SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn astronauts successfully performed a spacewalk, marking the first done by a private company. After depressurizing SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, the billionaire funding the mission, Jared Isaacman, emerged from the spacecraft early Thursday morning. With his torso and head fully sticking outside the capsule, Isaacman performed tests on SpaceX’s new spacesuits, which are designed for increased mobility. “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do,” Isaacman said during the spacewalk. “But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world.” Watch Dragon’s first spacewalk with the @PolarisProgram’s Polaris Dawn crew https://t.co/svdJRkGN7K After Isaacman returned to the capsule,...

The Engo 2 smartglasses with heads-up display look slightly bulky. From most angles, the Engo 2 looks like a normal pair of sports-oriented sunglasses, with wide, curved, and extensive lenses. The only oddity is a small metal plate in the middle of the glasses, right over the bridge of the nose, which is a sensor. Swipe from left to right, and the display will switch to another view or shut off—if your finger isn't too sweaty or your swipe is insufficiently forceful.

The new soldering iron is aimed at professionals and first-timers, but I'm still too afraid to turn it on.

Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, and Keegan-Michael Key voice the main players in the Hasbro adaptation.

Google Wallet will start beta testing a digital ID soon that works at TSA checkpoints in almost half the country, including states like New York, California, Florida, Texas, and Illinois, but Google still advises that users keep their physical ID handy. Google says it’s also working with partners to use digital IDs for other purposes, like car rentals, account recovery, and identity verification. To create the digital ID, you’ll scan the security chip on the back of your passport into the Google Wallet app. Google will ask you to verify your identity with a selfie video and then generate the ID pass within a few minutes. The ID is encrypted, so you’ll need a passcode or fingerprint to access and share it.

My first USB-C soldering iron was a revelation. “You mean I can make liquid metal connections anywhere, in seconds, just by plugging this tiny stick into a USB cable?” Now, repair company iFixit is introducing its own take on the idea. It claims the iFixit FixHub Smart Soldering Iron is powerful enough for pros and easier for beginners than any others that have come before. So far, it’s not a new revelation, but after my first couple of hours, I’m loving iFixit’s improvements on an already great idea. A post shared by The Verge (@verge) For starters: the $80 iron comes with a heat-resistant magnetic storage cap so you can safely put it away at a moment’s notice, an LED...

