Transmissions

Every year for a week a Scottish moor becomes an ad hoc launch site for amateur rocketeers to blast their DIY shuttles and spaceships into the skies. This is International Rocket Week.

Steve Wambolt, an ex-tech industry type with experience at places like IBM and Corel, put his technical mind towards an unlikely pursuit: dive bombing pesky, shitting Canadian geese with a drone. It all started when Ottawa city officials couldn't rid their public beaches of geese relieving themselves all over the sandy outcrops where people lay their towels and caught some rays. That's not to mention the geese pooping in water close to shore, polluted the waves beachgoers were jumping into. And all that shit causes major E. coli levels on beaches, posing dangerous public health concerns. After trying dogs, pungent fertilizers, and human decoys to ward off nesting geese that got the city nowhere, one councillor asked Wambolt if his hexicopter drone, used for aerial photography, could actually keep the geese at bay. From there Wambolt has designed his very own "Goosebuster" system outfitted with predator noises and flashing lights. Every morning in the warmer months, Wambolt deploys his

Bitcoin mines like this makeshift operation located in Northeast China are what keep the bitcoin network up and running. Motherboard will visit the secretive mine located in rural Northeast China and document a day-in-the-life of the three employees hired to maintain the mine.

The world of FPV racing is still tight-knit: It's a segment of a segment of the growing but still relatively small drone industry. But that might not be the case for long. These homemade machines can fly at speeds of up to 100 miles an hour, making it the perfect option for people with a speed obsession but can't shell out for a private jet. Those who race say it's going to be on ESPN one day, that we'll have drone racing stadiums, and leagues, and maybe even Mario Kart-style combat.

Motherboard meets up with NYC based drone makers to test out some newly designed battle drones.

The Hurt Locker got it only partly right. Just ask Brian Castner, a former bomb technician with the US military. He served three tours in the Middle East, two of which were spent leading an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, and deployed small remote-controlled robots to battle a blitz of insurgent-rigged car bombs and improvised explosive devices in and around Kirkuk, Iraq, in 2006. Castner and his crew grew so reliant on these machines, which can disarm explosives from afar, that they considered them part of the team. Years later, does he still feel an attachment to the machines? We met Castner to find out.

NASA’s top climate scientists study some of the world’s most advanced computer models in the same building that Jerry Seinfeld once ordered cereal for lunch. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies is perhaps the nation’s premier climatology hub, and it’s where director Gavin Schmidt attempts to predict what, exactly, will happen as humanity loads the earth with planet­ scorching greenhouse gases. In this Transmissions short, we’ll sit down with Schmidt, who has been director since 2013, when he took over for the grandfather of climate science James Hansen, to discuss what makes a good model—how they work, how accurate they are, and what kind of technology goes into making them what they are. Also: Do they say we’re doomed?

Here at Motherboard, we've been watching the emerging hobby-sport of first-person drone racing ever since we first strapped on VR goggles in the Bronx, New York, and flew tiny robots across a park in the middle of winter. That's why, when we heard Canada's first organized drone racing would be taking place in a town called Clinton, Ontario, in rural Canada, we sent VICE Canada's Patrick McGuire to document the festivities.

Crowd-funding campaigns can raise money for some pretty wacky projects, such as asteroid defense or images of brains on LSD. But rarely do you hear of campaigns raising funds for military equipment. Enter the People’s Project, a volunteer-led organization based in Ukraine that has a section currently raising funds for a military drone.

MOTHERBOARD goes behind the scenes at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in Los Angeles, where teams behind the world's most advanced search and rescue robots compete for millions of dollars in prize funding from the US Department of Defense. Think of it as Game 7 of the World Series of ground-based, semi-autonomous robots, two of which we first met while filming our documentary INHUMAN KIND. Which robot will come out on top, and which robots will crack under the pressure?

A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that strapping electrodes to your head and running a small amount of electrical current through it can actually help it perform better. It’s a field called transcranial direct current stimulation, and it’s getting very popular with the DIY community—all it takes is a 9-volt battery, a current regulator, and some electrodes. Motherboard’s Jason Koebler purchased a tDCS device from Reddit for a couple bucks, but it was daunting to strap something an internet stranger sent him to his head. So, he went to Brooklyn College to meet with Elizabeth Chua, a scientist researching how tDCS affects memory. Chua talked about the potential medical benefits of using tDCS, demonstrated her research-grade device, and helped him try out the DIY Reddit brain shocker.

Before GIFs and net art, there was Telidon. Telidon was a protocol invented in Canada in the late 1970s that let people dial in to central servers over the phone lines to view computer graphics on their TV sets. Telidon was mainly meant for online shopping and banking, but it wasn’t all business. Artists in Toronto obtained one of the desk-sized computers used to create Telidon graphics and formed a thriving community around it before Telidon disappeared in the mid 80s. We catch up with the original Telidon artists and find out what it was like to be a true pioneer in the world of art made with machines.

