Inside the 50-year quest to build a mechanical organ Steve Williams couldn’t breathe . The former athlete had cardiomyopathy, which occasionally choked his lungs with fluid, making him gasp for air. But this felt different; Williams felt like he was dying. He was raced to an Orange County hospital,…

There are 2.3 million Americans in prison or jail. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. One in three black men can expect to spend time in prison. There are 2.7 million minors with an incarcerated parent. The imprisonment rate has grown by more than 400…

Illustration by Andrew DeGraff Not too long ago, you could write a general history of the United States in the previous century as a story of ever-increasing wealth, power, and equality. Quite a few historians did . Even after the dot-com bust and Sept. 11, it seemed that at least since the Second…

朝日新聞デジタル Japanese 朝日新聞中文网 Chinese The Asahi Shimbun | AJW Asia and Japan Watch Register Log In RSS AJW.Asahi ajwasahi Behind the News Politics Social Affairs People Sports 3/11 Disaster Fukushima nuclear crisis Life and Death Quake and Tsunami Recovery Analysis and Opinion Cool Japan Style Fun Spots…

Engineer Roger Shawyer’s controversial EmDrive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech. Though no official peer-reviewed lab paper has been published yet,…

Cocktail Party At The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, March 13, 1961 takomabibelot Marijuana enhances social interactions (or so I've heard). But how does this work on the molecular level? And what's it tell us about the normal chemistry of the brain? Well, cannabinoid receptors are present in brain…

Terror in Little Saigon An old war comes to a new country. by A.C. Thompson, ProPublica November 3, 2015 in partnership with Frontline Introduction The journalists were assassinated on American soil, one after another. Duong Trong Lam was the first. He was 27 years old and ran a Vietnamese-language…

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…

0 Shares Media Options Download Video Download Audio Get DVD Other Formats This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate 0 Shares This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate When it comes to sheltering the wealth of the super-rich, the United States is moving…

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters Without Congressional permission, public debate, or any attempt to rally the American public’s support, President Obama has ordered U.S. ground troops to a war zone, his most flagrantly unconstitutional war-making since he unlawfully helped to overthrow Muammar al-Qaddafi.…

The New York Times published a piece over the weekend about the political prospects of Bernie Sanders , a politician who apparently does not kiss enough babies : “[Sanders] rarely drops by diners or coffee shops with news cameras in tow, unlike most politicians. He hardly ever kisses babies, aides…

"Don't buy a barrel of oil," the broker said. "It'll kill you." A fortuitous meeting between a gas trader and his broker at a bar in downtown New York was not going the way I had hoped. After revealing a long-held plan to try to buy a barrel of crude, I was now receiving a disappointingly stern…

Op-Ed Contributor How the F.B.I. Can Detain, Render and Threaten Without Risk The F.B.I.'s headquarters in Washington. AT exactly 5 p.m. on March 13, 2007, just as I was preparing to leave my cubicle in Washington for the day, I got a phone call from the journalist Jonathan Landay of McClatchy…

Sam Kronick Starting a cross-country drive to New York in Los Angeles is pretty inconvenient, unless your cross-country drive is also a vision quest to see the Internet. More specifically, we'd been tasked with going to see “the cloud”—a term I've generally been loath to embrace, as I tend to think…

First published in December 2013; updated October, 2016. This entry presents the empirical evidence of how inequality between incomes has changed over time, and how the levels of inequality in different countries can vary significantly. It also presents some of the research on the factors driving…

Some whales never make it back to the ocean: “The Whale Beached between Scheveningen and Katwijk, with Elegant Sightseers,” by the Dutch painter Esaias van de Velde. Wikimedia On Tuesday, Twitter Inc. announced another dreary set of quarterly earnings. While the company beat investor expectations,…

This natural gas station in Sheberghan, Afghanistan, cost American taxpayers nearly $43 million to build. SIGAR "DOD charged the American taxpayer $43 million for what is likely the world's most expensive gas station." That's what Special Inspector General John F. Sopko found when he looked at the…

