The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead

The Stack Archive IoT Wed 23 Sep 2015 Share 60 Share 35 215 Shares The September 16th release of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS9, introduced support for the IPv6 connection protocol, and its introduction has already begun to increase usage. A blog post from CDN provider CloudFlare…

In theory, the heart of Silicon Valley–towns like Mountain View and Santa Clara–should be the ultimate place to bike. It’s usually 72 degrees and sunny; it’s mostly flat. But it’s also a classic example of suburbia designed for cars, bisected by 10-lane freeways and extra-wide streets filled with…

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Despite the hype, DNA testing may not reveal as much about yourself as you would hope. Its real value lies elsewhere

P enn and Teller famously skewered the bottled water craze on their myth-busting Showtime series, Bullshit, setting up a hidden-camera sting operation in a fancy New York restaurant. A fake “water sommelier” stopped at each table, offering diners a special selection of high-end bottled water at $7 a…

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 Noam Chomsky weighed in on U.S. presidential politics in a speech Saturday at The New…

Remember Pig-Pen ? The little kid from Charles Schulz's Peanuts cartoons who walked around in a cloud of dirt? Well, the human body does spew a cloud, but instead of dirt it contains millions of microorganisms. "It turns out that that kid is all of us," says James Meadow, a microbial ecologist who…

(Andreas Levers/Flickr) A pre-K teacher in Oklahoma is making news this week after forcing a left-handed 4-year-old boy to write with his right hand. The boy was sent home from school with an article discussing left- and right-handedness. The article mentions historic attitudes toward…

A factory refurbished Thinkpad shipped with Windows 7 and a scheduler app that ran once a day, collecting usage data about what you do with your computer and exfiltrating it to an analytics company. The fact that this was taking place was buried deep in the user "agreement" that came with the…

MORGANTOWN, W.V. (Reuters) - Daniel Carder, an unassuming 45-year-old engineer with gray hair and blue jeans, appears an unlikely type to take down one of the world’s most powerful companies. But he and his small research team at West Virginia University may have done exactly that, with a $50,000…

None of the companies that have collected royalties on the "Happy Birthday" song for the past 80 years held a valid copyright claim to one of the most popular songs in history, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled on Tuesday. In a stunning reversal of decades of copyright claims, the judge ruled…

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Becoming dogs The first proto-dogs likely followed hunter-gatherer humans around in Europe in hopes of eating their leftovers. Due to genetic variation, some were more friendly to humans than others, and tagging along closer gave the friendlier ones better access to food. Being around these…

American beer history is a tale of consolidation. From the brewing industry’s early days, the business was marked by mergers, alliances and takeovers, which ultimately created “the big three” — Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors. Today none of those companies exist as they did at their most powerful,…

Jon Irwin | Kill Screen | September 2015 | 22 minutes (5,439 words) We’re excited to present a new Longreads Exclusive from Kill Screen —writer Jon Irwin goes inside the life of a man who helped keep the Muppets alive after Jim Henson’s death. For more from Kill Screen, subscribe . * * * Summer,…

Printing with Love Issue: Fall 2015 Author: Douglas Cruickshank Topics: Arts and Entertainment Locations: San Francisco Materials: Metal , Paper , Ink In the San Francisco Bay Area — a prime spot for the forces disrupting established publishing industries — there is a long-held, enduring passion for…

Bartholomew Cooke/Trunk Archive In 2011, six US economists tackled a question at the heart of education policy: how much does great teaching help children in the long run? They started with the records of more than 11,500 Tennessee schoolchildren who, as part of an experiment in the 1980s, had been…

Last month, a wild elephant and two of his friends were attacked by poachers. Wounded by poisoned arrows, they trudged across the African landscape to the one place that could help them: the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (DSWT). Though the wild elephant had never been a resident at DSWT, he knew…

A braconid wasp attacking a gypsy-moth caterpillar USDA / Wikimedia This is a story about viruses that became domesticated by parasitic wasps, which use them as biological weapons for corrupting the bodies of caterpillars, which in turn can steal the viral genes and incorporate them into their own…

Over the last few weeks a discussion has flourished over the FCC’s Notification of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) on modular transmitters and electronic labels for wireless devices . Some folks have felt that the phrasing has been too Chicken-Little-like and that the FCC’s proposal doesn’t affect the…

Raw Data ­ Evacuated patients at a hospital near the Fukushima power plant after the nuclear accident in 2011. No one has been killed or sickened by the radiation, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. But about 1,600 died of causes related to the evacuation. Credit Daisuke…

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UPDATE: On May 20, 2016, the Michigan Court of Appeals held that Twitter parodies are protected by the First Amendment, affirming the trial court’s decision to throw out Todd Levitt’s lawsuit against the creator of a parody Twitter account. The court held that “a reasonable reader, viewing the…

Turns out, you don’t need a car to see America. Want to book a similar train trip? I’ve started a travel service to help you plan a personalized trip and take care of booking all your travels. This trip is available for 2018/2019. Get started here. Traveling coast-to-coast across the United States…

This classic Facts So Romantic post was originally published in September, 2013. R oughly twice a year, the apparent positions of sun and moon coincide, and a fortunate few observers are treated to a solar eclipse. Watching such an event provides the opportunity to contemplate a strange coincidence:…

Some significant downsizing is underway at Groupon , the daily deals and local-commerce site. The company is today announcing that it will be cutting 1,100 jobs — mostly in its sales (aka “deal factory”) and customer service operations — taking a pre-tax charge of $35 million in the process. As part…

A few months ago, social psychologist Benjamin Crosier was building an app to look for links between social-media activity and ills like drug addiction. Then, he was stopped in his tracks after Facebook Inc. limited outsiders’ access to information about its roughly 1.5 billion users. Dr. Crosier, a…

Charlie Chaplin as the Tramp. “It was really my father’s alter ego,” Chaplin’s son has said, of the silent-film character, “the little boy who never grew up.” Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY The most un-put-downable movie book of the season is also the most un-pick-uppable one: “The…

Oslo: Syria's civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of crop seeds from a "doomsday" vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies. The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers in the Middle East to…

Something important, and valuable, has been quietly hidden along America’s Gulf Coast. Across four secure sites in unassuming locations lies nearly 700 million barrels of oil – buried underground. A total of 60 subterranean caverns, carved into rock salt beneath the surface, constitute the United…

A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 84 percent of Americans think money has too much influence in U.S. politics, and 85 percent want the campaign financing system completely rebuilt or at least fundamentally changed. Even politicians themselves will tell you that big money controls most of…