Motherboard

In 1946, importing 25 pairs of beavers from Canada to Chile in order to foster a fur trade in an economically lackluster territory of Patagonia seemed like a smart idea. However, no one would have imagined these incisor-toothed vermin would one day lay waste to Patagonia’s forests. Today, there are roughly 100,000 beavers in the region and their environmental destruction has allegedly led to the most transformative destruction of its southern ecosystem since the last ice age. We traveled to the southernmost tip of Chile to meet the beaver hunters in charge of crudely restoring order to its ecosystem.

There’s not much agriculture in the Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the North Atlantic, roughly equidistant from Norway, Iceland, and Scotland. Aside from the sheep that freely roam the fjords and a few root vegetables, the Faroese have always relied on the surrounding sea as a source of fish, seabirds, and the pilot whales they slaughter in a hunt known as the grindadráp, or grind.

Right now, in the 21st century, South Korean scientists are actually working to resurrect the prehistoric woolly mammoth using cloning technology and the flesh of perfectly preserved specimen once buried in Northern Siberia. The hope is that if they can find an active cell from the meaty leg of a 40,000 year old frozen mammoth, it could hold the keys to bringing back the extinct species.

In INHUMAN KIND, Motherboard gains exclusive access to a small fleet of US Army bomb disposal robots—the same platforms the military has weaponized—and to a pair of DARPA’s six-foot-tall bipedal humanoid robots. We also meet Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams, renowned physicist Max Tegmark, and others who grapple with the specter of artificial intelligence, killer robots, and a technological precedent forged in the atomic age. It’s a story about the evolving relationship between humans and robots, and what AI in machines bodes for the future of war and the human race.

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.

Motherboard meets John Romero, one of the creators behind Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM, and Quake, breakthrough games that all but created the first-person shooter genre.

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 spends a day with Martin Cooper, the father of the first ever portable, handheld cell phone.