Motherboard

On August 31st, 2013, Nyad jumped into the shark-friendly waters of Cuba and swam some 110-odd miles—without the protection of a shark cage—to eventually reach the shores of Key West, Florida, some 53 hours later.

Doug Coulter used to build signal processing and radio gadgets for our favorite three-lettered intelligence agencies, but for the past decade or so, Doug's chosen to explore his engineering interests in the isolated backwoods of Virginia, absent from any pesky boss or sticky bureaucracy.

The more we learn about our brains, the more we discover just how fragile they are. When concussions happen, it's extremely important to manage an athlete's recovery to prevent him or her from getting further damage. That's where Sway Balance comes in. An athlete's balance is one of the most obvious things affected by a concussion, but using balance as a recovery metric requires objective data typically gleaned from highly expensive force platforms.

Our latest doc is about clinic in Los Angeles that uses virtual reality simulations to treat war veterans with PTSD. With host Jody Mitic, a former master sniper for the Canadian military, this short doc explores the efficacy of these systems to treat a highly mysterious mental condition.

In Pasaje 18 of Lima's Polvos Azules shopping mall, you'll find racks of DVD burners humming away while flourescent lights cast their glare across the glitter of thousands of bootleg movies in their telltale cellophane wrappers. If you want it to be, it's a scene right out of cyberpunk. But for many Peruvians, whose access to things like Netflix is hampered by some of the slowest internet speeds on the globe, bootleg DVDs remain a primary source for accessing current movie releases.

By reversing its aging process when it gets sick or injured, Japan's tiny Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish is one of the only known animals that has figured out how to defeat death. Motherboard goes to Japan to visit the only researcher in the world who is studying the microscopic animal to see if humans can eventually do the same.

In the debut episode of our three-part series titled "Phreaked Out," we took a retrospective look at one day in August of 2006, when two Los Angeles traffic engineers, Kartik Patel and Gabriel Murillo, remotely accessed the city's traffic control system and tampered with the light sequences at four main intersections of the city, as part of a labor union protest.

In this episode of "Phreaked Out," we met some of the top security researchers at the center of the car hacking world. The goal isn't to make people crash: They highlight security holes in order to highlight flaws in car technology, intended to pressure auto manufacturers to be a few steps ahead of their friendly foes.

A MOTHERBOARD documentary on life, death, and an unassuming Mexican dentist whose proprietary chemical formula can restore corpses for identification.

Over the course of our "Phreaked Out" series, we've seen how devices such as urban control systems, moving vehicles, and smartphones are not impervious to hacks when connected to a network—cellular or wi-fi. In our third and final episode,we check out a slate of real-time phone hacks to tackle the question of mobile phone security.

Some say Dr. Alejandro Hernández Cárdenas' brew brings the dead back to life. A MOTHERBOARD documentary on life, death, and an unassuming Mexican dentist whose proprietary chemical formula rehydrates corpses for identification.

Our crew traveled to remote Liberia to discover 'Monkey Island,' an area inhabited solely by former lab tested chimpanzees who survived disease and two civil wars. We go to the island, interview the locals and meet the scientists involved in the testing facility 25 years ago.

Boyan Slat's story is not quite that of a 20-year-old Wunderkind who magically found a potential fix to a longstanding problem. It's perhaps more accurately described as a combination of personal dedication and trial and error. When going through his old prototypes for a technology that would passively scrub oceans of plastic, he's almost embarrassed of his early concepts.

In parts of Peru, there's an ancient culinary delicacy that consists of liquefying a rare frog. Drinking the concoction is said to cure a wide range of ailments, including bronchitis, tuberculosis, asthma, arthritis, even impotence.

There aren’t many places you can conveniently launch a homemade rocket. But a blustery Scottish moor, reachable only by winding roads that twist around reservoirs, wind turbines, and plenty of sheep, is one of them.

Motherboard investigates the new space race-one fueled not by countries trying to plant a flag on the Moon, but by explorers looking to get rich on Mars and beyond.

Earth is the only home we've ever known, and it's treated us well so far. But whether it’s climate change, an apocalyptic asteroid, or some horrifying disaster we don’t even know about yet, the Earth won't live forever.

Tang and freeze-dried ice cream is fun to consume for about five minutes of your life. When you’re 10. But when you’re floating in space, the limited culinary options leave something to be desired. In fact, astronauts on long trips typically don’t eat enough. That’s where SPOT and ROGR come in: a smart growing chamber and gardening robot, respectively, currently being developed by a graduate team at the University of Colorado Boulder.

When the bicycle became popular in the beginning of the 19th century in southern Germany, England, and France, it was the first machine that championed private transportation. Almost 200 years after the invention of the vélocipède and Drais’ dandy horse, personal mobility is one of the highest imperatives in a globalized world. Today, our streets are filled with fixed-gears, roadsters, rickshas, BMX, and electric bikes.

Ralph Baer, who developed the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, died in December of 2014 at the age of 92. Back in 2009, we chatted with Baer about his impact on the industry.

If you're a national army in the market for a brand spanking new jet, smart rifle, or drone, you might consider checking out CANSEC, Canada's premier defense trade show.

China is in the midst of a massive industrial and economic revolution which has required large expenditures of energy.