The Hedgehog Review : Vol. 19 No. 2 (Summer 2017) Mark Edmundson Audio brought to you by curio.io , a Hedgehog Review partner. The Hedgehog Review: Summer 2017 (Volume 19 | Issue 2) Issue TOC >> Print Article >> Subscribe >> W e commonly think of hangovers as the next-day result of too much alcohol.…

In a white paper sent to members of Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, CTIA, a telecom lobbying group that represents Verizon, AT&T, and other wireless carriers, argued that "Congress and the Administration should reject the [DHS] Report's call for greater regulation" while…

A fundamental change is underway in stock market investing, and the spin-off effects are poised to dramatically impact corporate America. In the past, individuals and large institutions mostly invested in actively managed mutual funds, such as Fidelity, in which fund managers pick stocks with the…

New studies of the levels of atmospheric lead as evidenced by icecores drilled from an Alpine Glacier lets scientists gauge the devastating effects of the Black Death on Economy and Society. It appears all ground to a halt. Next-generation ice core technology reveals true minimum natural levels of…

In what is believed to be a world first, scientists have reversed brain damage in a toddler that drowned in a swimming pool. Using oxygen therapy, scientists were able to restore her ability to walk and talk just months after the accident, in which she spent 15 minutes submerged in a swimming pool…

This article was created in partnership with the National Geographic Society. In December 2018, Great Britain's Royal Statistical Society named the core fact in this story—that only about nine percent of all plastic ever made has likely been recycled— its statistic of the year . Mass production of…

Report demands massive expansion of military-industrial complex to maintain global ‘access to resources’ Nafeez Ahmed Jul 17, 2017 By Nafeez Ahmed Published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE , a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support us to keep digging where others fear to…

Share 885 Share 272 Reddit 360 2K Shares With Bitcoin , Ethereum, and a host of other cryptocurrencies once again making headlines following an incredibly bullish year, crypto security has never been more important, this guide will teach you how to protect your cryptocurrency with a paper wallet and…

Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea by erik reece farrar, straus and giroux, 368 pages, $14.99 Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism by chris jennings random house, 512 pages, $28 The Story of the Shakers by flo morse countryman, 128 pages, $12.95 The Shaker’s…

A good rocket launch site has a few important characteristics. An unpopulated patch of land near an ocean is preferable, so no one gets showered with wayward bits of flaming metal. It’s also nice if it’s on the equator—like all spheres rotating on an axis, the Earth spins fastest in the middle,…

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Following an internet-wide day of protest on July 12, many activists are claiming a victory in the fight to preserve net neutrality against a proposed complete regulatory repeal by the Federal Communications Commission. But was it really a victory? Cynics…

i 1 Vote You can find anything and everything on the internet, yet nothing that explains how to track cell phones. Let us clarify right away, we are not talking about how to track your own cell phone in case it’s lost or stolen. We are talking about tracking everyone that lives, breathes and wears a…

Op-Ed Contributors Wall Street Profits by Putting Investors in the Slow Lane Wall Street has developed a new way, clouded in obscurity, to fleece the hundreds of millions of Americans who have money invested in company pension plans, mutual funds and insurance policies. Institutional brokers are…

“The Accusation” may be the first work of dissident fiction by a living North Korean writer ever smuggled out of that country. Photograph by Gavin Hellier / Alamy The story goes something like this: nearly thirty years ago, a talentedNorth Korean propagandist secretly began writing fiction critical…

Ron Sachs/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Justice Department will issue new directives to increase the federal govenment's use of civil asset forfeiture, a controversial practice that allows law enforcement to seize property from suspected criminals without…

As the plane descended over Iowa, Fan Yijia could see a quilt of green and yellow cornfields extending to the horizon. It had taken more than 24 hours – and one missed flight – for the first-year University of Iowa student to travel from Jiaxing in eastern China to the American Midwest. To her weary…

Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog , Armstrong Economics, last week. Officers can take cash and property from…

Not such a birdbrain Mathias Osvath/Lund University By Anil Ananthaswamy Ravens can plan for future events at least as well as 4-year-old humans and some adult, non-human great apes. The birds did this in tasks they wouldn’t encounter in the wild, so it isn’t an adaptation to an ecological niche,…

Giphy In the age of the hipster, dust-covered and irrelevant mediums like the vinyl and cassette tape have slowly been given a new lease of life. Now, thanks to Radiohead , it looks like popular British computer the ZX Spectrum might be the next '80s relic to come back into fashion. Celebrating the…

