Qantas Dreamliner aircraft commercial jet

Researchers from the University of Sydney and Australian national airline Qantas—which, given its home base, flies plenty of long-haul flights—recently undertook Project Sunrise, an extensive in-air research project that aims to lessen the suffering of the long-distance traveller.

Ask the rocket man: it’s lonely out in space. Turns out it’s more than a little unhealthy too. It’s not just the difficulty of finding a pharmacy on the International Space Station or a doctor’s office on the moon. Astronauts have to contend with the absence of gravity, the threat of gamma rays, the lack of physical activity, and the mental strain of months away from solid ground. All of it combines to make being a deep space explorer one of the most hazardous jobs on Earth. Or off it.

For the record, the sentence you are currently reading was not written by ChatGPT. Nor was anything in the magazine you’re holding. But that newspaper over there, that recipe you downloaded for last night’s dinner, the blurb on the toothpaste package, the radio ad you listened to on the drive home, that essay your neighbour’s son just handed to his prof—well, who knows?

You can see the appeal of the idea: instead of immediately cutting our use of oil, coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuels, we wean ourselves off gradually, stashing their planet-warming CO2 emissions underground until we figure out how to kick our addiction.

Warming temperatures, ongoing drought, and urban sprawl are forcing the world to confront one of the oldest technologies: fire. In the modern era, instead of trying to understand wildfire, studying our vulnerabilities to it, and changing our behaviour, we have kept doing the same things, assuming water and fire retardant will solve the problem.

If you’ve been to the beach lately—or gazed at the roadside, walked through a typical downtown, or been pretty much anywhere on the planet—you’ve no doubt noticed the world has a bit of a plastic problem: there’s too much of it. So much so that scientists estimate the mass of all plastic ever produced now surpasses that of all creatures on the planet.

From the so-called Great Firewall of China to service providers throttling download speeds to Russia’s recent attempt to permanently log itself out of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, the free, open, and globally accessible World Wide Web isn’t exactly living up to its name.

Recently, a bunch of would-be digital land barons have planted their flags on a variety of online spaces, staking ownership to properties in the so-called metaverse before the rest of us are even sure what the word means.

If you want to know someone, ask them about their politics. But if your goal is to understand someone—how they think, what they value, how they view the task of moving through this life—ask them what’s in their liquor cabinet.

News flash: all those people ripping through the pages of the Harry Potter novels, the Divergent series, and the Hunger Games trilogy—on their lunch break, on the train home, during that layover at Pearson—not all of them were teenagers.

Making an Emoji NUVO

Since their emergence on Japanese cellphones some 19 years ago, emoji have become a standard feature of conversation in the digital age.

Earlier this year, a group of 21 prominent universities united to form the Public Interest Technology University Network, a group putting forward a collaborative, open-source approach that views high tech through the lens of social, ethical, legal, and public policy implications.

For years, recycling in the Western world has been based on the idea that we can simply stuff our dirty plastic, obsolete electronics, and broken toys into a shipping container, and send it to the other side of the world. Until now.

A look at the worlds most common passwords—ranging from sequential numbers to the word ‘password’ itself—bring to light a new age of digital apathy, where our most personal information is thinly blocked by our most lacklustre passwords.

Bitcoin, Inquiring Minds, Spring 2018

Developed in 2009 as an unregulated, decentralized payment system that bypasses banks and other middlemen, bitcoin has become perhaps the definitive example of financial speculation.

Men (Not) At Work, IM, Autumn 2017

Robots are expanding past their home on the factory floor and starting to threaten human employment in a variety of professions.

A new app puts professional-level concussion diagnosis in the hands of amateur coaches and officials, parents, or anyone with a smartphone.

Winter 2016, Inquiring Minds, Cybathlon

The Cybathlon is a different sort of competition, in which performance enhancement is not only perfectly acceptable, it’s actively encouraged.

Inquiring Minds, Pipe Dreams, Autumn 2016

A super-speed levitated transportation system that uses magnetic accelerators to transports passengers at a projected top speed of around 1,200 km/h.

NUVO Magazine: Data After Death

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Derek Miller is dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that—because Miller himself told us. His final words, uploaded posthumously by a close friend on May 4, 2011, were both pithy and poignant: “Here it is. I’m dead, and this is the last post to my blog.” He was 41.

NUVO Autumn 2016: Brexit Stage Left, Inquiring Minds

Dramatic. Momentous. Revolutionary. Earth-shattering. Such peacockery has typically been confined to Hollywood puff pieces and high-tech product launches, until now.

