—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 expertise” to reorganize the US Company for Worldwide Growth, and Elon Musk’s DOGE has already unleashed an inside chatbot to automate company duties—with greater plans on the horizon to take over for laid-off workers.
The chief order that created DOGE within the first place claims the company intends to “modernize Federal expertise and software program.” However jamming hyped-up tech into authorities workflows isn’t a system for effectivity. Profitable, protected civic tech requires a human-centered method that understands and respects the wants of residents.
Sadly, this administration laid off all of the federal employees with the know-how for that. And if this administration doesn’t change its method quickly, Americans are going to undergo excess of they most likely notice. Learn the total story.
Meet the researchers testing the “Armageddon” method to asteroid protection
Sooner or later, 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 is going to land in the course 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 trendy instances will unfold. Houses dozens of miles away will fold like cardboard. Thousands and thousands of individuals may die.
Luckily for all 8 billion of us, planetary protection—the science of stopping asteroid impacts—is a extremely energetic discipline of analysis. We already know that at the very least one methodology works: ramming the rock with an uncrewed spacecraft to push it away from Earth.
However there are circumstances wherein giving an asteroid a bodily shove won’t be sufficient to guard the planet. If that’s the case, we may need one other methodology, one that’s notoriously tough to check in actual life: a nuclear explosion. Learn the total 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!