Doctors have just discovered a previously unknown relationship between the long-term recovery of spinal cord injury victims and high blood pressure during their initial surgeries. This may seem like a small bit of medical news–though it will have immediate clinical implications–but what’s important…

Hillary Clinton asserted at Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands.” She seemed to be darkly intimating that the information Snowden gave to journalists in Hong…

Pedestrians cross the street near the PNC Bank building in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood. (iStockphoto) It was nearing closing time in March last year when a manager at Boffi Georgetown dispatched a series of alarmed messages. Observing two men yelling outside the luxury kitchen and bath showroom,…

0 Shares Media Options Download Video Download Audio Get DVD Other Formats This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate Image Credit: Sonia Nazario 0 Shares This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate As immigration has become a key issue on the campaign…

In the past year, global wealth reversed a steady upward climb and fell by $12.4 trillion, largely due to currency fluctuations. But worldwide wealth inequality continued its upward march: The top 1 percent of households “account for half of all assets in the world,” according to the 2015 Credit…

Under an aggressive policy meant to combat unlicensed vehicles for-hire, the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC) has seized over 21,000 cars since 2012. After a seizure, commission inspectors pressure owners to plead guilty and pay hundreds of dollars in fines to recover their property.…

The remains of millions of people were moved to the Catacombs in the late 18th century to avoid a public health problem in Paris.Photograph: Airbnb/REX Shutterstock No one has ever woken up alive in Airbnb’s latest rental offer, but then again, no one has ever spent the night alongside 6 million…

Francesca Buchalski leaned heavily on plastic foam, floral wire and other craft-store staples to assemble evening wear for her first orchestra concert last month at Philadelphia’s Mann Center for the Performing Arts. The 15-year-old Allentown, N.J., sophomore is part of a new generation of symphony…

Winners of Nigeria’s massive business plan competition, YouWin, celebrate their victory. Youth unemployment in developing countries is one of the world’s great problems. The Economist referred to it as an “epidemic” with possibly disastrous economic and political consequences. Using World Bank data,…

Kevin Morefield In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.” Between these constellations sits an…

Steve Peers The relationship between intelligence and law enforcementagencies (and companies like Google and Facebook) and personal data is muchlike the relationship between children and sweets at a birthday party. Imagineyou’re a parent bringing out a huge bowl full of sweets (the personal…

In the lead-up to their first debate tonight in Las Vegas, the Democratic presidential candidates have been calling for a tough-on-crime stance by the federal government against major corporations. A new report documenting a precipitous decline in corporate prosecutions could intensify those…

How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings. October 13, 2015 The CIA used the music of an Irish boyband called Westlife to torture Suleiman Abdullah in Afghanistan. His interrogators would intersperse a syrupy song called " My Love " with…

If you have ever tried scanning or photocopying a banknote, you may have found that your software—such as Adobe Photoshop, or the embedded software in the photocopier—refused to let you do so. That's because your software is secretly looking for security features such as EURion dots in the documents…

In his offices overlooking Lake Washington, just east of Seattle, Bill Gates grabbed a legal pad recently and began covering it in his left-handed scrawl. He scribbled arrows by each margin of the pad, both pointing inward. The arrow near the left margin, he said, represented how governments…

It all comes back to Rupert Murdoch. As multiple recent news stories have proven, the 2016 presidential race is fast becoming a referendum on the News Corp CEO and reigning media gorgon. The two top candidates in the Republican field are a Fox News contributor ( Ben Carson opened his Fox career two…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is probing allegations that Anheuser-Busch InBev ( ABI.BR ) is seeking to curb competition in the beer market by buying distributors, making it harder for fast-growing craft brewers to get their products on store shelves, according to three people…

When you live in total squalor—cookies in your pants drawer, pants in your cookies drawer, and nickels, dresses, old New Yorkers , and apple seeds in your bed—it’s hard to know where to look when you lose your keys. The other day, after two weeks of fruitless searching, I found my keys in the…

By Christie Thompson A Nashville lawyer hopes to wipe clean some arrest records for 128,000 Tennesseans. The lawyer, Daniel Horwitz, who has worked on multiple cases regarding incarceration and re-entry, has filed a class-action motion in county court to have the case files destroyed for hundreds of…