IBM’s Watson unit is receiving heat today in the form of a scathing equity research report from Jefferies’ James Kisner . The group believes that IBM’s investment into Watson will struggle to return value to shareholders. In recent years, IBM has increasingly leaned on Watson as one of its core…

Technology Ilya Poropudas · 11 July 2017 We’ve been told the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is right around the corner. But what if it isn’t? What if this is just another false dawn? After all, we’ve been set to harvest the rich bounty of AI before. But it wouldn’t be the first time our…

Earth has no shortage of stunning landforms: Mt. Everest rises majestically above the clouds; the Grand Canyon rents deep into desert rock layers; the mountains that make up the Ethiopian Highlands, aka the Roof of Africa, tower above the rest of the continent. But all of these natural icons pale in…

AT THE start of this year, two straws in the wind caught the attention of those who follow the development of artificial intelligence (AI) globally. First, Qi Lu, one of the bosses of Microsoft, said in January that he would not return to the world’s largest software firm after recovering from a…

Enlarge / NASA's chief of human spaceflight, Bill Gerstenmaier, speaks at the Humans to Mars summit in 2015. NASA For the last five years or so, NASA has sold the public on a Journey to Mars , a grand voyage by which the agency will land humans on the red planet during the 2030s. With just budgetary…

Chongqing, across the Yangtze. Photographer: Qilai Shen Photographer: Qilai Shen As a Chinese friend of mine was helping me buy a plane ticket from Kunming to Chongqing, I read aloud from my guidebook : "... the [city] has little appeal. Overcrowded and fast-paced, the city is plagued by oppressive…

In a new study published in Nature , a group of scientists at Harvard have successfully stored a GIF— yes, like a moving meme — into live bacteria ( E. coli to be specific). It’s a weird idea, but scientists have actually been using the genetic wondertool known as CRISPR or “clustered regularly…

Demon ruler Bael, from the Dictionnaire Infernal . Louis Le Breton/Public Domain The demons of the underworld that tempt us into sin are (theoretically, anyway) endless in number. Yet this didn’t stop the early 19th century occultist writer Jacques Collin de Plancy from trying to catalog them…

People are (rightfully) freaking out about their privacy as the Senate voted to let internet providers share your private data with advertisers. While it’s important to protect your privacy, it doesn’t mean that you should sign up to a VPN service and tunnel all your internet traffic through VPN…

Subscribe to Motherboard Radio today! http://apple.co/1DWdc9d In October of last year Motherboard gained access to a massive, secretive Bitcoin mine housed within a repurposed factory in the Liaoning Province in rural northeast China. This is the infrastructure that keeps the digital currency’s…

Taking advantage of the cheap and plentiful hydroelectric power that an army of computers require, bitcoin mining is spreading in remote parts of China’s Sichuan province. In dark and isolated warehouses, bitcoin mining machines hum along solving equations to produce the highly valued…

A Commodore 64 computer. (Photo: Luca Boldrini/CC BY 2.0 ) A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium , a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. Back in the early ’90s, it wasn’t a sure thing that Microsoft Windows was going to take over the market, even though…

‘Exporting death and harm’ ... Photograph by David Levene.Photograph: Guardian Design Team B ritish American Tobacco (BAT) and other multinational tobacco firms have threatened governments in at least eight countries in Africa demanding they axe or dilute the kind of protections that have saved…

Using AI and algorithms to return to feudal economic models Thaddeus Howze Apr 17, 2017 For the sake of this essay, feudal economic models imply the idea that a very tiny segment of the society is fantastically rich while the bulk of society works hard, has few choices about the work they do, and…

Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab boasts 400 million users worldwide. As many as 200 million may not know it. The huge reach of Kaspersky’s technology is partly the result of licensing agreements that allow customers to quietly embed the software in everything from firewalls to sensitive…

Just 100 companies are responsible for more than 70 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions over the last three decades, new research has revealed. The Carbon Majors Report , from the Carbon Disclosure Project, found that just 25 of those companies are the source of more than half of greenhouse…

In August 2016, Apple's head of security Ivan Krstic stole the show at one of the biggest security conferences in the world with an unexpected announcement . "I wanna share some news with you," Krstic said at the Black Hat conference, before announcing that Apple was finally launching a bug bounty…

For years, two-factor authentication has been the most important advice in personal cybersecurity — one that consumer tech companies were surprisingly slow to recognize. The movement seemed to coalesce in 2012, after journalist Mat Honan saw hackers compromise his Twitter, Amazon, and iCloud…

T he first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent…

Never-Before-Published Hannah Arendt on What Freedom and Revolution Really Mean