A startup pushes back against cancel culture — One of the weirdest tech success stories today is the conversation app Clubhouse. On the surface, it appears to be a glorified conference call with several people talking while a small audience listens. Sometimes the sound quality is so poor I can’t hear what they are saying. At other times…

The prehistoric wonder was discovered in Siberia after being entombed in ice for tens of thousands of years — At the same time NASA and SpaceX are racing into the future on Mars and beyond, other scientists have been camped out in the frozen Siberian wilderness, painstakingly digging into our past. Their latest discovery is unprecedented. A tuft of coarse reddish hair sticking out of the ice led them…

When you listen to someone’s voice online, are you sure it’s a real person? Because there’s a chance it might be Descript. — Have you seen this Arthur C. Clarke quote about new technology? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It’s what people thought when they heard their first radio or experienced their first elevator. It’s also how I felt the other day when I stumbled across something called Descript.

Critics say the cryptocurrency is an energy glutton that produces too much CO2, but they couldn’t be more wrong — Some people really don’t like Bitcoin. People like the Bloomberg columnist Lionel Laurent. Last week he called it a predatory hoax on desperate people. Worse, he sniffed, this speculative gold rush is consuming more energy than entire countries. He’s right about the second part. The computerized calculations that are used…

Google and Facebook have never been more powerful, but thanks to new competitors it’s never been easier to leave. — We made a deal with Big Tech. They are allowed to vacuum up our personal data and become billionaires, and in return we get cool things to do on the Internet. It has been a great deal for them. Google alone has raked in $1 trillion since 2000, while Mark…

A decade after hearing about crypto I decided to jump in — The first time I came face-to-face with Bitcoin was a humid Friday night in Singapore. We were on a pub crawl along a stretch of river that slides past the skyscrapers in the financial district before emptying into Marina Bay. …

Singapore becomes the first country to approve lab-grown meat — After years of discussions with Singapore regulators, the US company Eat Just has been given the green light to sell its lab-grown chicken in restaurants and stores. This is the first time cultured meat has been cleared for sale to customers anywhere in the world, and could mark the start…

Dominos and F45 are, and it’s not because they’re providing better pizza or fitness — The gym is tucked away in a dingy downtown mall known for its all-night bars and prostitutes. Pointed in the right direction by a mall security guard, I walked down a long corridor made sticky by spilled beer. …

A stranger arrives with the truth about our past, and a warning for what lies ahead — The black torus dropped out of hyperspace into the emptiness beyond Saturn and started scanning the solar system. The ultrawave flickered over the gas giants and their icy moons before moving quickly inward to the rock worlds and finally to the water planet, where it paused. Back on the torus…