Could we solve climate change if we just accepted being dramatically poorer, forever?  As I’ve written before, the answer is 1) no, not really, and 2) we can also solve climate change without that, and that will be better for everyone — especially those who are already poor — so we should do that instead. But this idea has stuck around in the form of the “degrowth” movement, which argues that “economic growth” as an objective inevitably leads to environmental destruction and that we should focus away from economic growth and toward ways to improve quality of life without it. Degrowth has always been a bit of a moving target. Even mainstream economists will agree that GDP alone doesn’t measure whether a life is meaningful and fulfilling, but they will also point out that as countries get richer, they also get healthier and happier. Is degrowth just the uncontroversial claim that what really matters is people leading good lives, or is it the wildly controversial claim that people would lead equally good lives even if we were to systematically shrink GDP in rich countries to focus on sustainability?  I think a lot of people find something appealing about the rhetoric of degrowthism: anti-consumerism, a simpler life, local food, etc. But widespread adoption of all of those things would do approximately nothing about climate change or the other environmental issues the movement cares so much about.  And while degrowth positions itself as a policy platform, it’s political poison. As soon as you start getting into details, it’s hard to come up with anything that polls worse than a steadily shrinking economy and the end of the conveniences of modern life. That makes it a policy agenda without any proposals about how it would become a law, an agenda that would sink any politician who attached themselves to it. (Not that you’re likely to find one.)  All of this combines to make the degrowth literature — which has by this point become an enormous body of work — frustrating. Degrowthers understandably expect people who want to criticize their movement to engage with its literature. One of the most frequent responses to criticism is that the critics have engaged with only a tiny fraction of the degrowth literature out there. That’s true, but at the same time, no one can seriously engage with hundreds of papers. But the fact that there’s so much written about degrowth doesn’t mean there’s good answers hidden somewhere in the pile of papers. I’ve increasingly gotten the sense that the movement’s contributors are effectively in an academic echo chamber, publishing papers that only they read and that don’t address any of the reservations of their critics.  A new fiercely critical review of the degrowth literature, published in the journal Ecological Economics, sums up everything that’s gone wrong. But it also offers the degrowth community the serious critical engagement it will need if it wants to move from idle speculation to a workable policy program. The authors analyzed 561 papers about degrowth in an effort to describe where the field is at today. What they uncovered was profoundly discouraging.  Their major takeaways: Of the 561 studies, “the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis … most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies … Data analysis is often superficial and incomplete … studies tend to not satisfy accepted standards for good research.” It’s rare to see a critique this stark of an entire field’s academic literature in a respected journal that is itself within that field (Ecological Economics publishes papers on degrowth). And, to be clear, these are some extremely damning critiques. They paint a picture of a field that’s unserious about the actual standards of academic work, one flooded with papers (many of them in reasonably respected journals) but conducted totally without reference to everything we actually know about how climate, development, and policy work.  Reading this review, one comes away with the impression that the degrowth literature is fundamentally unserious. The authors of the review say, “[O]ne is inclined to infer that degrowth cannot (yet) be considered as a significant field of academic research.” The review describes paper after paper with meaninglessly tiny sample sizes: sociological interviews with 10 volunteers who make handicrafts for a charity in a town in Germany, 12 interviews with residents of a town near Barcelona about tourism, eight interviews with environmental justice leaders in Croatia. Even a healthy field will have the occasional paper with a tiny sample size or that’s methodologically shaky, but the popularity of these tiny sample-size qualitative interview-based studies is typical of a field in its infancy that hasn’t yet nailed down its core questions or methodologies.  All of this is a significant problem. If a policy proposal is intended to solve a problem like climate change, it needs to be put into effect worldwide within the next decade or two. That’s not the stage of policy maturity where you publish lots of interviews with volunteers at NGOs; it’s the stage of policy maturity where you are expected to have (and where the mainstream climate policy literature does have) specific by-country emissions targets, breakdowns of possible routes for that country’s energy demand to be met while those emissions targets are met, and analyses of the trajectory so far.  You might expect that the field would have these struggles as it was new but would have higher-quality research as it matured. That does not appear to be the case with degrowthism, which has its origins as far back as the 1972 report “The Limits to Growth” by the Club of Rome. As the review authors concluded: “There is also no indication that things are improving with time.” Recent work is just as far from meeting scientific standards as older work.  None of this surprised me as someone who has tried in the past to wade through the degrowth literature for my reporting. But I am glad the review was comprehensively written up and published in a journal that people who believe in degrowth actually read.  If you think that our world needs degrowth, then the horrendously poor quality of the degrowth literature isn’t just annoying, it’s a serious emergency.  The more important a problem is, the more important it is to do high-quality, comprehensive, well-justified work on it. If degrowth ideas have something to offer the world, it’s all the more important that they adhere to normal standards about how to do research. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Jared Isaacman emerges from the Dragon spacecraft on Thursday morning. as the spacecraft passed near Australia on the planet below. A billionaire, entrepreneur, and avid pilot, Isaacman paused for just a moment as he stood on the edge of eternity and looked back at Earth.

Smart locks may still be a niche product, but lock behemoth Assa Abloy is clearly betting on a digital future for our doors. Despite being sued by the US Department of Justice for trying to buy too many smart lock manufacturers, the Swedish-based company just bought another one: sleek smart lock maker Level Lock. With this latest purchase, Assa Abloy, which owns a staggering 190 brands in the “access control” space, may now have a significant piece of the puzzle it needs to push the market into a digital future. “Their innovative platform provides an easy transition from mechanical locking to digital access solutions with minimal effort,” said Lucas Boselli, executive vice president of Assa Abloy, in a press release. Level’s technology...