Discoveries in the past decade have revealed more about the people for whom Stonehenge and nearby monuments held great meaning. Credit Adam Stanford/Aerial-Cam AMESBURY, England — About 6,300 years ago, a tree here toppled over. For the ancients in this part of southern England, it created a prime…

Inside the jihadi lifestyle magazine wars Samir Khan sat on the floor of a Charlotte, North Carolina mosque, describing his pro-al-Qaeda blog to a reporter from The New York Times . Khan was 21-years-old, living in his parents’ basement, where he continued to nurse an affinity for Islamic extremism…

Sherri Burks in Dallas loaded her dishwasher in preparation for the 9 p.m. start of free hours of electricity from TXU Energy. Credit Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times DALLAS — In Texas, wind farms are generating so much energy that some utilities are giving power away. Briana Lamb, an…

Clay Shirky Nov 6, 2015 The digital revolution in higher education has happened. In the fall of 2012, the most recent semester with complete data in the U.S., four million undergraduates took at least one course online , out of sixteen million total, with growth up since then. Those numbers mean…

iStock Donate B ack in 2009, I had a job with a Washington, D.C.-based newsletter called Water Policy Report . It wasn’t exactly a household name, but I was covering Congress, the federal courts, and the Environmental Protection Agency—a definite step up from the greased-pig-catching contests and…

Even the military may not be enough to protect an endangered Amazon tribe

The online future of TV is getting closer. Everyone from HBO to NBC, Showtime to CBS, is serving up an early iteration on the idea that TV soon will be just another app. This week, another old-media powerhouse signaled that it gets this is how TV's future will go down. Disney chairman and chief…

It all goes downhill after 30 — at least when it comes to happiness. “Adults over 30 are less happy than their predecessors,” concludes a study published in 2015 in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science, which examined happiness data from more than 50,000 adults, gleaned from the…

Frederic Filloux Nov 9, 2015 Thomas Schreiber at DNI’s conference Ad blocking keeps growing and widening the chasm between publishers and advertisers. Media executives no longer hold back, they now openly blame the advertising community for being too slow to grasp the full extent of the digital…

Since time immemorial polar bears, the largest land mammal carnivore on earth, have congregated in their hundreds, even thousands, on the shores of Hudson Bay in October/November, waiting for the winter ice to form after a summer of discontent to give them access once more to their favourite buffet…

VIEWED from above, the great steel roofs of Nigeria’s textile mills are an impressive sight, occupying block after block in the northern city of Kano. Yet from the ground a very different picture emerges. Entire estates sit eerily empty in what was once the country’s industrial heartland. A handful…

The new treatment, Electrically Accelerated and Enhanced Remineralisation (EAER), could be available within three years. Photograph: Hermes Morrison 2/Alamy Scientists have developed a new pain-free filling that allows cavities to be repaired without drilling or injections. The tooth-rebuilding…

Maybe Linus Pauling was on to something after all. Decades ago the Nobel Prize–winning chemist was relegated to the fringes of medicine after championing the idea that vitamin C could combat a host of illnesses, including cancer. Now, a study published online today in Science reports that vitamin C…

A computer-generated image of the proposed garden bridge between Temple and the South Bank.Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Visitors to the garden bridge in London will be tracked by their mobile phone signals and supervised by staff with powers to take people’s names and addresses and confiscate and…

A LLEN LEBLANC LED A VIGOROUS LIFE as a young man growing up in Mossville, Louisiana. He had a sheet-rocking business, drove trucks, and worked at the Conoco oil refinery. He helped his mother and stepfather run their nightclub, where Tina Turner and James Brown used to play. He also helped out at…

Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle's investigative journalist Jessikka Aro has been harassed in disturbing ways while she has covered Russian online propaganda. About a year ago there was a twist in my life. I realized the depth of what had happened when a respected journalist Pasi Kivioja asked me to…

Facebook Groups, Slack, Nextdoor and others are leading a charge into new territory for the social internet. Facebook VP Will Cathcart's drawing As he kicked off a discussion about his company's Groups product, Facebook product management VP Will Cathcart walked over to a whiteboard and drew a…

I remember a conversation with a colleague a couple years ago: During one summer Friday, nearly half his work emails bounced back with out-of-office autoreplies. My colleague rolled his eyes. "It's not like they're really not reading their emails on vacation," he groaned. He has a point. Once, I…

Human beings will always be explorers. We’ve pretty well surveyed our planet, our tiny blue dot, for answers and only found more questions. Why are we here? How did we get here? What does it mean? What happens when vast numbers of us can leave our tiny blue dot behind? NASA We’ve already taken baby…

