Tuesday, 14 March 2017
Do You Want to Go to Space? Here's Your Chance
Only a couple hundred people have ever been to space. Now you have a chance to follow them.
Motherboard is partnering with Sony Pictures—the studio behind the upcoming alien movie LIFE—and XCOR, a private aerospace company, to offer one reader a seat aboard a future XCOR launch.
XCOR is developing a reusable spacecraft known as the Lynx, which the company says will be able to take a passenger up to 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth, an area known as the Karman Line, the internationally-recognized boundary where Earth's atmosphere "ends" and outer space begins. It should be quite the view.
If that sounds appealing to you—and, let's be honest, if you're reading Motherboard on the reg, it probably does—you can enter our contest to win the ticket to space. The rules are pretty simple: you have to be at least 21 years old and a resident of one of the following countries: US, Canada (excluding Quebec), France, United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Australia and Spain. Imagine aliens have made first contact with Earth, and write up the best news headline you can think of for this momentous event. Try to think of a headline that we would publish on a Motherboard article. Be creative! It's fun but harder than it looks.
Enter the contest and read the full terms and conditions here.
Sony is also sponsoring Motherboard's new series EXO, a collection of articles and video documentaries about how humanity is searching for life in the universe, and how we will handle it, if and when we find it.
Check out our full EXO series.
from Do You Want to Go to Space? Here's Your Chance
Monday, 13 March 2017
An Ecologist Became a Drone Engineer to Save Our Food Supply
There's a huge industry built around providing advanced technology to farmers. But one new tool in particular is rapidly proving its usefulness alongside the more traditional tractors, trailers, and fertilizing machines: the drone.
Greg Crutsinger understands this better than most. A field ecologist turned scientific program director specializing in drone agriculture, Crutsinger is putting sensors and cameras on consumer drones, enabling them to monitor crops with high precision and at low cost.
Crutsinger's efforts allow farmers to rapidly and repeatedly monitor the health of their plants from the sky, showing them which areas of land might need more water or fertilizer. He works directly with struggling farmers as they prepare for a world where extreme weather is predicted to increase due to climate change.
"The world is facing unprecedented challenges when it comes to the future of food," Crustinger told Motherboard. "We need to use every tool at hand to create a solution for farms." Watch him in action above.
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from An Ecologist Became a Drone Engineer to Save Our Food Supply
Thursday, 9 March 2017
Is This Seal Slapping Heavy Metal Beats on Its Belly GOOD or BAD?
A video of a harbor seal slapping its fat belly to the beat of a face-melting heavy metal riff has divided the Motherboard staff. Is this heavy metal remix of an otherwise innocuous video Good or Bad?
The original video, uploaded in December, is brief and simple: A harbor seal slaps its blubber super-fast, looking extremely pleased with himself. The video slows to show his chubbiness ripple with every smack, as serene and timeless as the ocean tide.
Per a cardinal-rule of 21st century internet culture, any video with a cute animal and a noise resembling a beat must be remixed into music. But must we continue down this path, or does the madness stop here? Writer and professional internet talker Jason Koebler and phone licker Samantha Cole present their cases.
Jason Koebler: 'Seal Metal' is BAD
Look at this poor seal. Decontextualized from its natural habitat, its moderately entertaining belly pats turned into milquetoast content by some dude named Vladimir with a YouTube channel and a PayPal account. Unwittingly linked in gchats and Slack rooms by bored office workers 'round the world, clicked on by teens, shared by your well-meaning aunt.
Viral animal videos are the lowest common denominator of internet content, but it has become a mark of sociopathy deign to call them unentertaining, boring, or a waste of time. If that's what I am, so be it. 'Seal Metal' is basic. Safe. I do not blame the seal. I blame the decidedly bland wholesome internet movement. I blame professional computer farmer Emanuel Maiberg for sending it to me. Do not show me an animal video unless it is viciously killing something.
Samantha Cole: 'Seal Metal' is GOOD
I've seen a lot of viral animal videos. If the plight of the ocean sunfish and the glory of the spliff slug have taught me anything, it's that the creatures who end up on the receiving end of our clicks always hold a deeper story. In this case, harbor seals use a variety of slaps to display aggression, including a body slam move and the belly slaps we see here for courtship and communication. Their blubbery girth hitting the sand actually produces seismic waves that scientists can study. That's goddamn metal if you ask me.
Jason's take is, as usual, incorrect and misguided. These videos are one of the few pure forms of entertainment left on the internet. Viral animal video remixes are inspired. Look me in the eyes and tell me you don't start jamming as soon as you hit play —even without the metal backtracking. The baby seal scream at the very end of the video? Transcendent. I applaud the artist. This beat slaps.