An Apple Store in Hong Kong. Apple News app users in China are alerted: “News isn’t supported in your current region.” HONG KONG — Apple has disabled its news app in China , according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, the most recent sign of how difficult it can be for foreign…

One night, 18-year-old Ritesh Agarwal was locked out of his apartment in Delhi. It was an unfortunate minor incident that was to change his life. Forced to check into a hotel he found himself in a situation he had already experienced several times while travelling in India. "The receptionist was…

In the years since Columbine, school shootings changed; they became ritualized. Illustration by Oliver Munday On the evening of April 29th last year, in the southern Minnesota town of Waseca, a woman was doing the dishes when she looked out her kitchen window and saw a young man walking through her…

Job seekers fill out applications at an employment fair in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 18. Photographer: Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg Photographer: Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg The World Bank has an unsettling message for young people around the globe: Whether you're male or female, live in Tunisia or the…

The year 2015 could be called the year of the emoji. They have landed a teenage boy in a police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin’s wrath in Russia, and the loveable smiley faces are even set to come to life in their own Hollywood film . Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites…

Defendants don’t always have the ability to inspect the code that could help convict them. Image by Mirexon / Shutterstock Secret code is everywhere —in elevators, airplanes, medical devices. By refusing to publish the source code for software, companies make it impossible for third parties to…

Project Remote, an effort to find the spot farthest from a road in each of the fifty states, inspired a search for New York’s remotest place. Credit Photograph by Visions of America / UIG via Getty The ecologists Rebecca and Ryan Means spend a good deal of their time thinking about the imperilled…

Humans have a love/hate relationship with the cliques, clades, and classes that compartmentalize their world. That tension forms the backbone of so much dystopian sci-fi: The protagonist of Divergent is special because she doesn’t fit into her society’s rigid castes of personality traits; Minority…

When Flannery O’Connor wrote to her friend John Crowe Ransom, the legendary editor of the Kenyon Review , in September 1955, it was to ask a favor. She wanted to use him as a reference for a Guggenheim fellowship—money she would put toward finally completing the novel she had been working on. “I…

Of all the investment fads and manias over the past few decades, none have been as big of a fizzle as the craze for nanotech stocks. Ten years ago, venture capitalists were scrambling for investments, startups with “nano” in their names flourished and even a few nanotech funds launched hoping to…

Arriving at a hospital seven hours' drive from his remote village in the mountains, former gold miner He Quangui is finally put in a ward. The doctors are puncturing his chest cavity with a needle to remove air that had escaped from his damaged lungs. In pain, He Quangui tries to clasp the drip…

Rosemary Kennedy was a beauty, a debutante, and the daughter of one of America's most glamorous families. She was born with a wealth of advantages as the daughter of Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy — but her mental development was flawed at birth, and never got beyond about a fourth-grade level. And at…

A girl looks away from the body of an assassinated man, who was killed by a gang member in San Salvador. Encarni Pindado for NPR In many countries, the decisions teens make at 15 can determine the rest of their lives. But, often, girls don't have much say — parents, culture and tradition decide for…

Listen to Narration Please warmly welcome our newest contributor, Jennifer Colton-Jones. On a December morning in 1916, the polls opened in the small town of Umatilla, Oregon, for a municipal election. As the day stretched on, the town’s men drifted in and out, casting a ballot here or there. By…

I’ve been reading a paper [1] written two decades ago, which itself is an account of events two decades before that . It is Alan Kay nominally writing about the history of a programming language called Smalltalk. I say “nominally” because already by Smalltalk 72, Kay was losing interest in language…

Dr Karen Wicks from the University of Reading with the pigs, which set the process in motion by rooting up implements on the shore.Photograph: Handout Stone tools left by ice age hunter-gatherers who camped out on the east coast of the Scottish island of Islay about 12,000 years ago have been…

The Internet has become a critical part of almost every part of our society — it provides information, communication, and entertainment to billions of people every day, and enables coordination and collaboration between people and business across the globe. Unfortunately, this crucial piece of…

Michael Clune’s Gamelife is an excellent new memoir about computer games. We could tell you all about it, but there are better means of description: as Clune writes, “computer games taught me how to imagine something so it lasts, so it feels real .” With that in mind, we’ve gotten together with…