‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell…

A lost world off the British coast which was flooded by the rising North Sea thousands of years ago, is finally to reveal its secrets. The ancient country of Doggerland was once the home to thousands of stone age settlers and was an important land bridge between Britain and Northern Europe. Now…

In this April 19, 2014 photo, partygoers dance and smoke pot during the annual marijuana festival in Denver. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File) Daily marijuana use among U.S. college students is rising, and, for the first time since data has been collected, their use of pot has surpassed cigarette…

A new breast cancer drug is turning heads in the hard-to-faze pharmaceutical industry. The compound, called palbociclib, has already shown remarkable results in breast cancer patients and is being tested for use against other forms of cancer. Pfizer, the company behind the drug, achieved accelerated…

W hen it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all around us. In a recent poll, machine intelligence experts predicted that computers would gain human-level…

Jason Cohen isn ʼ t the first man to look for the solution to his problems at the bottom of a beer glass. But the 24-year-old entrepreneur might be the first to have found it. Cohen ʼ s tale would make a great episode of HBO ʼ s “ Silicon Valley ” if only his epiphany had taken place in sun-dappled…

A Waze map complete with crowd-sourced information. Photograph: /flickr Google is facing a lawsuit over allegations that its Waze traffic app stole part of its database from a competing app called PhantomAlert. Acquired in 2013, Waze offers turn-by-turn driving directions, but it differs from…

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Every March, Richard Whelan boards the Shepherd II — one of hundreds of hunting vessels in Newfoundland, Canada — and drifts into the frigid eastern waters to hunt for seals. For two months, he lives aboard the battered ship, subsisting on minimal rations and braving blisteringly cold temperatures.…

In 2014, Americans spent $70 billion on the lottery (source: NASPL sales data ) In 2014, Americans spent $70 billion on the lottery. When I read this fact back in May, I thought it was one of the craziest stats I had ever seen. That’s over $630 for every household in the U.S.! It sounds absurd. Then…

Jessica Gross | Longreads | August 2015 | 17 minutes (4,402 words) Bella DePaulo, a Harvard-trained social scientist who is now a Project Scientist at UCSB, started her career researching deception. But it was when she delved into singlehood, her personal passion—she describes herself as “ single at…

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Silicon Valley's most successful and wealthy leaders are investing in biomedical research. REUTERS/Jim Young A growing number of tech moguls are trying to solve their biggest problem yet: Aging. From reprogramming DNA to printing organs, some of Silicon Valley's most successful and wealthy leaders…

Since Steve Jobs’s death, in 2011, Elon Musk has emerged as the leading celebrity of Silicon Valley. Musk is the CEO of Tesla Motors, which produces electric cars; the CEO of SpaceX, which makes rockets; and the chairman of SolarCity, which provides solar power systems. A self-made billionaire,…

5. Seeking Protection ( samsraya ). This strategy essentially entails bandwagoning with a stronger state for one’s own security. Various small states in Europe, for example, derive security from allying with the United States. 6. Dual Policy/Alliances ( dvaidhibhava ). This strategy deals with…

Oh dear. There’s something not quite right with this animal. It’s obviously cold, and yet this teeny little fur ball is dashing frantically across the ice, probing, sniffing, darting, never pausing, never resting, it just barrels on, ferociously hunting, hunting, hunting. That’s what shrews do. This…

Fossil of frond-like Ediacaran species found in Namibia. Credit: Sarah Tweedt, Smithsonian Institution In the popular mind, mass extinctions are associated with catastrophic events, like giant meteorite impacts and volcanic super-eruptions. But the world's first known mass extinction, which took…

Three months ago, I thought I wasn’t ready to apply for a job at Google. Google disagreed. I was in the midst of a career transition. I had spent three years working as a management consultant and then at a startup, but I wanted to become a computer engineer. I was earning a Master’s in computer…

Ethan Siegel Sep 2, 2015 A leftover glow unlike any other — of neutrinos — has finally been seen. Image credit: Ken Crawford at Rancho Del Sol Observatory , via RC Optical Systems at http://gallery.rcopticalsystems.com/gallery/ngc7331_stephans.html . “When you see how fragile and delicate life can…

We’ve been told that the modern, connected life is taking a toll on our sleep . Compared to previous generations, studies report , we’ve been sleeping less and less every year. And that is making us ”more likely to suffer from chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, depression, and obesity,…

W e are going to start recording and automatically transcribing most of what we say. Instead of evaporating into memory, words spoken aloud will calcify as text, into a Record that will be referenced, searched, and mined. It will happen by our standard combination of willing and allowing. It will…

How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus - Featuring John McAfee himself

Old-growth trees in the off-trail area of the Opal Creek Wilderness east of Salem, Ore. (Zach Urness/Statesman Journal via AP) In a blockbuster study released Wednesday in Nature, a team of 38 scientists finds that the planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, blowing away the previously estimate of…

As readers and writers, we’re intimately familiar with the dots, strokes and dashes that punctuate the written word. The comma, colon, semicolon and their siblings are integral parts of writing, pointing out grammatical structures and helping us transform letters into spoken words or mental images.…

THE history of economics has been, among other things, a story of learning to care less about land. The physiocrats of 18th-century France saw it as the primary guarantor of wealth. Adam Smith included it alongside labour and capital as one of the three factors of production that combined to…

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The air is still. It’s quiet. Occasionally, the sound of a water droplet bursting feebly onto stone echoes through the chamber. Somewhere, somehow, moisture is getting in. But for the most part, it’s dry. And were it not for the smattering of electric lights, this 200-year-old tunnel beneath the…

Editorial Solitary Confinement Is Cruel and All Too Common Credit Alex Nabaum If mass incarceration is one of modern America’s deepest pathologies, solitary confinement is the concentrated version of it: far too many people locked up for far too long for no good reason, at no clear benefit to…

Related news Indigenous knowledge, key to a successful ecosystem restoration Ecological restoration projects actively involving indigenous peoples and local communities are more successful. This is the result of a study carried out by the ICTA-UAB, which places value on indigenous and local…

YOUR correspondent stands, in a pleasingly impossible way, in orbit. The Earth is spread out beneath. A turn of the head reveals the blackness of deep space behind and above. In front is a table full of toys and brightly coloured building blocks, all of which are resolutely refusing to float…

The latest trend in social networking is the rise of elitism. It's not an elitism that's emerging spontaneously from the everyday social interaction of users. Facebook, Apple and Twitter are intentionally devising a new online world of inequality. This new social media elitism is being trotted out…

Amazon has been making real strides in its attempt to catch up to Netflix, and today the company is delivering a feature that arguably leapfrogs its streaming competitor in sheer utility: offline playback for both iOS and Android devices. An update to the company's mobile video apps for each…

THE first item sold on eBay, an online marketplace, was a broken laser pointer, which was snapped up for $14.83 in September 1995. By 2002 eBay had hosted nearly $15 billion of transactions and had more registered users than Britain had people. Yet the fad for online auctions faded almost as quickly…