Brandon Bryant, a former drone pilot and sensor operator for the of the US Air Force, quit his job after 5 years of being in the Drone Program left him emotionally traumatized. In this episode of Transmissions, Motherboard speaks with Brandon about his feelings of responsibility for the remote killings of people with predator drones, its connection to Germany's drone program, and why ultimately drone warfare makes us lose our humanity.

While all eyes were on Pittsburgh-based biotechnology startup Grindhouse Wetware, biohacker Amal Graafstra was quietly building the world's first implant-activated smart gun inside his Mount Vernon, Washington, garage.

This DIY surveillance camera will scan your face, then speak aloud what it sees. We brought the tech into the streets.

Since the first European colonists set foot in Manhattan in the 1600s, New York City has been losing the war on rats. A recent estimate put the number of rats at around 2 million, about a quarter of the city’s human population, and any efforts to prune that population down have seen limited success. Rats continue to infest basements, parks, and apartment buildings, chewing through car wiring and the city’s underground communications, and although reports of rats starting a new plague epidemic may be exaggerated, they do undermine quality of life and cause a lot of costly damage. But now, an aggressive commitment to rounding up these highly unpopular rodents is finally showing real results thanks to a new strategy dedicated to getting inside the rats’ heads—finding their burrows and targeting them in their nests. In this episode of Transmissions, Motherboard meets up with Matthew Frye, an urban entomologist at Cornell University’s integrated pest management program. He’s going to show

Opened by lifelong taxi driver Gus Kodogiannis, McGuinness Management Corporation has serviced New York City streets with yellow cabs since 1986—25 years before Uber launched in the city in 2011. Today, the dispatcher's surplus inventory of yellow cabs is so large that it stretches beyond its own property and overflows onto public streets, prompting residents and business owners nearby to dub this particular area of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a “taxi graveyard.” It's an unprecedented predicament for yellow cab dispatchers: sitting on millions of dollars worth of medallion yellow cabs, lots full of idle cabs, but not enough drivers to drive them.

Virtual Reality isn’t new. But in today's luxury real estate market it’s giving the super rich a chance to tour properties without having to see them in person. For Motherboard's Luxury Week, we went to Manhattan to see how the wealthy use VR to buy multi-million-dollar properties.

Dr. Nakamatsu, colloquially known as Dr. NakaMats, claims to have 3,500 patents, the most of any inventor living or dead. Just in time for his 88th birthday, Dr. NakaMats flew from Japan to New York to receive the first-ever Lifetime Visionary Award from the Mmusuemm, a tiny museum housed in a former freight elevator.

Located in the arctic circle, The Global Seed Vault isn't simply just a large storage facility for seeds from around the world. The vault is protecting the world's agricultural genetic diversity and protecting our future food supply in case of catastrophe. Motherboard went to Svalbard, Norway to see the vault, located deep inside a mountain, in person.

We’re in St. Paul Minnesota for the Institute of Navigation’s Autonomous Snowplow Contest. It’s a yearly competition that invites university and college engineering students to use their navigation and control technologies (in order) to create robots with the sole purpose of clearing as much snow as possible from a designated area, without any human intervention. Engineers kit out their vehicles with radio beacons, lasers, optical and ultrasonic sensors so that the robots can autonomously navigate themselves. With thousands of dollars in prize money at stake — plus a whole lot of bragging rights — the robots and their makers, get ready to plow.

Most environmental issues are caused by the living but have you ever considered the environmental impact of death? Alkaline hydrolysis, a greener alternative to burial or flame-based cremation, uses a combination of water and potassium hydroxide to decompose bodies. It doesn’t require burial space, uses 1/12 the energy of traditional cremation and doesn’t produce toxic gases or air pollutants. Motherboard spoke to Terry Regnier at Mayo Clinic to find out more about the process.

On March 15th, 2018, the city of Plattsburgh in upstate New York issued an 18-month moratorium on cryptocurrency mining. Plattsburgh is part of a long-standing power agreement that gives the city an allotment of some of the cheapest electricity anywhere in the world, but a recent influx of cryptomining companies and their energy-draining rigs have raised power prices at the expense of the general population. The ban is meant to be a temporary arrangement, but it could potentially end all cryptomining investment in the city.

We visit Denmark and talk to a marine maintenance manager to learn more about how undersea cables are crucial to data transportation.

Ingrid Burrington, author of "Networks of New York," explains how big cities like New York are constantly under surveillance.

Ever since the bitcoin boom of late 2017, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Ripple, and even DogeCoin have made their way into the mainstream. But for some predisposed to addiction, the volatility of trading cryptocurrency can sometimes become a dangerous obsession. In this episode of Transmissions, Motherboard goes to Castle Craig Hospital in Scotland, a rehabilitation facility that recently added treatment for cryptocurrency addiction to its gambling rehabilitation program intended to help those struggling with betting specifically on (unstable) digital currencies.