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AUTHOR ARCHIVES
Alexis Madrigal
Alexis Madrigal
Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Technology channel. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
The New York Observer calls Madrigal "for all intents and purposes, the perfect modern reporter." He co-founded Longshot magazine, a high-speed media experiment that garnered attention from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. While at Wired.com, he built Wired Science into one of the most popular blogs in the world. The site was nominated for best magazine blog by the MPA and best science Web site in the 2009 Webby Awards. He also co-founded Haiti ReWired, a groundbreaking community dedicated to the discussion of technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.
He's spoken at Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, SXSW, E3, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and his writing was anthologized in Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale University Press).
Madrigal is a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Office for the History of Science and Technology. Born in Mexico City, he grew up in the exurbs north of Portland, Oregon, and now lives in Oakland.
Is This Virtual Worm the First Sign of the Singularity?
May 17, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. And yet, these ...
What the Obama Campaign's Chief Data Scientist Is Up to Now
May 9, 2013 By all accounts, Rayid Ghani's data work for President Obama's reelection campaign was brilliant and unprecedented. Ghani probably could have written a ticket to work at any company in the world, or simply collected speaking fees for a few years telling companies how to harness the power of data like ...
Operation Acoustic Kitty: The CIA's Would-Be Cat Spy
May 9, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
You see, cats are sly and unpredictable. They can slip unnoticed from place to place, watching, listening, wryly judging, surveilling. So, why wouldn't the Central Intelligence Agency stick a microphone in a cat's ear and embed a radio transmitter in her body? Oh, but they would! In an excerpt from ...
The Hordes of Microbes Inside Your Body Are Your Friends
April 26, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
As tools for engineering life’s building blocks have proliferated in recent years, our definition of human life has become more expansive. For example,we are learning that the vast ecosystems of microbes inside our bodies are as integral to our health as our own tissues, affecting everything from our immune systems ...
NASA Announces the Discovery of the Most Interesting Planetary System Outside Our Own
April 18, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
The Kepler Space Telescope has been in orbit looking for planets around other stars since 2009, and it's started to find some startlingly interesting solar systems out there. Today, the Kepler team announced the discovery of star system Kepler 62, a group of five planets circling a red star, two ...
Hey Reddit, Enough Boston Bombing Vigilantism
April 18, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
If there's one thing we want to believe about the Boston bombing, it's that someone saw the perpetrator. Somewhere, inside an iPhone or on a memory chip, there's an image of the terrorist(s). The video would serve as evidence at a trial, and it would calm the queasy feeling that ...
The SSA Employee Behind All the Great Data on Baby Name Popularity
April 16, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Every year, the Social Security Administration releases its annual list of the most popular names in America. They've become a valuable source of data for researchers, as Ruth Graham brilliantly laid out in the Boston Globe this weekend. The best thing about name data is that it is the perfect ...
How Boston Police Could Examine Videos From the Boston Bombing
April 15, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
As investigators try to figure out what happened today during the bombings at the Boston Marathon, they'll turn to video taken at the scene of the explosions. In addition to any closed-circuit television cameras lining Boylston Street and its surroundings, The Bureau Chief of Public Information, Cheryl Fiandaca,called for members ...
Cell Networks Use Much More Energy Than Data Centers
April 15, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
For years, people have talked about the electricity consumption of data centers. Some people want to believe, somehow, that Googling is energy intensive. But it's not. Thanks to Koomey's Corollary to Moore's Law, computation has been getting more energy efficient: The number of computations per kilowatt-hour of electricity usage has ...
Emerging Infectious Diseases, Better Public Health Outcomes, and Zombies
April 5, 2013
FROM NEXTGOV
Perhaps the public's obsession with zombies can be refracted from horror movies and towards health issues, suggests a new paper in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. The hope is that zombies can do for public health awareness what they did for Jane Austen: tack on some zombies and suddenly boring ...
