In this issue

The Outer Limits of War - A new arms race is threatening to explode—500 miles above our heads.

Do Androids Dream of Cooking Beef? - One man’s mission to create a robot that cooks perfect cheeseburgers.

Atomic Unit The Delicate Art Of Emoji

BACK IN 1999, when the mobile internet first flickered to life on Japan’s i-mode, email was confined to a snug 250 characters. Email! So when designer Shigetaka Kurita centered pixels on his potter’s wheel and spun them into sunshine and rain , he was both supplying a jolt of atmospherics to the early smog-screened smartphone and frugally conserving space.Kurita’s horizontal rain and naval-ensign sun were among the first 176 emoji. These symbols, of course, put meat on the bones of emoticons, the digital typographical form born in the 1970s on Plato, a computer-based teaching system. Plato emoticons had to be styled by hand, with meticulous backspacing, like screen-based needlepoint. But they were also much more sophisticated than later ASCII and could be quite beautiful when encountered in the bleak midwinter of Arpanet-era networks.

4 mins

Mission: How Possible?

IT’S BEEN 22 YEARS since Tom Cruise infiltrated a CIA vault suspended from a wire in the first Mission: Impossible flick. This sum mer, Cruise reprises his role as secret agent Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible–Fallout, the sixth installment in the $2.8 billion–grossing series. Aside from its earworm theme song and stomach-clenching (and reportedly bone-crushing) stunts, the franchise is perhaps best known for its futuristic gadgets, often harbingers of tech to come. Our mission: consulting computer scientists, planetary physicists, engineers, and biohackers to find out what’s actually achievable and what’s still, you know, impossible. 

2 mins

Tech's Shield Ken ZZ03 Is Still Trolling Us

THERE ONCE WAS A LEGENDARY TROLL, and from its hideout beneath an overpass of the information superhighway, it prodded into existence the internet we know, love, and increasingly loathe.

3 mins

Clive Thompson Bring Back Geeks! Government Needs Techsupport

CONGRESS IS FINALLY TURNING its attention to Silicon Valley. And it’s not hard to understand why: Technology impinges upon every part of our civic sphere.

3 mins

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