A spate of shipwrecks recently found near a group of Greek islands has given researchers new insights into how trade routes and sailing technology evolved in the Eastern Mediterranean. And with more exploration planned, additional discoveries are still likely. Over a stretch of two weeks in…

Disclaimer : I am not responsible for anything you do with this information. As I entered the parking lot, I took out my parking ticket and put a sticker on it to validate my parking. My company buys stickers for parking validation which cost around $10 each. Looking a bit more at the stickers, I…

Five dimensions? WTF? By this point you can probably tell where things are going. At IBM Research in Zurich, they are working on a technology that solves both power delivery and cooling in vertically stacked electronics, with the eventual goal of enabling the creation of skyscraper CPUs, GPUs, or…

The pinball table is a bright spectacle: pulsing lights in rich purple and blue, the back glass covered with an amiable-looking cartoon spaceman in a futuristic flying car oddly reminiscent of a Volkswagen Beetle, a cacophony of futuristic pings, bleeps, and zaps. There’s the satisfying thunk of the…

Letters of note.Photograph: Alamy Many words in English are homophones. That is, they are pronounced the same but are spelt differently. For example AISLE and ISLE If we write this as AISLE = ISLE and consider it to be an equation in algebra - as in A x I x S x L x E = I x S x L x E - we can…

Every nation-state tends towards the imperial—that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police, propaganda, courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something…

We do this to our philosophies. We redraft their contours based on projected shadows, or give them a cartoonish shape like a caricaturist emphasising all the wrong features. This is how Buddhism becomes, in the popular imagination, a doctrine of passivity and even laziness, while Existentialism…

Story highlights The hackers are suspected of accessing the LEO.gov law enforcement portal They are also suspected of hacking into the email account of FBI No. 2 Mark Giuliano Washington (CNN) Hackers who breached the AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan have not only evaded arrest, but…

(updated below – Update II) Shortly after the news broke of the U.S. attack on a Doctors without Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, there was abundant evidence suggesting (not proving, but suggesting) that the attack was no accident: (1) MSF repeatedly told the U.S. military about the…

Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders staked out what is perhaps the boldest marijuana policy position of any serious presidential candidate when he announced that he would seek to remove marijuana from the federal government's official list of dangerous drugs. On Wednesday, the candidate took the first…

The Koch brothers are on a publicity tour to change their image. Long caricatured by Democrats as shadowy billionaires who buy Republican politicians so they can grow their profits and destroy the environment, Charles and David Koch did on Tuesday something they have never done before: a joint…

Chile’s Communist Party Rejects Intervention in Venezuela Nigeria: Early Tally Shows Buhari in Lead, Opposition Rejects 86% Votes For New Constitution in Cuba US VP Pence Leads Lima Group, Pushes for More Severe Blockade Venezuela: EU Spurns Violent Intervention for Peaceful Solution Campaign…

Civil rights attorneys suing the state of Minnesota for failing to educate poor and minority children called Thursday for a metro-wide integration plan and other remedies to address increasingly segregated schools. But redrawing boundaries — one of the lawsuit’s proposed solutions — is a…

Do you earn a decent salary, but live paycheck-to-paycheck? If so, you are part of a growing segment of the American population: the income rich-ish and asset poor. We tend to associate empty bank balances with those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder. But many of America’s upper middle class…

HOW THE BLOOMBERG TERMINAL MADE HISTORY—AND STAYS EVER RELEVANT

Phones used to just call people. Then we put cameras and the internet in them, and a man in a mock turtleneck created one that revolutionized the way we communicate. You might be surprised to hear it, but we’re near a similar inflection point with drones. Right now, they’re seen either as scary,…

Human language may be shaped by climate and terrain

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Researchers aren’t sure why, but in the 23 U.S. states where medical marijuana has been legalized, deaths from opioid overdoses have decreased by almost 25 percent, according to a new analysis. “Most of the discussion on medical marijuana has been about its effect on…

Photo-montage: IEEE Spectrum; Photos: Toyota From left: iRoad, a three-wheeled electric concept that Toyota is testing in some cities; the Human Support Robot, designed to help people at home; an autonomous test vehicle that Lexus, a Toyota division, demonstrated last month. Advertisement Today in…

Five years. That is how much time has passed since we have seen an affordable server processor that could keep up with or even beat Intel's best Xeons. These days no less than 95% of the server CPUs shipped are Intel Xeons. A few years ago, it looked like ARM servers were going to shake up the…