Annalee Newitz

As fears about the energy and environmental crises reach a fever pitch, we're all searching for solutions. And one possibility is that we could fix everything if we'd just shrink our population back down to about 2 billion people - which would put us roughly where we were at 80 years ago.

With technology tracking us everywhere we go, 'cosplay' might become our best defense against surveillance.

We're seeing a new 'Gilded Age,' where inheritance is a deciding factor in who becomes the wealthiest.

If we look at the past two centuries of economic history in Europe and the United States, we see an astounding pattern. Capital will accumulate in a tiny portion of the population, no matter what we do.

What can we expect from this latest crop of indie directors who have been sucked into the franchise factory? I'm especially curious about 'Star Wars,' which will feature an all-indie crew after J. J. Abrams finishes with 'Episode VII.'

If outsider perspectives made 'Lord of the Rings' and 'Dark Knight' into fantastic franchises, imagine what would happen if you brought in the perspectives of women and people of color.

Michel Gondry's 'Green Hornet' was another franchise flick that felt like it came out of left field - I thought in a good way, but most audiences disagreed.

Suddenly, all the giant Hollywood franchises are being driven by alternative filmmakers.

When it comes to the population explosion, there are two questions on the table. One, is our population growth going to kill us all? And two, is there any ethical way to prevent that from happening?

A series of studies in the 1990s and 2000s revealed that as women gained more access to education, jobs, and birth control, they had fewer children. As a result, developed countries in western Europe, Japan, and the Americas were seeing zero or negative population growth.

When you consider that our technology has advanced from the first telephones to smart phones in roughly a century, it's easy to understand why it seems like tomorrow is arriving faster than it ever did.

The U.N.'s current projection is that humanity will number 9.3 billion individuals in 2050 and then hit 10.1 billion by 2100. Meanwhile, our energy resources are dwindling, and droughts threaten our food supplies.

Your fragile mind can't have forgotten the terrifying technothriller series known 'Scorpion'. Because it features the worst hacking scenes ever broadcast in any medium.

I am a big proponent of character arcs that show us how people change over time.

I think a lot of us responded intensely to 'True Detective' because it was so incredibly earnest. That's what made it heartbreaking and involving.

Watching 'Interstellar' is really like watching two movies slowly collide with each other.

Put simply, 'Interstellar' has a strong undercurrent of cheesiness.

If you love epic space opera, you shouldn't miss 'Interstellar'.

'Interstellar' is a thematic sequel to Christopher Nolan's last original film, 'Inception'. It drops us into a dark future full of otherworldly landscapes and time distortions.

Radio Shack is meeting the fate of many other stores that were wildly popular in the twentieth century, including record stores, comic book stores, bookstores and video stores.

A group of scientists wanted to find the most effective mosquito repellents. So they tested 10 different substances, including campout standbys like DEET, as well as a random choice: Victoria's Secret perfume Bombshell. Turns out the perfume is almost as good as DEET.

We can celebrate how far we've come from our sexist past when women and men are equally represented in the pages of science fiction anthologies.

Women are being welcomed into science fiction, but it's through the back door.

Publishers often push women in a subtle way to focus on fantasy and paranormal writing.

'The Red' delivers intense action, leavened by a genuinely sympathetic portrait of soldiers caught up in battles they never chose.

'The Red' is the first book in a trilogy that gained a big following as a self-published e-book, and is now out in paper from Saga. It introduces us to reluctant hero Shelley, a former anti-war activist who chooses to join the military rather than serve jail time after being arrested at a protest.

In the 1920s and 30s, when Radio Shack was young, a much earlier generation of nerds swarmed into these tiny shops to talk excitedly about building radios and other transmission devices. You might say that Radio Shack helped define gadget culture for four generations, from radio whizzes up to smartphone dorks.

Millions of nerdy kids who grew up in the 1980s could only find the components they needed at local Radio Shacks, and the stores were like a lifeline to a better world where everybody understood computers.

Back in the 1980s, you could learn how to add memory cards to your PC in a Radio Shack.

Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy - witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he'd been faking evidence for years.

There can be problems with extended families, and it can get a little close for comfort. But for the younger generations, it's clear that this option is becoming almost as appealing as living alone.

The myth that young people should leave the nest at 18, never to return, started with iconic American Benjamin Franklin.

Max Brooks' novel 'World War Z' is one of the greatest zombie stories ever written, partly for reasons that make it basically unfilmable.

The novel 'World War Z' is told from the perspectives of so many people - speaking to the narrator - that there's no way a movie could capture all of them. Still, the idea of turning a zombie pandemic into a war story is fascinating and could have translated easily to film.

'World War Z' is basically a big-budget B-movie.

Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe.

To understand the future properly, it's crucial that we listen to geologists as often as we do computer scientists.

Evolution, climate change, and the construction of the physical universe down to its atoms are processes that we measure in millions or billions of years.

'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.

You are ruled by change whether you like it or not, and io9's future path lies with joining a larger site that covers technology as well as science and science fiction.

io9 was the last standalone site that Gawker Media ever launched. It was born at a time when many of the company's other famous sites, from Consumerist and Wonkette to Fleshbot and Idolator, were being sold off or shuttered.

You've probably heard the stories about how io9 got its name. And maybe you know that io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders and I were inspired by Kathy Keeton, whose groundbreaking magazine 'Omni' combined coverage of real science with science fiction. But what you probably don't know is how unlikely it was that io9 ever succeeded at all.

I founded io9 back in 2008, and I watched it journey from the farthest reaches of space to its current home under this atmosphere bubble on Ceres.

At last we've seen the first installment of Joss Whedon's new web series, 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog,' and it's sweeter than we'd ever imagined.

When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born.

RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet.

Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down.

Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before.

When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters.

Whether 'Avatar' is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick 'District 9', released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race.