On the outside, this giant fruit resembles something out of the Jurassic era and emits a sweet yet putrid stench. But don't be fooled: The fruit, known as a jackfruit, is being hailed as a "miracle" crop that could save millions from starvation. And the unique fruit inside of it is just the…

You'd have to look really hard not to see Steve Jobs in Elizabeth Holmes . Both Holmes and Jobs were loners as kids. As a teenager, Jobs discovered Plato; Holmes favored Roman emperor-philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Both dropped out of college, in part, because they didn't see the virtue in an…

The importance of Donald Trump Far from destroying our democracy, he’s exposing all its phoniness and corruption in ways as serious as he is not. And changing it in the process. Photo-illustration by Bobby Doherty. Trump photograph by Michele Asselin/Contour by Getty Images; Wig Styling by Sharelle…

Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros , 1511. Woodcut. 9 1/4 × 11 3/4 inches. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. It’s easy to get lost on the dirt roads to John Hume’s place. Located in the open savanna of South Africa’s North West Province, the private land is indicated only by wired fencing…

If you have an iPhone running iOS 9, you should be aware that it may be possible to access your photos and contacts on a locked device, even with a passcode and/or Touch ID enabled. I’ve always ignored reports on this sort of security flaw, because they always seem to pop up with every iOS…

Oil rig inspection is a dangerous business. Traditionally roughnecks dangled from a wire, in gale-force winds if needed, to manually log wear and tear on the girders. Assessments include giant chimneys — called flare stacks — that belch fire during million-dollar-a-day shutdowns. Increasingly the…

Dan Quinn was relieved of his Special Forces command after a fight with a U.S.-backed militia leader who had a boy as a sex slave chained to his bed. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times KABUL, Afghanistan — In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was…

WASHINGTON — President George W. Bush sought to retroactively authorize portions of the National Security Agency’s post-9/11 surveillance and data collection program after a now-famous incident in 2004 in which his attorney general refused to certify the program as lawful from his hospital bed,…

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AVG said its new privacy policy was more intended to be more "transparent". A spokesperson for the company confirmed users would have the choice to opt-out should it start selling anonymised search and browser history data to advertisers AVG Security firm AVG can sell search and browser history data…

How to Make Ink in the Middle Ages

John Ismay, Adrian Bonenberger, and Damien Spleeters On December 5, 2001, an American B-52 flying tens of thousands of feet above the ground mistakenly dropped a 2,000-pound satellite-guided bomb on an Army Special Forces team in Afghanistan. The aircrew had been fed the wrong coordinates, but had…

This time last year Gartner said that by 2022 a typical family home, in a mature affluent market, could contain several hundred smart objects by 2022. Several hundred . Thinking over this for a moment you can pinpoint a few of the usual suspects and brands already that may grace a home in 2015; for…

Perry Chen, left, and Yancey Strickler, co-founders of the online crowdfunding website Kickstarter, have rejected the idea of an initial public offering or acquisition. Credit Jake Naughton for The New York Times Many technology start-ups aim to become “unicorns,” the companies that get valued at $1…

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, and the Vostok 6 spacecraft she travelled in, at the Science museum in London.Photograph: Michael Bowles/REX Shutterstock On 16 June 1963, within hours of Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space, she realised that the scientists and…

Researchers are working to create a new design for the Harry Potter-esque invisibility cloak, which will conceal objects, making them more difficult for adversaries to detect. (Photo: Department of Defense illustration) An academic says he and his colleagues have demonstrated a major breakthrough in…

Edward Snowden thinks he might have an answer to the Fermi paradox — the cosmological puzzle of why, given that the universe is so very old and so very big, we haven't heard from any aliens yet. Speaking with Neil deGrasse Tyson on the astrophysicist's StarTalk podcast (the relevant section starts…

For my money, the best novel to read about the future of war today, in 2015, was published in 1974. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is an all-time science fiction classic , but it hasn't quite enjoyed the same degree of mass cultural saturation as other war-themed SF staples like Ender's Game or…