NUVO Summer 2016: Airbnb, Last Writes

To co-founder Joe Gebbia, what Airbnb is actually selling is a kind of antidote to a peculiar sense of 20th century alienation.

NUVO Summer 2016: Proof for Gravitational Waves, Inquiring Minds

Did you feel that? That little stretch as your legs pulled away from your body, that little squeeze as your sides squished together for a fraction of a moment?

Spring 2016: Inquiring Minds, Wheels Up

Wheels Up isn’t the only company offering private aviation. But they do business differently, functioning more like a private club than an ownership group.

NUVO Spring 2016: Battle of the Bytes, Inquiring Minds

The script reads like something Spielberg would have cooked up back in the eighties: a nefarious group of black-hooded malcontents arise from the desert, hell-bent on burning Western civilization to the ground.

NUVO Spring 2016: Bang Goes the Buck, Inquiring Minds

China fired first. Maybe it was Brazil. It could have been Mexico. Or perhaps Japan. Whoever pulled the trigger, one thing is certain: the currency war is on. And the one who can debase their money furthest, and fastest, wins.

Daily Edit: Chevrolet Bolt EV

You’re behind the wheel when suddenly the radio starts blaring—strange, because you just shut it off. Then the turn signal turns on. Your pulse picks up; you wonder what the heck is going on—and that’s when the engine cuts out.

Daily Edit: Hacker Hang-Up

When hackers bust into your phone, you could go after the hackers. Or, you could go after the phone—by building a new one. At least, that’s what the mandarins in the People’s Republic have decided to do.

NUVO Winter 2015: Everything Was Awesome, Inquiring Minds

Down in the basement there’s a box. The box is a bit of a contradiction, made of ordinary cardboard, but filled with the most extraordinary things: houses and castles, cars and trucks, monsters and machines both real and fantastic, all crafted from a wonder-filled geometry of multi-coloured bricks.

NUVO winter 2015: Chinese Economy

Let’s be clear about one thing: the explosion was real. Fully 173 people lost their lives; a further eight remain unaccounted for. The blast levelled the commercial heart of the city, damaging 17,000 homes and destroying 3,000 vehicles.

NUVO Autumn 2015: Medicine Gets Personal

Thirteen years, three billion dollars. That’s the size of the investment made to map the human genome in its entirety, give or take a few months and a few million. While scientists completed the effort over a decade ago, we’re only starting to reap the returns.

NUVO Autumn 2015: Inquiring Minds, Greek Tragedy

Odysseus had Scylla and Charybdis; in the present day, Greeks have been forced to choose between austerity and bankruptcy. The devil and the deep blue sea—either way, the chances of coming out in one piece are pretty slim.

NUVO Magazine: Investment Opportunities In The World Of Fine Art

He is an imposing figure, this walking man: fully six feet tall, naked, his stick-thin limbs disproportionately long, his metallic skin clearly showing the rough handiwork of his creator.

NUVO Magazine: The Darknet Side

FROM THE ARCHIVE: Ross William Ulbricht is in jail. And if the FBI has its way, he’ll be there for quite some time. The charges: drug trafficking, money laundering, computer hacking, and ordering a hit on a resident of White Rock, B.C., who had piqued his ire.

The Auto-Automobile

On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers. At least, there used to be.

NUVO Summer 2015: Oil's Big Collapse

It’s the way you feel after downing one too many Singapore Slings the night before: after years of binging on high oil prices, Canada’s energy sector is experiencing the mother of all hangovers.

NUVO Magazine Spring 2015: Clearing the Air

And now for some good news: the ozone layer might actually be repairing itself.

NUVO Magazine Spring 2015: Inquiring Minds

Let’s all just agree on this one, at least: no one deserves to spend life atop a garbage dump, living hand to mouth by rifling through the refuse and waste of the better-off. Yet many do—120 million, in fact, according to World Housing, a Vancouver-based initiative that’s made it their mission to do something about it.

NUVO Magazine Inquiring Minds: Show Me the Yuan

It was the kind of story that sends the financial press into spasms of ecstasy. Back in November, a smiling Mr. Harper stepped in front of the cameras at the Great Hall of the People and announced that Canada secured the rights to become the first North American trading hub for the renminbi, China’s official currency.

