Getting the right exposure is a critical ingredient in taking a good photo. And while your camera’s Auto mode does a pretty good job most of the time, there’s often room for improvement. Thankfully, tweaking the exposure is not as complicated as it might seem—after you learn a few simple rules, you…

About a month and a half ago, I walked into an AT&T Store, handed over my iPhone 4S, and asked to be switched from my unlimited iPhone data plan to a new LTE data plan. I bought the first-generation iPhone and I bought it early, during a brief and wonderful window before AT&T realized that offering…

Picture the tragic scenes in Crouch End, north London, early this year. The patrons of Harris + Hoole, a local coffee shop, had just learned to their horror that the supermarket chain Tesco owns a 49 per cent stake in the company. Shaken caffeine-guzzlers told the Guardian that they felt “duped” and…

Tim Wu, writing for The New Yorker “News Desk”, has done us all a grand favor by penning a sort of grand unified theory on how the “open beats closed” axiom can be true in the face of Apple’s decade-long success: “ Does a Company Like Apple Need a Genius Like Steve Jobs? ” Wu’s conclusion: yes,…

‘Do You Think You’re Going to Give This Part to Somebody Else? I’m Going to Blow You Motherfuckers Away.’ - Terrific retrospective on Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction by Mark Seal for Vanity Fair. - via DF

There are two websites where you can add a gram of heroin to your shopping cart as if you were buying asparagus on Fresh Direct. One belongs to Sigma-Aldrich, the St. Louis chemical company that synthesizes pure opioids for use in laboratory studies. For this you need to be a federally accredited…

In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taiga

A lethal bacterium was running rampant at an NIH hospital. Antibiotics were useless. Then two scientists began a frantic race to track down the killer—with the superbug’s own DNA.

Digital maps are the enemies of wonder. All-seeing satellites dampen our urge to explore, making the world a less exciting place... - via ALD

The adventure gene. The urge to explore, take risks, embrace change is innate. So how does sailing off the map make evolutionary sense?... - via ALD

Candace Weiss didn't know she had a family history of birth defects until she got pregnant with her daughter. That's when she learned that her grandmother, at the age of 42, had given birth to a baby with Down syndrome. "That child died young," she says. "But back in that time, they sent them away.…

Nearly 1.5 million people die from tuberculosis every year, even though most cases can be cured with routine antibiotic treatments. One country’s fight to get the ancient scourge under control has an unlikely hero: a simple diagnostic test.

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the…

Irene Gallo documents the printing process at the Tor bindery - via CR

via DF

via TF

The CIA is not in the habit of discussing its clandestine operations, but the agency’s purpose is clear enough. As then-chief James Woolsey said in a 1994 speech to former intelligence operatives: “What we really exist for is stealing secrets.” Indeed, the agency declined to comment for this…

IT IS an awful lot of rubbish. Since 1960 the amount of municipal waste being collected in America has nearly tripled, reaching 245m tonnes in 2005. According to European Union statistics, the amount of municipal waste produced in western Europe increased by 23% between 1995 and 2003, to reach 577kg…

via DF

Cosmo is huge – 6 foot 7 and 220 pounds the last time he was weighed, at a detention facility in Long Beach, California on June 26. And yet he's getting bigger, because Cosmo – also known as Cosmo the God , the social-engineering mastermind who weaseled his way past security systems at Amazon,…

Opening installment of a new series on what we can learn about human sex and gender by looking at the natural world.

PLASTIC here, newspapers there, bottles in that pile, tin cans over there. Across the rich world tonight a small army of worthy householders will pick through their rubbish to ready it for the recyclers. It is hardly pleasant work, but at least recyclers bear the mark of civic virtue—unlike those…

The truth about Jeff Dean appeared on April Fool’s Day 2007. Somewhere inside Google, a private website served up a list of facts about Dean, one of Google’s earliest employees and one of the main reasons the web giant handles more traffic than any other operation on the net. The site was only…

via CR

Detailed and well-sourced story by Greg Sandoval on Netflix’s tumultuous year. Must-read piece. - DF

Today, many people long for simpler times. It’s a natural reaction to a world in which money is becoming not just more abstract but more digital and virtual as well, in which sophisticated computer algorithms execute microsecond market transactions with no human intervention at all, in which…

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic JULY 28, 2012 Berkeley, Calif. CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving…

By Richard A. Muller October 21, 2011 Are you a global warming skeptic? There are plenty of good reasons why you might be. As many as 757 stations in the United States recorded net surface-temperature cooling over the past century. Many are concentrated in the southeast, where some people attribute…

Image credit: Wikipedia I recently stopped drinking coffee. Yeah, I know, why would anybody do that? For me it was a combination of health-related reasons, and overall I can say I’m happy I did. If you had asked me a few days after I kicked it, though, I would have told you it was one of the dumbest…

Mike Tetreault has spent an entire year preparing obsessively for this moment. He’s put in 20-hour workdays, practiced endlessly, and shut down his personal  life. Now the percussionist has 10 minutes to impress a Boston Symphony Orchestra selection committee. A single mistake and it’s over.  A…