I joined Facebook in April 2005 shortly after it was opened up to Mississippi State students. Despite being an early Facebook supporter, I deleted my account back in May 2017. Privacy and ethical concerns rank at the top of the list, while other factors—my waning usage of the service for…

If you've ever watched The Jetsons as a kid, you probably remember Rosie. The friendly robot that did all the chores in the house of the future. Who haven't dreamt of having one of their own? 50 years after the The Jetsons were first aired, we're way closer to that. Robots won't prepare dinners or…

Photo: Franklin Robotics Advertisement Editor’s Picks iRobot Brings Visual Mapping and Navigation to the Roomba 980 Agriculture Drones Are Finally Cleared for Takeoff Bosch's Giant Robot Can Punch Weeds to Death iRobot’s Roomba robotic vacuum is, arguably, the most successful robot ever made. Some…

The river cascades through steep-sided gorges and churns around isolated towers of rock, before winding across a vast plain beyond. It is a torrent to rival the mighty Colorado River that carved out the Grand Canyon. Yet this dramatic natural wonder has never appeared in any tourist photographs, nor…

Image Credit: Elena Scotti/Gizmodo/GMG, photos via Shutterstock In 2009, Gary Olhoeft walked into a Best Buy to buy some DVDs. He walked out with his whole body twitching and convulsing. Olhoeft has a brain implant, tiny bits of microelectronic circuitry that deliver electrical impulses to his motor…

Preethi Kasireddy Jul 5, 2017 The Crypto market is gaining lots of steam. Gravity-defying price rallies… Bitcoin Price Chart (1 year) Ethereum Price Chart (1 year) Top 8 Cryptocurrencies Price Chart (excluding Bitcoin & Ethereum) …and multi-million dollar token sales are commonplace, as are…

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In…

The world's most detailed scan of the brain's internal wiring has been produced by scientists at Cardiff University. The MRI machine reveals the fibres which carry all the brain's thought processes. It's been done in Cardiff, Nottingham, Cambridge and Stockport, as well as London England and London…

Nature | News Sharing Pachyderms have extra copies of a key tumour-fighting gene. Ewen Callaway Article tools Rights & Permissions Theo Allofs/Minden Pictures/FLPA Multiple copies of a tumour-suppressor gene help elephants avoid cancer. Elephants have evolved extra copies of a gene that fights…

US military intelligence agencies have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows Tom Secker Jul 4, 2017 By Tom Secker and Matthew Alford Plato’s Cave reimagined for the Hollywood era — copyright Derek Swansonn Published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE , a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for…

Get the Mach newsletter. June 30, 2017, 2:01 PM GMT / Updated June 30, 2017, 2:01 PM GMT By Irene Klotz, Space.com As NASA makes plans to one day send humans to Mars, one of the key technical gaps the agency is working to fill is how to provide enough power on the Red Planet’s surface for fuel…

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China’s latest maneuvre in a sweeping crackdown on internet content has sent a chill through a diverse community of filmmakers, bloggers, media and educators who fear their sites could be shut down as Beijing tightens control. Over the last month, Chinese regulators have…

(Image: file photo) NEW YORK, NY -- US authorities intercepted and recorded millions of phone calls last year under a single wiretap order, authorized as part of a narcotics investigation. The wiretap order authorized an unknown government agency to carry out real-time intercepts of 3.29 million…

Since we’re coming up on the Fourth of July, and towns everywhere are preparing their better-than-ever fireworks spectaculars, we would like to offer this humbling bit of history. Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It…

Inner view of the Manhattan Project's scientific library. Courtesy Los Alamos Historical Society Photo Archives The residents of Los Alamos, New Mexico—a town that wasn’t supposed to exist—lived in a viscous state of secrecy during World War II. To disguise the existence of the nuclear bomb being…

Erika Larsen for Politico Magazine The residents of Colorado Springs undertook a radical experiment in government. Here’s what they got. Caleb Hannan is a writer in Denver. Colorado Springs has always leaned hard on its reputation for natural beauty. An hour’s drive south of Denver, it sits at the…

Metadata? Encryption? Backdoor? Tor Browser? VPN? PGP? When it comes to digital security for journalists, the amount of technical terms and acronyms can be scary. But tools to ensure online privacy can be crucial to protecting sources, which is why the site Privacidade para Jornalistas (Privacy for…

Repeated safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Laboratory’s work on the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads Technicians at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory settled on what seemed like a surefire way to win praise from their bosses in August 2011: In a hi-tech testing and manufacturing…

