North Korean soldiers in Hamhung, taken during heightened tensions between North and South Korea last month.Photograph: Getty Images In North Korea , men serve in the military for 10 years and women for seven. The special unit working as Kim Jong-un’s personal bodyguards serve for 13. Military…

A state judge has slammed the door on a legal challenge by opponents of Uber, clearing the way for the rideshare giant to run traditional taxis off the road. In a decision unveiled Wednesday, Queens Supreme Court Justice Allan Weiss ruled that for-hire vehicles could use electronic hails to compete…

60 YouTube channels that will make you smarter

SO BAD are the seasonal wildfires sweeping America’s tinder-dry north-west that Alex Thomason, a public-spirited lawyer in Washington state, bought himself a second-hand fire engine to fight them. “We can operate hoses, we can understand water,” he told reporters. “We’re going to at least save one…

When climbers go missing on high mountains it can be decades before their frozen remains are found in the snow and ice. But around the world, mountain ice is now receding. Does the rise in global temperatures provide hope to families who never had a body to say goodbye to? "I'm always looking for…

A panel discussion of "National Geographic Channel - Wicked Tuna" at a TV critics event in 2014. Since 1888, the National Geographic Society has stood for science, discovery and storytelling. Its yellow-bordered magazine has served as the ultimate stage for award-winning photography, depicting the…

A plane monitoring the so-called Rough Fire in the Sierra National Forest last month in California. Credit Max Whittaker/Reuters FRESNO, Calif. — The air in the San Joaquin Valley hangs thick with gray-brown dust, a result of the state’s largest fire, which has burned through more than 160 square…

exclusive Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has…

es. So there are a huge number of technical hurdles. We have to do sensor fusion with accelerometers to cancel out gravity—but when you turn [the device] a different way, we have to subtract out gravity. … Your thumb can read differently to the touch sensor than your finger would. That difference is…

Even if you're not a die-hard privacy advocate, the prospect of widespread license plate scanning is rather unsettling. Local police departments often operate such programs under the assumption that all cars in their jurisdiction are "under investigation," even if the vast majority of cars scanned…

Nearly 50 years ago, a 35-year-old bank employee from Madrid named Jordán Peña had a fiendish idea: he would contact fellow UFO-spotters across the city, purporting to be an extraterrestrial – DEI 98, from the planet Ummo. Spinning an audaciously convoluted yarn, Peña would proceed to chronicle the…

It may be possible to transmit Alzheimer's disease from one person to another, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature . But this would occur only in highly unusual circumstances involving direct exposure to brain tissue, scientists say. "This relates to a very special situation where…

Unstructured time is rarely a priority for many adults, despite evidence of its value. "Breaks are moments of breakthroughs," says psychiatrist Shimi Kang. "Certain biological processes occur exclusively during moments of relaxed wakefulness, when the brain's default-mode network becomes activated."…

Jean-Louis Gassée Aug 31, 2015 Ad blocking started as an initiative by independent developers who wanted to improve our browsing experience. Now that at least one company, Apple, has made Content Blocking “official”, ad-supported publishing business models are in trouble. Back in the days when we…

IDGNS Passwords are a bane of life on the Internet, but one Turing Award winner has an algorithmic approach that he thinks can make them not only easier to manage but also more secure. The average user has some 20 passwords today, and in general the easier they are to remember, the less secure they…

B y any measure, young city dwellers are less and less likely to own a car. And New York City officials have spent millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours ensuring that trend works for the recent grads and young professionals that flock to it constantly. NYC bus, rail, and ferry systems are…

I built a hut with a tiled roof, underfloor heating and mud and stone walls. This has been my most ambitious primitive project yet and was motivated by the

Scientists have discovered a new human-like species in a burial chamber deep in a cave system in South Africa. The discovery of 15 partial skeletons is the largest single discovery of its type in Africa. The researchers claim that the discovery will change ideas about our human ancestors. The…

Slender Man Is Watching If 12-year-olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser knew that the internet character they worshipped was a fantasy, why did they want to kill their friend for him? Video stills and Morgan’s drawings are part of the court record; mug shots courtesy of the Waukesha Police…

Photo Credit Getty Images Phys Ed Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness. Young runners are different from you and me. They have more speed. And to achieve that swiftness, they use certain leg muscles quite differently than runners past age 50 do, according to a new study of runners’ strides at…

