Annalee Newitz

Critics have called alien epic 'Avatar' a version of 'Dances With Wolves' because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.

If we lose bees, we may be looking at losing apples and oranges. We may be looking at losing a great deal of other crops, as well, and other animals that depend on those crops.

Humans have obviously contributed a great deal of carbon to the atmosphere. So we are warming the planet up.

There is evidence that we are headed into what would be the planet's sixth mass extinction. It's hard to know for sure if you're in one because a mass extinction is an event where over 75 percent of the species on the planet die out over a - usually about a million-year period. The fastest it might happen is in hundreds of thousands of years.

It is true that I will confess that I have an incredible fascination for pop-culture stories about the Apocalypse and the end of the world.

In the 1970s, as historians became enchanted with microhistories, economists were expanding the reach of their discipline. Nations, states and cities began to plan for the future by consulting with economists whose prognostications were shaped by investment cycles rather than historical ones.

Turning a zombie pandemic into a generic disaster movie robs the zombies of their dirty, nasty edginess and robs the disaster of its epic scope.

In many cities, it's become popular to hate 'gentrifiers,' rich people who move in and drive up housing prices - pushing everyone else out.

Humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it's unlikely that humans' early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating or the willpower to complete a dissertation.

Unlike economics, whose sole preoccupation in our finance-obsessed era is the near-term profit motive, history offers a way to place our tiny lifespans in a narrative that spans dozens of generations - perhaps even reaching into a future where capitalism is no longer our dominant form of economic organization.

Economic systems rise and fall just like empires. That's the kind of perspective we need to take if we hope to prosper for centuries rather than for the next quarter.

Fifty years ago, historians advised politicians and policy-makers. They helped chart the future of nations by helping leaders learn from past mistakes in history. But then something changed, and we began making decisions based on economic principles rather than historical ones. The results were catastrophic.

Cities might become biological entities, walls hung with curtains of algae that glow at night and sequester carbon, and floors made from tweaked cellular material that strengthens like bones as we walk on it.

Using predictive models from engineering and public health, designers will plan safer, healthier cities that could allow us to survive natural disasters, pandemics, and even a radiation calamity that drives us underground.

Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time.

People who gentrify are usually new transplants to a city, changing it to suit their particular cultural needs and whims.

Gentrification is a form of immigration, though almost nobody calls it that.

Capitalism is, fundamentally, an economic system that promotes inequality.

To share a story is in part to take ownership of it, especially because you are often able to comment on a story that you are sharing on social media.

A hard-hitting investigative report that uncovers a nugget of genuine truth is the ultimate viral hit.

Before the 21st century, stories became popular because people talked about them in other publications or shared magazine and newspaper clippings with friends.

Once you've worked as a writer and editor in the world of social media for a decade, the way I have, you start to notice patterns.

We sometimes allow writers to publish their work without editing on io9.

The first time I saw 'Star Wars,' I got so excited that I threw up.

When I was a journalist at Wired, I convinced a doctor to implant an RFID tracking device in my arm.

When I was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I became obsessed with end user license agreements.