The rest of the team Brems, who works in advertising and marketing and is now mostly retired, lived in Seattle for more than 20 years before moving to Orcas Island about 15 years ago. He has been struck by the “can-do” spirit of the community, which in the past built its own water plant and fire…

Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans, Study Finds

Last week changes to the Windows 10 upgrade path mean it is going to become increasingly difficult for any non-techy users to avoid being pushed to Microsoft ’s new operating system. But given Windows 10 is better than Windows 7 and Windows 8, why would that be a problem? Because of policies like…

Internet and social media companies will be banned from putting customer communications beyond their own reach under new laws to be unveiled on Wednesday. Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked…

Airbnb has become its own worst enemy

ore than 40% of goods sold online in China during 2014 were either counterfeit or of bad quality, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Getty Images Japan loves its robots but still uses faxes in the office Japan has a reputation for being fascinated by robots and hi-tech gadgets - a nation at the forefront of manufacturing innovation. But the technological reality in many offices is strikingly different. This is a country that uses…

This story appears in the November Issue of VICE . If you are looking for pot growers on the remote southern end of the Yurok Reservation in Humboldt County, California, you might start your search at Pearson's, a cluttered grocery perched above the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity rivers. The…

A woman makes roti (flat bread) in the kitchen of her home in Kaskikot, Nepal. (John B. Healey/For The Washington Post) A bout 3 billion of the world’s poorest people burn wood, charcoal or dung in smoky, open fires to cook their food and heat their homes. Millions die annually from lung and heart…

Violence Against Women Driving Central American Refugee Crisis, Says UN Repor

Archaeologists exploring the remote reaches of a military training base in southern California have uncovered nearly 9,000 artifacts that represent more than 11,500 years of human history in the Mojave Desert, a new study reports. The artifacts, found at multiple sites across the base, include more…

Major web and telecommunications companies, including Google, Twitter, Facebook, Vodafone and Orange, have scored poorly on a new index intended to track how companies protect users’ privacy and freedom of expression. None of the companies evaluated by the Ranking Digital Rights project for its…

Scientists typically shy away from activism, but many now believe it’s what’s needed to punch through the machinations and inertia regarding chemical regulation. Scientists are trained to express themselves rationally. They avoid personal attacks when they disagree. But some scientific arguments…

It could soon be illegal for police to deploy stingray surveillance technology , which sweeps up cell phone metadata and voice information, without a warrant. A new House of Representatives bill would make any violations to that policy punishable with up to 10 years in prison. Republican Rep. Jason…

If you live hundreds of miles away from the coast, it probably never occurs to you that the plastic bag or cup lid that you toss into the gutter might make its way into the Atlantic or the Pacific.

Since then, they’ve been using the data from this reactor to study how nuclear waste migrates through the environment The Physics arXiv Blog Apr 29, 2014 In June 1972, nuclear scientists at the Pierrelatte uranium enrichment plant in south-east France noticed a strange deficit in the amount of…

Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg Money is flooding out of Canada at the fastest pace in the developed world as the nation’s decade-long oil boom comes to an end and little else looks ready to take the industry’s place as an economic driver. QuickTake Canada…

A large segment of white middle-aged Americans has suffered a startling rise in its death rate since 1999, according to a review of statistics published Monday that shows a sharp reversal in decades of progress toward longer lives. The mortality rate for white men and women ages 45-54 with less than…

‘Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate.’Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images I ’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing…

Apple devices are widely considered extremely secure and hard to hack. But as the internet adage says, everything can be hacked—even the new iPhone. Over the weekend, somebody claimed the $1 million bounty set by the new startup Zerodium , according to its founder Chaouki Bekrar, a notorious…

Leonard Nimoy in the original “Star Trek,” which ran on NBC from 1966 to 1969. Credit CBS “Star Trek,” that venerable outer-space adventure, is boldly going where it’s been before, but hasn’t been seen in more than a decade: back to television. The science-fiction program that chronicled the voyages…

With all our talk about police violence aimed at poor and minority communities, we have yet to talk about the group most likely to be killed by law enforcement: Native Americans. Native American men are incarcerated at four times the rate of white men and Native American women are sent to prison at…