What did the ancient Mediterranean smell like? How could scent be used to speak directly to the Gods? Where did the frankincense and myrrh given to the infant Jesus come from? These questions and many more were asked this weekend at a conference at the British School at Rome and the École française…

Biodiversity refers to the variety of all living things on Earth, but people often have very specific ideas of what it means. If you run an online search for images of biodiversity, you are likely to find lots of photos of tropical rainforests and coral reefs. Those ecosystems are invaluable, but…

Credit: harpazo_hope Getty Images Our brains have evolved to recognize and remember faces. As infants, one of the first things we learn is to look at the faces of those around us, respond to eye contact and mimic facial expressions. As adults, this translates to an ability to recognize human faces…

Nature | News Sharing DNA of 234-year-old tree has few mutations, giving weight to idea that plants protect their stem cells. Heidi Ledford Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Abaddon1337/CC BY-SA 4.0 The 'Napoleon' oak has few single-letter mutations in its genome. The towering 234-year-old…

Hamzeh AlMaaytah in his bookstore's storage room. Courtesy of Hamzeh AlMaaytah Hamzeh AlMaaytah rarely sleeps, but when he does, it’s usually on the mattress hidden behind a screen in the back of his bookshop. Hamzeh, 36, is one of Amman’s most dedicated bookshop owners, and certainly its most…

W e have long deemed ourselves to be at the pinnacle of cognitive abilities among animals. But that is different from being at the pinnacle of evolution in a number of very important ways. As Mark Twain pointed out in 1903, to presume that evolution has been a long path leading to humans as its…

Story and Photographs by Laurent Ballesta This story appears in the July 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine. In the morning, when we arrive on foot from Dumont d’Urville, the French scientific base on the Adélie Coast of East Antarctica, we have to break up a thin layer of ice that has…

From vaccinations to climate change, getting science wrong has very real consequences. But journal articles, a primary way science is communicated in academia, are a different format to newspaper articles or blogs and require a level of skill and undoubtedly a greater amount of patience. Here…

World Asia China In vast social-engineering experiment, facial-recognition systems crunch data from ubiquitous cameras to monitor citizens

Photo: Hans Camenzind This is part of IEEE Spectrum’s Special Report: 25 Microchips That Shook the World. In microchip design, as in life, small things sometimes add up to big things. Dream up a clever microcircuit, get it sculpted in a sliver of silicon, and your little creation may unleash a…

SpaceX has succeeded in launching another Falcon 9 into space, this time for client Iridium, a global satellite telecommunications provider. The Iridium-2 mission on Sunday saw a Falcon 9 take off from SpaceX’s Vandenberg Air Force base in California, with a payload of 10 satellites destined to…

Crony capitalism at work. Photographer: Meridith Kohut/Bloomberg Photographer: Meridith Kohut/Bloomberg When most people use the word “rent,” they mean the price paid to live in a house or apartment. But when economists say “rent,” they mean money that one person extracts from another without…

Chinese authorities have sent shockwaves through the social media sphere, with a blanket ban on livestreaming across three major online platforms. On Thursday, the government ordered Weibo, iFeng and ACFUN to stop all its video and audio streaming services, according to an FT report . Weibo, China's…

WASHINGTON/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Western technology companies, including Cisco, IBM and SAP, are acceding to demands by Moscow for access to closely guarded product security secrets, at a time when Russia has been accused of a growing number of cyber attacks on the West, a Reuters investigation has…

Alexander Graham Bell (right) and his assistants observing the progress of one of his tetrahedral kites, 1908 — Source . Although best known for developing the practical telephone — for which he became the first, in 1876, to secure a US patent — the Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell is…

A recording of an internal briefing at Apple earlier this month obtained by The Outline sheds new light on how far the most valuable company in the world will go to prevent leaks about new products. The briefing, titled “Stopping Leakers - Keeping Confidential at Apple,” was led by Director of…

Broadband industry lobby groups want to stop individual states from investigating the speed claims made by Internet service providers, and they are citing the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules in their effort to hinder the state-level actions. The industry attempt to undercut…

Hong Kong (CNN) The two leaders sat several feet apart at a long table covered in green silk. Between them, a tiny twin flagpole bore the standards of the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China. The crowd behind applauded as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chinese Premier…

Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait Hesitating between the Arts of Music and Painting , 1791 (via Wikimedia Commons) Listen to a narrated version of this essay: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky; Penguin Press, 800 pp., $35 Have you ever thought about killing…