one that’s notoriously troublesome to check in actual life: a nuclear explosion. Learn the complete story.
—Robin George Andrews
This story is from the subsequent version of our print journal, which is all about creativity. Subscribe now to learn it and get a replica of the journal when it lands!
