According to Twin Galaxies, the official high score for the arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man belongs to Abdner Ashman, with 933,580 points. Or at least it did, before an artificial intelligence developed by Microsoft achieved the maximum possible score for the game, 999,990.
The oldest human to have ever lived died at the age of 122—and that was nearly 20 years ago. A recent analysis of global demographic data suggests this may very well be the maximum age attainable by humans, and that it’s extremely unlikely anyone will ever live much beyond this advanced age. That is, unless we science…
In a vat of liquid nitrogen on storage platform 17, the youngest person ever to be put into cryogenic storage has been waiting for the future for one year and eight months.
Recently, a group of forward-looking thinkers compiled a list of catastrophes that could kill off 10 percent or more of the human population within five years. This Gizmodo video explains how it could actually happen.
You often hear people say things like, “no science fiction writer could have predicted the Internet,” when they’re talking about science fiction’s lack of predictive power. But actually, writer Murray Leinster did get a lot right about the Internet, in the 1946 story “A Logic Named Joe.”
It’s all well and good to make fun of Donald Trump’s presidential run, but it turns out that you can put his words in the mouths of the classiest fictional dictators, and it really works.
While some companies try to cash in with virtual reality porn, others are thinking about saving your soul. Most churches haven't set up outposts in virtual worlds, but some future-focused Christian leaders are already imagining how tech like the Oculus Rift could change what it means to be part of a congregation.
We puny humans can be depressingly fragile and flawed, a realization that's all the more discouraging when we consider the incredible potential for robots. Here are 12 reasons why machines will always have the edge over us meatbags.
In the daily hubbub of current “crises” facing humanity, we forget about the many generations we hope are yet to come. Not those who will live 200 years from now, but 1,000 or 10,000 years from now.
My newest science fiction novel, Lockstep, was recently serialized in Analog magazine. Reactions have been pretty favourable — except that I've managed to offend a small but vocal group of readers. They're outraged that I've written an SF story in which faster than light travel is impossible.
The economy may be mired in an existential crisis, but there's one place where the money is flowing: into those fun apps on your phone. As I discovered at a "casual mobile entertainment sector" conference last month, Portland isn’t the only place where the dream of the 90s lives on.
What kind of military would you need to wage a war in space? You've got your Napoleonic space navies, which can lay waste to one another in empty sections of space. You've got space marines, who are armored up and ready to kill anything that moves. And finally, you've got the fighter jocks, who run interference and…
Not just as a vague concept, either. The famed science fiction author absolutely nails it, from the bank statements to the hardware to the social changes to the possibilities for communication.
In this excerpt from his book The Erotic Engine, Patchen Barss talks about one part of the future of pornography and sex on the internet: video games.
You thought laptop glare was murder on your eyes? Try sending a fleet of wheeled robots down into the horrors of battle using nothing but your icy stare.
A segment on British TV shows Microsoft's vision for the home of the future. That vision of a Microsoft Home, as demonstrated by a Microsoft official for England's Channel 4, included an image of a TV displaying an icon for Halo 5.
We recently rounded up the most nightmare-inducing creations of speculative zoologist Dougal Dixon. Here's another one of Dixon's futuristic Homo sapiens. This being is more or less a psychic raspberry strudel.