I spent the last 30 days eating nothing but Soylent , a new age powdered meal replacement. Why would I do something so stupid? I’ll explain. But first, if you aren’t familiar with Soylent, here’s the gist: In 2013, 24-year-old Rob Rhinehart created a powdered drink mix that met all of the…

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There are around 6,000 cargo vessels out on the ocean right now, carrying 20,000,000 shipping containers, which are delivering most of the products you see around you. And among all the containers are a special subset of temperature-controlled units known in the global cargo industry, in all…

China Has a Microplastic Pollution Problem On Chinese beaches, researchers found microplastic concentrations thousands of times higher than in some other countries. Authored by by Charles Q. Choi Wordcount September 9, 2015 | 450 words, about 2 minutes Share this article Share this: Article body…

Lu Wei, China’s Internet czar, is expected to speak at a tech forum in Seattle organized by the Chinese government. HONG KONG — As President Xi Jinping of China prepares for his first state visit to the United States this month, Washington has warned that it could hit Chinese companies with…

I have seen the future of space exploration, and it looks like a cue ball covered with brown scribbles. I am talking about Europa, the 1,940-mile-wide, nearly white, and exceedingly smooth satellite of Jupiter. It is an enigmatic world that is, in many ways, almost a perfect inversion of Earth. It…

Gravity Basics for Sci-fi Authors July 9, 2015 by Illustration by Callie_Wugange This article on gravity is part of the Science in Sci-fi, Fact in Fantasy blog series. Each week, we tackle one of the scientific or technological concepts pervasive in sci-fi (space travel, genetic engineering,…

CROATOAN. The word was found written on a fencepost in the lost colony of Roanoke, and it still intrigues us after 425 years. But this 16th century settlement is more than a legend. It’s also the subject of archaeological and historical investigations that are now starting to yield answers. The…

The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

A few years back, Jenny Vekris says she was prescribed the sleeping pill Ambien for insomnia. It took her a while to figure out that the drug was affecting her in dangerous ways. “I’d wake up to car damage, bruises, fast-food wrappers, and who knows what else, because I was sleeping and driving,”…

Then One/WIRED Yesterday, the New York Times mentioned a trend that’s becoming more common: tech companies fighting back against government requests for user data, among them Microsoft and Apple. According to the report, the Justice Department obtained a court order demanding that Apple provides the…

Lucretia Gantner and Patrick Guidry, off-duty officers for the New Orleans Police Department, on patrol as part of the privately funded French Quarter Task Force. Credit Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times Feature How a rich entrepreneur persuaded the city to let him create his own high-tech…

Getty Images If you’re a state-sponsored hacker siphoning data from targeted computers, the last thing you want is for someone to locate your command-and-control server and shut it down, halting your ability to communicate with infected machines and steal data. So the Russian-speaking spy gang known…

Some of the largest non-nuclear explosions on record — in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1917, Port Chicago, California in 1944 and Texas City, Texas in 1947 — involved huge accidental blasts at harbors and aboard ships. But what if a similar explosion occurred by intent rather than accident? A really…

About five miles outside Aarhus in Denmark – the country’s second-­biggest city and the unofficial capital of Jutland – sits a converted farmhouse. Inside, in a large wood-floored space with vaulted ceilings – once part of the stables – a big brown leather sofa is positioned a few feet from a DVD…

The Philippines is planning free Wi-Fi services to half of its towns and cities this year and nationwide coverage by end-2016, limiting the data revenue prospects for Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. and Globe Telecom Inc. The free Internet service will cost the government about 1.5 billion…

(iStock) Here is a new post from pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom, author of a number of popular posts on this blog, including “Why so many kids can’t sit still in school today,” as well as “ The right — and surprisingly wrong — ways to get kids to sit still in class ” and “ How…

Matt Hodges Sep 8, 2015 Photo credit Maryland GovPics CC-BY 2.0 Whether you like it or not, Americans are getting into the swing of another presidential election cycle! That means it’s time to prepare for phone calls, mailers, attack ads, corn dogs , and debates about the Electoral College! Lots of…

There's yet another candidate jumping into the race for the White House, and he's got his own political party. John McAfee, the antivirus software magnate who fled Belize after police tried to question him for murder, confirmed to CNNMoney that he plans to run for President in 2016 and that he'd…