Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “Between the World and Me” Seattle Times book editor Mary Ann Gwinn talks with the best-selling author of “Between the World and Me,” now in its 12th printing. Lit Life Jacket of “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,”…

Too little has been done to safeguard citizens' fundamental rights following revelations of electronic mass surveillance, say MEPs in a resolution voted on Thursday. They urge the EU Commission to ensure that all data transfers to the US are subject to an "effective level of protection" and ask EU…

(C ountries with commercial LTE service as of December 7, 2014 shaded in red; Source Wikipedia article ) 4G mobile communication networks, also known as "LTE" (Long Term Evolution) are widely deployed. How good is LTE security? Ravishankar Borgaonkar , a postdoc in my research group , and Altaf…

thierry ehrmann You gotta love this twisted logic. In May, a federal appeals court declared the National Security Agency's bulk telephone metadata collection program illegal because it wasn't authorized under the Patriot Act, as the Obama administration and its predecessor administration had…

Earlier today, Google’s parent company Alphabet announced its high-flying Project Loon has partnered with Indonesia’s three largest telcos to start countrywide testing. It will deliver internet access in rural areas at the beginning of next year. Don’t know what Project Loon is? Essentially, it’s…

I t is the biggest of problems, it is the smallest of problems. At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works. There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbiting planets, colliding galaxies, the dynamics of…

The astronomer and the witch – how Kepler saved his mother from the stake

A nurse organizes the files of deceased patients at a TB hospital in Togliatti, Russia. Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis is a huge problem in the former Soviet Union. Misha Friedman Tuberculosis is now killing more people each year than HIV, according to new data from the World Health Organization.…

From left: BSQT 3347 club wheat, perennial breeding line DdW 1933, Edison hard white spring, Red Russian historical wheat, Skagit club wheat breeding line, Skagit 4325 breeding line. Credit Kenji Aoki for The New York Times The Food Issue Industrial production destroyed both the taste and the…

Hyperspace, ghosts, and colourful cubes — Jon Crabb on the work of Charles Howard Hinton and the cultural history of higher dimensions. The coloured cubes — known as “Tesseracts” — as depicted in the frontispiece to Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension (1904) – Source . (Want it as a poster? Buy it here…

Advertisement Photo: Scott Torborg/Crowd Supply Has the computer become a black box, even to experienced electrical engineers? Will we be forever reliant upon large, opaque organizations to build them for us? Absolutely not, we say. And to prove our point, we built our very own laptop, from the…

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - A drone carrying mobile phones, drugs, hacksaw blades and other material dangling in a bundle from a fishing line crashed at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester before inmates could grab the contraband, prison officials said on Tuesday. The drone clipped razor wire…

The first study to measure the incidence of medication errors and adverse drug events during the perioperative period — immediately before, during and right after a surgical procedure — has found that some sort of mistake or adverse event occurred in every second operation and in 5 percent of…

Law enforcement agencies around the country have been all too eager to adopt mass surveillance technologies, but sometimes they have put little effort into ensuring the systems are secure and the sensitive data they collect on everyday people is protected. Case in point: automated license plate…

My Photo Agency Restaurant owners in Paris are furious with chefs who have started catering for diners in their own homes - traditional eateries say they could be put out of business as websites put customers directly in touch with cooks. In a small flat not far from the Pompidou Centre, a young…

Scientists note that fear of terrorism makes people stupid . As I’ve repeatedly noted , FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, constitutional law expert professor Jonathan Turley, Time Magazine, and the Washington Post have all said that U.S. government officials “were trying to create an…

It got a lot of attention this morning when I tweeted , “You’re Eight Times More Likely to be Killed by a Police Officer than a Terrorist.” It’s been quickly retweeted dozens of times, indicating that the idea is interesting to many people. So let’s discuss it in more than 140 characters. In case it…

Today in Texas, former prosecutor and judge Ken Anderson pled guilty to intentionally failing to disclose evidence in a case that sent an innocent man, Michael Morton , to prison for the murder of his wife. When trying the case as a prosecutor, Anderson possessed evidence that may have cleared…

Utility death spirals That rise in rates could be significant. People who follow the topic have laid out two scenarios of renewable adoption that could potentially be disastrous for utilities. One of them starts with consumers facing high electricity prices. Consumer grade death spiral: Right now,…

James Verini As the sun set on a Saturday in early February, Mubarak Angalo, a farmer in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, was riding in a pickup truck with two friends. They had spent the day at a market, selling vegetables, and were returning to their village when they heard a low droning sound overhead.…

