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" 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. "

Annalee Newitz

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" You've probably heard the stories about how io9 got its name. And maybe you know that io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders and I were inspired by Kathy Keeton, whose groundbreaking magazine 'Omni' combined coverage of real science with science fiction. But what you probably don't know is how unlikely it was that io9 ever succeeded at all. "

" Reader was by far the most popular feed reader out there, and its user base had been in a steep decline for two years before Google decided to shut it down. "

" 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. "

" When Usenet was eclipsed by websites in the late 1990s, people from that world - many of them programmers - wanted to bring the freewheeling, amazing discussions of Usenet to the web. And thus, RSS was born. "

" In the 1920s and 30s, when Radio Shack was young, a much earlier generation of nerds swarmed into these tiny shops to talk excitedly about building radios and other transmission devices. You might say that Radio Shack helped define gadget culture for four generations, from radio whizzes up to smartphone dorks. "

" When it comes to the population explosion, there are two questions on the table. One, is our population growth going to kill us all? And two, is there any ethical way to prevent that from happening? "

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

Annalee Newitz

Atmosphere

Great

" Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we've seen before. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" With technology tracking us everywhere we go, 'cosplay' might become our best defense against surveillance. "

" I am a big proponent of character arcs that show us how people change over time. "

" Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe. "

" io9 was the last standalone site that Gawker Media ever launched. It was born at a time when many of the company's other famous sites, from Consumerist and Wonkette to Fleshbot and Idolator, were being sold off or shuttered. "

" I founded io9 back in 2008, and I watched it journey from the farthest reaches of space to its current home under this atmosphere bubble on Ceres. "

" When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters. "

" 'Avatar' imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. "

" Whether 'Avatar' is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick 'District 9', released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. "

" 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. "

" You are ruled by change whether you like it or not, and io9's future path lies with joining a larger site that covers technology as well as science and science fiction. "

" RSS, as a format and an idea, grew directly out of an internet culture that many people online today know nothing about: Usenet. "