NUVO Magazine Winter 2014: Inquiring Minds, (Un)Made in Canada

It wasn’t the service. Or the ambience. And let’s be honest with ourselves—it wasn’t the coffee or the doughnuts either. No, it was a feeling that turned Tim Hortons into our national coffee shop. Call­­ it a sense of humble comfort: a small-town, aw-shucks goodness its customers liked to see in themselves.

NUVO Magazine Winter 2014: Inquiring Minds, Smarten Up

New. Improved. Throw in free and you’ve got the three most powerful words in the English language. A lesson Silicon Valley learned very early.

NUVO magazine: Dragon V2

Sometime next year, if you look up—way up—at just the right time, you might see something in the sky that wasn’t there before. That’d be the Dragon V2, the next generation of space “taxi” shuttling astronauts, cosmonauts, and the occasional space tourist across the cosmos.

NUVO Daily Edit: The Apple Watch

If it is nothing else, the new Apple Watch is a wish—a fervent hope that lightning may indeed strike twice. You know, much like it did back in 2007, when the indomitable Steve Jobs pulled a nondescript glass-and-plastic brick out of his pocket and started a high-tech revolution the likes of which the world had never seen.

NUVO Daily Edit:

Consider yourself on the road. Consider yourself part of a traffic jam. You’re moving, sure, but you’re in a thick soup of bumper-to-bumper mayhem with nothing but tailpipes to the left and road rage to the right. But wait; up ahead, the road widens. A luxury sedan whips down the open road. Then another. And another. But hang on, you’re not allowed. It’s for first-class customers only.

NUVO magazine: Blame Game

Whoever thought up the “war is good for business” thing might want to check out the action on the Moscow Exchange this year. As the crisis in Ukraine came to a boil at the end of February, investor appetite for Russian equities went into a deep freeze, and the country’s benchmark Russian Trading System (RTS) stock-market index lost 19 per cent in a matter of weeks.

NUVO Summer 2014: Last Writes

Never mind dropping out; as far as turning on and tuning in go, there’s never been a better time. Over the past decade, both cable and the major networks have upped their game, giving us better writing, better characters, better jokes, and better plot twists than we’ve ever seen on the small screen. As for the advertising—well, that’s another story.

NUVO Summer 2014: Always On

Take everything you know about energy—burning oil, falling water, spinning windmills, splitting atoms—and forget it. All of it. Now, what does the world look like? Given what scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have just managed to do, you may want to mull it over.

NUVO Daily Edit: Tesla Motors' Gigafactory

By now, you’ve probably heard about Elon Musk. He’s the 42-year old serial entrepreneur with the funny name and a chinful of three-day stubble who’s trying to make the internal combustion engine go the way of the great auk.

NUVO Magazine: China's Off-the-Grid Lending

Even the name sounds sketchy: “shadow bank”. An apt moniker for a business that lends like a bank, earns interest like a bank, has a pleasant and confidence-inspiring name like a bank, yet isn’t exactly a bank—particularly when it comes to regulations, transparency, and risk control.

Daily Edit: We Can Build You

The first time you see Google Glass in real life, sitting astride some stranger’s nose, it’s hard not to be taken aback by the idea that the future—some form of it, at least—has indeed arrived.

NUVO Magazine: Profiting From Market Turmoil

Remember the meltdown of 2008? You know—the one where America’s housing market fell down a deep, dark hole, the world’s banks teetered on the edge of insolvency, stock markets did a face plant, and stockbrokers from here to Timbuktu considered (however briefly) defenestration as their next career move? Sure you do.

NUVO Daily Edit: Lululemon

No matter how it finishes, a bad year holds one consolation: eventually, it ends. Except when it doesn’t. Can “brand-as-business” overcome basic executionary missteps? Can the idea of a product (or an entire company, for that matter) overcome the reality?

NUVO Magazine: Barrick Gold

You’d figure it’d be a pretty easy business. Find a hole with some gold in it, then dig; whatever comes out is essentially money. In reality, the business of gold mining is one of the most dangerous there is.

In normal times, the business of fertilizer is only slightly more interesting than the soil one spreads it on: one of those super-simple, steady-Eddie, boring-but-profitable businesses every investor loves.

NUVO Magazine: The Patent Troll Sector

Lower than the used-car salesman. Or the telemarketer. The repo man, too. Maybe one notch above that guy from Nigeria who’s always sending you e-mail. That’s a good approximation of the esteem with which the patent troll is held within the pantheon of the world’s professions.

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