Year In ReviewWe look back at the best, worst, and most significant moments of the year, and look forward to next year.    The elephant in the room has been, for a very long time, Moore’s Law—or really, its eventual end game. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted in a 1965 paper that the number of…

Photo: AP Images A CenturyLink outage that started on Thursday has left customers across the country without internet and shut down vital services including 911 emergency calls. And now the federal government is launching an investigation. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced on Twitter on Friday morning that he’s instructed the FCC’s Public Safety…

Pretty weird lookin’!Photo: Sophie Rosenbaum (AP) You’ve surely heard about Thursday’s incident at a Con Edison substation in New York City that temporarily knocked out power at LaGuardia airport and set the night skies glowing with an eerie aquamarine. We wondered: What made it so BLUE? Con Ed initially tweeted a laughably understated comment to…

Aerial view of the ocean entry zone where lava erupting from Kilauea’s Lower East Rift Zone poured into the sea earlier this year.Photo: USGS, HVO Kilauea’s historically huge 2018 eruption didn’t just transform the southeastern corner of Hawaii’s Big Island. Most of the lava wound up spilling into the ocean, creating an enormous new undersea…

Tsunami damage in Sumur, Indonesia.Image: AP/Achmad Ibrahim Volunteer rescuers working on beaches along Sundra Strait have rescued more than 30 stranded sea turtles, following the Indonesian tsunami that has killed hundreds of people, the Guardian reports. On December 22, Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau island volcano triggered a massive landslide, generating a tsunami that killed at least…

At a lab in Shenzhen, China, an embryo is injected with the Cas9 protein. Image: AP Gene therapies are very much at their preliminary stages of development, so it would make sense to keep tabs on patients whose DNA has been modified via the innovative CRISPR technique. For some scientists in China, however, this is…

Sphingomonas koreensis, in yellow, on a petri dishImage: Justesen, et al (Journal of Clinical Microbiology) In 2016, a mysterious illness spread inside the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, the U.S. government’s most prominent research hospital, in Bethesda, Maryland. Patients were somehow being sickened by an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria that practically never causes disease…

Photo: Getty Images Everyone hates spam texts, but only some Android users are reporting they’re seeing alerts about a new spam protection feature from Google in their Messages app. According to Android Police, the update seems to be a limited rollout as it isn’t live on every single device yet. Those who do have the…