FBI Director James Comey, shown in September, said Wednesday that the lack of accurate information about police-involved shootings is ”embarrassing and ridiculous.” (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images) The lack of accurate information about police-involved shootings is roiling the nation’s law enforcement…

For a brief period in 1810, there was a tiny independent country that existed between Louisiana and Florida. Not many people remember the Republic of West Florida, but you can still find its faded outline on old maps: A 1903 map showing the changes. Wikimedia Commons The republic arose out of a…

© Shin Katan In February 2007, about a month after Netflix began streaming movies online, Efe Cakarel quietly launched what would become MUBI — a video-on-demand service focused on international and independent cinema. Where Netflix sought to amass a large library for wide audiences, Cakarel, a…

No one saw it coming: The Surface Book , history’s first Microsoft laptop (or notebook, if you prefer). And has there ever been a more apt setting for a special delivery than the giant and largely defunct Post Office building in Midtown Manhattan in New York City? Microsoft’s new head of Windows…

Attendees take pictures of the new Tesla Energy Powerwall Home Battery during an event at Tesla Motors in Hawthorne, Calif., on April 30. (Patrick T. Fallon/Reuters) Last week, a study in Energy Policy gave a new glimpse into why, despite much anticipation, the so-called energy storage revolution —…

In times of economic trouble, governments can choose to cut public services to save money. But at what cost? Mary O’Hara meets those on the sharp end of austerity in the UK to find out what it means for mental health. When Mark Wood was found dead in his home in August 2013 it could have been just…

Coins and notes are an anonymous way to make quick transactions.Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA I f you type “money” into a Google image search, you get pictures of metal coins and paper notes. People fixate upon this physical currency, but while we still use such transferable tokens for many small…

Runners train in Ngong, Kenya, in 2012. The country has produced the world's best distance runners for decades, and most belong to the Kalenjin people. Michael Steele/Getty Images Kenyan Wilson Kipsang won this year's Berlin Marathon in 2 hours, 3 minutes and 23 seconds — an average of 4:42 per…

Automaton Robotics Robot Sensors & Actuators 1 Oct 2015 | 18:50 GMT With no sensors, motors, or actuators, hot feet are all this robot needs to walk By Advertisement A bimetal consists of two different kinds of metal stuck together. Bimetals are different than alloys, where the two metals are…

Butcher Benny Pizzuco cuts prime beef at Florence Prime Meat Market in New York on Sept, 17, 2015. (Photo by Melina Mara/The Washington Post) To some, the idea sounded like a fringe notion promoted by environmentalist vegetarians. Where it came from, though, was an expert panel advising the federal…

The World Bank may have some new advice for developing countries: Give away millions of dollars to random entrepreneurs. That’s the implication of a study on development grants (pdf) produced by the international bank’s research group, led by economist David McKenzie. In 2011, then-Nigerian finance…

Updated below China is launching a comprehensive “credit score” system, and the more I learn about it, the more nightmarish it seems. China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of…

Is Photography the Best Deal in the Art Market?

Cuba: A nation gets connected

A Sentry Tech remote-controlled weapon station.Photograph: Supplied The United Nations has been warned that its protracted negotiations over the future of lethal autonomous weapons – or “killer robots” – are moving too slowly to stop robot wars becoming a reality. Lobbying for a pre-emptive ban on…

Home » Comcast/Xfinity » Competition » Consumer News » Data Caps » Public Policy & Gov't » Currently Reading: Source: FCC Will Get Serious About Data Caps if Comcast Moves to Impose Them Nationwide Phillip Dampier May 12, 2015 167 Comments A well-placed source in Washington, D.C. with knowledge of…

At a time when obscure new whiskeys are appearing on cocktail menus from Savannah to Seattle, it’s hard to imagine the American whiskey industry was ever under threat. For starters, the grain-based spirit is as American as apple pie, or at least George Washington—in fact, the first president’s Mount…

Cuba’s Startup Paradox

If you’re on the east coast tonight, keep an eye on the sky between 7pm and 9pm: NASA is launching a test of some new tech that will include releasing colorful vapor tracers 130 miles above the Earth. It sounds like it’s going to be beautiful. The vapors will be ejected from a sounding rocket…

The American west is littered with ghost towns - frontier villages that were abandoned with the end of the Gold Rush. A town in New Mexico is about to join the ranks of these ghost towns, as the builders of the futuristic city have no intention of letting anyone live there. Telecommunications and…

A group of do-gooder hackers calling themselves The White Team have taken responsibility for a large peer-to-peer botnet that compromised more than 10,000 routers to improve the security of the devices , and have explained to FORBES some of their future plans to fix more broken machines. The…