Nature | News Sharing US regulators clear a viral melanoma therapy, paving the way for a promising field with a chequered past. Heidi Ledford Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Dr. Andrejs Liepins/SPL Killer T cells (orange) are recruited to attack malignant cells (mauve) in the viral-based…

N othing focuses the mind like a moment of peril. John Hockenberry, the heavily-decorated journalist and commentator, had one of those nearly four decades ago. Yet it has never left him, and it always plays out in his memory, as he puts it, “in super slo-mo.” “About 38 years ago, I was on a road in…

Credit Illustration by Christoph Niemann Not too long ago, for-profit colleges looked like the future of education. Targeting so-called “nontraditional students”—who are typically older, often have jobs, and don’t necessarily go to school full time—they advertised aggressively to attract business,…

The last line of a 17th century poem by John Donne prompted Louise Noble’s quest. “Women,” the line read, are not only “Sweetness and wit,” but “mummy, possessed.” Sweetness and wit, sure. But mummy? In her search for an explanation, Noble, a lecturer of English at the University of New England in…

A sonic tractor beam that can grab tiny objects and move them around has been created by scientists in Spain. They used the same technology to lift and spin objects in the air using only the forces produced by a field of ultrasonic waves. Though not much use for capturing vessels in the vacuum of…

There may be a scientific reason why you can’t stop hitting that ‘snooze’ button in the mornings. It’s actually because waking from sleep before 10 a.m. is biologically unnatural. You’ve been there, dreading that morning alarm. Whether is the coffee that helps to inspire you to rise from your bed…

ResearchScienceGenetics A new study of chickens overturns the popular assumption that evolution is only visible over long time scales. By studying individual chickens that were part of a long-term pedigree, the scientists, led by Professor Greger Larson at Oxford University's Research Laboratory for…

Chrissie Giles on her generation’s climb to Peak Booze I first met alcohol in the late 1980s. It was the morning after one of my parents’ parties. My sister and I, aged nine or ten, were up alone. We trawled the lounge for abandoned cans. I remember being methodical: pick one up, give it a shake to…

Of course I won't tell you what it costs. Scott Olson/Getty Images About a year ago this month, I bought a new car for the first time in my life, and it was an entirely crazy-making process. Shopping for furniture or appliances or other consumer durables is pretty straightforward. You look up what…

Nature | News Sharing Astronomers prepare to observe an impact off the coast of Sri Lanka. Traci Watson Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Researchers call it sheer coincidence that a newly discovered piece of space junk is officially designated WT1190F. But the letters in the name, which form…

Listen to Narration This piece was intended primarily as an audio/podcast experience. You can listen by clicking 'Listen to Narration', and/or read the transcript below. On the 10th of January 1956—about a decade into the Cold War and about a year into the Space Race—the United States Air Force…

Blog Blog Subscribe Join over 5,000 people who receive the anecdotally newsletter —and immediately get the free ebook Character Trumps Credentials . Read the latest newsletter Categories Anecdotes Business storytelling Collaboration Communication Culture Employee Engagement Events Fun Insight…

IBM hopes it has a new use for Watson, its artificial intelligence business. The company announced on Wednesday that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire most of the assets of the Weather Company, including its Weather.com website, a large number of weather data collection points,…

Taken together, the revelations add to the growing possibility that U.S. forces destroyed what they knew was a functioning hospital, which would be a violation of the international rules of war . The Pentagon has said Americans would never have intentionally fired on a medical facility, and it's…

LAST WEEK The Intercept published a package of stories on the U.S. drone program, drawing on a cache of secret government documents leaked by an intelligence community whistleblower. The available evidence suggests that one of the documents, a study titled “ISR Support to Small Footprint CT…

The IRS spent tens of thousands of dollars on controversial technology that tracks people by their cellphone, according to government documents revealed on Monday. The heavily redacted documents obtained by The Guardian show that the tax agency spent more than $70,000 on upgrading and training the…

Art World Did Hobby Lobby’s Pious Owners Smuggle Ancient Artifacts for Their Bible Museum? The museum director is saying the issue is improper paperwork. Brian Boucher , October 27, 2015 The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. Courtesy of Museumofthe Bible.org Hobby Lobby, a company previously…

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 Jamaica Debates Permitting Abortions In Case of Rape, Incest Campaign…

Senate intelligence committee chairman Richard Burr confers with committee vice-chair Dianne Feinstein and committee member Ron Wyden.Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP The US Senate overwhelmingly passed a controversial cybersecurity bill critics say will allow the government to collect…