Soon after Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil, 70 feet down, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 27, 1859, he had a problem. He had nowhere to store the dark green liquid, and no good…

During World War II, a radar operator tracks an airplane over Hamburg, guiding searchlights and anti-aircraft guns in relation to a phosphor dot whose position is updated with each…

In 2014, Google fired a shot heard all the way to Detroit. Google’s newest driverless car prototype had no steering wheel and no brakes. The message was clear: Cars of the future…

On most days, we do not wake up anticipating that we may be suddenly thrust into the sky while popcorn shrimp rains down like confetti, as some guy roars from above: “Hey, there,…

Richard K. Miller has been on a long intellectual journey. His ambitions started out modest enough: Growing up in the small farming community of Tranquillity, California, he thought…

It might seem that we have explored every kind of sport by this point in history. But people get tired of playing the same old games, so they make new ones. Baseball, football, hockey,…

Long ago I lived in Santa Cruz, California. Almost every morning I would throw on a wet suit, grab my surfboard out of the garage, and head to the rocky cliffs just a few blocks from…

Ken Perlin doesn’t hesitate to say that he’s more than just a scientist. Along with being a professor of computer science at New York University and directing the NYU Games For…

The infrastructure behind NASA’s shuttle program was unimaginably vast. At $1 billion each, the launches were so audacious that they seemed to risk collapsing under the weight of…

I am standing a few feet away from a conference table, about to test something called a “Holojam.” It is made of head-mounted displays, motion capture cameras and many lines of…