If you want to take a shower or wash dishes in East Porterville, California, you’ll probably have to use a bucket. The water stopped running in most houses over a year ago. But nearby, farmers are paying to get rid of around 300 billion gallons of water a year. The paradox is a result of a…

A cell at the federal prison in El Reno, Okla., which President Obama visited in July to build support for overhauling the criminal justice system. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prisons starting at…

Story highlights The Eastern New York Correctional Facility's debate team has also beaten West Point The debate team is part of the Bard Prison Initiative, which has 300 inmates enrolled (CNN) In a debate between Harvard College students and those from any other college, some might guess that the…

Cost of Renting a One Bedroom Apartment December 2013 Hover over a city to see its median one bedroom rent. Size of dot indicates population, color reflects rent per month. Source: Priceonomics Rental Data In the past, Priceonomics has analyzed apartment rent prices in San Francisco and most of the…

Michael Hayden, the former head of the CIA and the NSA, thinks the US government should stop railing against encryption and should support strong crypto rather than asking for backdoors. The US is "better served by stronger encryption, rather than baking in weaker encryption," he said during a panel…

Editor's note: Unless otherwise stated, all names in this article have been changed. On a short stretch of Market Street, sandwiched between the headquarters of Twitter and Uber, one of San Francisco’s most lucrative economies runs its daily course. Here, in the street, men lean against walls in the…

Caleb is telling me about the birth of his son, now eight months old. “You know you hear parents say that the first time they looked at their kid, they were overcome with that feeling of joy and affection?” he asks me, before pausing. “I didn’t experience any of that.” His wedding day was equally…

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc said it had managed to disrupt the spread of one of the most pernicious systems for infecting Internet users with malicious software such as so-called ransomware, which demands payment for decrypting users’ data. The investigators from Cisco’s Talos…

By Issi Romem, BuildZoom Chief Economist *** Note (October 6, 2015): an earlier version of this blog post reported figures obtained by comparing search results on Zillow.com and on Realtor.com within the core cities of the 51 largest metros. However, because the geographic boundaries associated with…

Much of the world spent the last 48 hours expressing revulsion at the U.S. airstrike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. It was quite clear early on that the perpetrator of the attack was the U.S., and many media outlets and other organizations around the world have been stating this without any…

Excerpt: "The 500 largest American companies hold more than $2.1 trillion in accumulated profits offshore to avoid U.S. taxes and would collectively owe an estimated $620 billion in U.S. taxes if they repatriated the funds, according to a study released on Tuesday.' Apple CEO Tim Cook. (photo: KOMO…

When NASA engineers look at Mars, they see a planet-sized Venus flytrap. It lures us with the promise of scientific discovery—but the moment we land there, gravity and a harsh climate will conspire to keep us stuck on the surface. And that’s not an option. If The Martian holds one lesson for…

Abe Zeines’s hilltop mansion in Puerto Rico looks like a frat house after a rager. A wrecked golf cart blocks the driveway. An SUV with a blown tire sits on the grass out front. A porch overlooking the Caribbean is littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts. It’s a Monday morning in June, and…

The Las Vegas taxi industry used every political maneuver in its arsenal to keep Uber and Lyft off the strip. It didn't work. Photo illustration by Jared Harrell / BuzzFeed News; Photos: Getty images (4) On the evening of Oct. 24, 2014, swarms of tourists flooded the Las Vegas Strip, clutching…

Product integration is a small part of advertising, but it has symbolic importance. Credit Illustration by Michael Kirkham Ever since the finale of “Mad Men,” I’ve been meditating on its audacious last image. Don Draper, sitting cross-legged and purring “Ommmm,” is achieving inner peace at an…

It seems so. Recent studies on the biological effects of radiation carried out under radiation levels from natural background to essentially zero radiation, demonstrate that the absence of radiation is not good for organisms ( Castillo et al., 2015 ). Following experiments with microbes and human…

As a kid, whenever I'd get some BMX or car magazine in the mail, I'd always dive in first to the letters to the editor. The interplay between readers sharing their opinion on stories and editors responding in italics always made the rest of the mag feel more real—as if real, normal people actually…

The Most Important Thing, and It’s Almost a Secret We journalists are a bit like vultures, feasting on war, scandal and disaster. Turn on the news, and you see Syrian refugees , Volkswagen corruption , dysfunctional government. Yet that reflects a selection bias in how we report the news: We cover…

Scientists have found the biggest and oldest reservoir of water ever–so large and so old, it’s almost impossible to describe. The water is out in space, a place we used to think of as desolate and desert dry, but it’s turning out to be pretty lush. Researchers found a lake of water so large that it…