Jason Koebler: A Brief Rebuttal
Sam cheated and wrote her take after reading mine, which is against GOOD or BAD rules. I have just one thing to add: Viral animal remixes are only good when being used to make fun of humans, who are almost invariably bad. Goat Taylor Swift is the only good viral animal remix.
from Is This Seal Slapping Heavy Metal Beats on Its Belly GOOD or BAD?
Tuesday, 7 March 2017
Thursday, 2 March 2017
Friday, 24 February 2017
Friday, 30 December 2016
Motherboard's Best Documentaries of 2016
At various points this year, I'd walk into the VICE office and see a member of Motherboard's video team gathering things--team members, camera equipment, paperwork. They were inevitably rushing to catch a plane or rent a car that would take them somewhere we aren't usually supposed to be, whether it's a printing press down the street in Queens or a seed vault buried under 400 feet ice in the Arctic Circle.
Every year I'm in awe of our team: Producers Xavier Aaronson and Lara Heinz, researcher Erik Franco, and a carousel of various VICE camera operators, editors, production assistants, and a whole host of other supporting players along the way who make even the simplest videos possible. Someone should make a video about watching a story go from from seed of an idea to the chaotic organize-and-shoot phase, to the intricate business of cutting a video. Even though I've watched it happen dozens of times, it still feels like a minor miracle that my colleagues are able to consistently churn out documentaries worth watching. Here's some of our favorites from this year. - Jason Koebler
The Global Seed Vault
I first heard about the Global Seed Vault—a sort of Noah's Ark of seeds buried beneath 400 feet of Arctic ice—a few years ago. I found the idea of building a backup plan for food shortages, mass extinction events, and agricultural catastrophes to be intensely interesting, but I had no frame of reference for actually imagining what such a place would look like. What Xavier Aaronson found behind an iced-over door in Svalbard, Norway is Earth's ultimate prepper shelter.
Cyborg Beetles
Once or twice a year, my colleagues make a video that reminds me that the FUTURE IS NUTS, and, oh yeah, it's happening today. Cyborg Beetles can be summarized with this completely normal sentence: Aerospace engineers in Singapore control real, live beetles with a Wii controller.
Bionic Arm
The "cool prosthetic" genre of video is one science news viewers have likely come across—university researchers love to issue them as press releases, which often get embedded in news stories. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, but those videos rarely show the psychological ramifications of becoming a bionic person, and a patient's struggle with adapting to and using prosthetic technology. This episode of Humans+ is cool because it's futuristic, but Melissa Loomis's tribulations and triumphs make it a must watch.
Surrounded: Island of the Sharks
We once again sent Xavier to a far-flung, exotic locale to make a movie, and once again he came back with one of our best pieces of the year. "Surrounded" explores a surprising rise in shark attacks off the coast of Reunion, a small French territory in the Indian Ocean, through the islanders' relationship with the ocean and the animals.
The Machinists
The Machinists was our first episode of "State of Repair," a series I had been wanting to make for quite some time. After profiling the guys over at iFixit, I realized that all our fancy new technology get tons of attention when it launches, but we rarely think about who keeps things running in the interim, or what happens to our stuff when it eventually dies. I couldn't have asked for a better pilot than "The Machinists"—three old school New Yorkers who got along great, all access to an intensely visual and impressive printing plant, a camera crew who could take advantage of it, and a good story about the people who are keeping print alive.
Greatest Moments in Hacking History
Motherboard's staff wanted to take explore new video formats with our Pilot Week, in which we launched five new shortform shows that were unlike anything we'd done before. It was a fun experiment, but the new formats didn't go over too well with our viewers—maybe we were having too much fun. The clear standout of these episodes, though, was one that was most similar to our documentaries in format, if not in visual style. Greatest Moments in Hacking History takes a sitdown interview with Samy Kamkar and turns it into a quirky animated piece about the time he hacked MySpace.
The Church of Perpetual Life
Transhumanism is one of Motherboard's favorite topics, but because the movement is still in its infancy and much of its science is in the early stages, it had been hard to translate subject matter that makes great written articles into great videos. Then, we found the Church of Perpetual Life, a transhumanist temple in Hollywood, Florida, where parishioners believe they won't ever have to die. I like this piece because transhumanism is inherently about people, and so it was important that we finally got to pick some brains before they one day get cryonically frozen.
I did at least a handful of pieces this year that I consider to be good journalism, but at VICE's holiday party this year, I was repeatedly approached by people I had never met, who inevitably asked me about the golden toilet. What could have been a disaster in a number of possible ways—penis flashing on live video among them—somehow turned out as close to perfect as I could have hoped: Line waiters' musings on the nature of luxury and on Trump; a Dutch man who was all too happy to tell us, in excruciating detail, that he had just shit in a golden toilet; and a correspondent (that's me) who had more than a little stage fright when it finally came time to piss in a toilet worth millions of dollars.
from Motherboard's Best Documentaries of 2016