Specialists in infectious disease are protesting a gigantic overnight increase in the price of a 62-year-old drug that is the standard of care for treating a life-threatening parasitic infection. The drug, called Daraprim, was acquired in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a start-up run by a former…

Stocks rise and fall, but bonds are starting to make people anxious no matter what they do. The U.S. bond market is among the biggest financial markets in the world, with $39.5 trillion outstanding at mid-2015, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association says. That is equivalent to 1½…

There's a clever hack that bypasses any Android phone's lock. The latest Android phone flaw is sheer stupidity. Locked phones require a passcode. But there's a way to get around that. Just type in an insanely long password. That overloads the computer, which redirects you to the phone's home screen.…

It’s 2015, and there’s no denying it: We live in an era of hyper-connectivity. We are constantly being bombarded with information—text, image, and video sweep into our consciousness night and day, flowing at us from our many screens. We’re pinged for urgent emails and random miscellany alike. Every…

The Zipf Mystery

Scientists have discovered a way by which genes from one species can jump directly into another species—nature’s way of creating genetically modified organisms. The finding is relevant to the debate over genetically modified foods. Opponents have frequently maintained that an interspecies gene…

by Sohaib Hasan | 5 min read Problem: Deteriorating physical conditions in multifamily buildings endanger the health and safety of residents in NYC. Objective: Preemptively identify at-risk buildings. Method: Develop a metric to find buildings approaching states of severe distress by modeling a…

Here’s a quick story you’ve probably heard before, followed by one you probably haven’t. In 1979 a young Steve Jobs paid a visit to Xerox PARC, the legendary R&D lab in Palo Alto, California, and witnessed a demonstration of something now called the graphical user interface. An engineer from PARC…

Slate stands out immediately as a great stop on the caffeine trail. (Photo: Will Foster) (NEWSER) – It's no news flash that consuming caffeine close to bedtime can interfere with sleep. But scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder report in the journal Science Translational Medicine that…

After our first child was born two months ago, I was very much preoccupied with trying to learn the basics of infant care. I still had to know how much candy to order, so one day I got online for a moment to check how many new subscribers had joined during my time away. Wow, a ton of new members are…

Credit: ©iStock.com By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - A medical journal criticised British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline on Thursday for delaying access to key data from a trial of its antidepressant paroxetine (Seroxat, Paxil) that would have shown earlier that it is neither safe or effective in…

Matthew Moore Sep 16, 2015 Designing magical experiences is a local effort. Uber was imagined as a private driver that appears at the tap of a button. And, since your private driver would never ask you to hand over money at the end of your ride — neither would driver-partners using the Uber…

This article has been corrected. We had met at a bar. I told him I was an economist. He told me he was a pot dealer. You might think we wouldn’t have had much to talk about. But the most exciting story in economics is one where an innovation disrupts a market and creates new ones. So once he said…

Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference by William MacAskill Guardian Faber, 325 pp, £14.99, August 2015, ISBN 978 1 78335 049 0 Philosophy, Wittgenstein said, ‘leaves everything as it is’. It sounds like a complaint, but actually it was a recommendation.…

Picture the world through the eyes of the jerk. The line of people in the post office is a mass of unimportant fools; it’s a felt injustice that you must wait while they bumble with their requests. The flight attendant is not a potentially interesting person with her own cares and struggles but…

Don’t sell tickets to strangers. Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez. Photo by Milenko Bokan/Thinkstock. Kyle didn’t think twice about the buyer’s request. It was mid-June, and he had posted four tickets to Game Four of the NBA Finals on Craigslist. When the buyer, Michael, said he preferred to…

The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post has become the largest newspaper to refuse to serve readers who filter out advertisments. The Post described it as “a short test” to gauge what users who use blocked blockers will do next. “Often, we run tests like this not in reaction to a problem, but to…