We launched Real Future almost two years ago to tell stories about the ways in which technology is changing both the world we live in and us.

A few years ago, the software start-up GitHub faced an uncomfortable truth: It could be a pretty unpleasant place.

If you were asked to imagine a flasher, you’d probably think of a cartoonish looking man in a trenchcoat, running shoes, and white crew socks. You might imagine him appearing suddenly in a parking lot, library or subway station. But that’s not what a flasher looks like now.  In 2016, a flasher still attacks you in a…

Dagny Carlsson is a 104-year-old woman who loves to blog.

In early November, dozens of people gathered at Fusion's offices in Oakland with one common goal: to find new ways to use technology to combat violence. The hackathon was organized by Reboot Safety, a Bay Area organization led by Linda Maepa and Angelica Coleman. Born from the problem of police violence against…

The 2016 presidential election may have been hacked. And if so, there's only days left to save it.

To Trump opponents, the country is going to hell in a hand basket. Hate crimes and swastika graffiti have been on the rise. White supremacists have descended on D.C., chanting "Heil Victory." Trump's main presidential priority seems to be to advance his business interests.

In ancient Greece, the philosopher Aristotle once said that "it is possible to infer character from features." Through the 1800s, scientists took his cue, pushing theories that bad people could be identified through their looks alone. Then, of course, science happened, and Aristotle's comment was taken with a…

Joyce Taylor's family has owned a plot of land near Wichita, Kansas for over 100 years. Now 82, she grew up in a farmhouse on the property, and remembers when the home first got electricity and an indoor bathroom.

In the name of science, Rich Lee has done things to his body that most of us wouldn't dare imagine. He's implanted permanent earbuds in his ears that allow him to listen to music on the sly. He's implanted magnets in his finger and experimented with eyedrops that would allow him to see in the dark. Most recently, he…

Despite what Mark Zuckerberg has insisted to the public, it doesn't take a degree in computer engineering to understand that Facebook has a very, very serious problem with fake news.

In this election, lies sometimes seemed to carry as much weight as facts. You'd see a story declaring that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS (false, obviously) trending right alongside one about Barbara Bush urging female voters not to vote for Trump (true).

Mae Jemison, the first woman of color in space, has an alternative view on the race to get humans on Mars: it isn't enough.

A group of Chinese scientists have become the first to use the game-changing gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9 on humans. Nature reported today that a team from Sichuan University inserted genetically modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer in October.

Over the course of the election, we saw online discourse reach a new low.

Election results aside, the future is still female.

At this point automation is inevitable, but that just means we need to think longer and harder about how we prepare for its consequences.

On Tuesday at Fusion's Real Future Fair, Edward Snowden took the stage via Snowbot to discuss the future of the surveillance state under Trump, the political power of social networks, and how technology has changed what it means to be in exile.

Over the years, Twitter has become the unfortunate example of what happens on the internet when you govern your territory like the Wild West. On Twitter, the least civil parts of society not only persist, but flourish. There, even unassuming punctuation marks are just waiting to evolve into viral racial epithets.

On the main drag of downtown San Francisco, a bearded man with a tattered t-shirt stumbles into the middle of busy Market Street, carrying a foldable lawn chair.