Idris Elba nearly plunged to his death filming Cary Fukunaga ’s “ Beasts of No Nation .” The indie drama, about an African tyrant known as “the commandant” who recruits an innocent boy into his army of youth soldiers, took Elba into the depths of Ghana’s jungles for a guerrilla-like shoot. One…

There’s been a lot of buzz about pot and wine recently . It’s hard to separate the toga party contingent’s thirst for a potion into which two psychoactive substances have been crammed, from the more sober, scholarly consideration of the 3,700+ year history of fortifying wine with cannabis. And the…

IFA 2015 IFA 2015: A messy jumble of 4K TVs, smartwatches, and troubled IoT devices Samsung Gear S2 hands-on: Svelte design and a brilliant rotating bezel Hands-on: Sony’s Wena is a handsome mechanical watch with a smartwatch strap Acer’s Arduino-based Cloud Professor wants to get kids into the IoT…

Conspiracy theorists are in a bit of a flutter after the discovery of what the believe is an alien corpse near a nuclear power plant. The odd discovery of the apparent body with a “mysterious skull” in Russia has got UFO hunters excited at what could be evidence of life on other planets. Either that…

SANTA MONICA, Calif.--( BUSINESS WIRE )--Today Hulu is offering a commercial-free option to subscribers. Viewers now have the choice to watch Hulu commercial free for $11.99 per month or with limited commercials for $7.99 per month. Current Hulu subscribers will maintain their existing subscription,…

At some point or another you've probably played one of these claw machines, hoping to score the plush toy of your dreams. But despite your skill at perfectly positioning the claw over the prize and activating it, you've found that the pincers just don't grab tightly enough to pick up a stuffed…

David and Orion Hindawi at the offices of Tanium, their cybersecurity start-up, in Emeryville, Calif. Orion Hindawi said potential investors have started asking, “Do you guys actually make money?” Credit Talia Herman for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — A funny thing happened to Orion Hindawi…

The American Egg Board provided 14,000 eggs for the annual White House Easter egg roll this year.Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP A US government-appointed agricultural body tried to crush a Silicon Valley food startup after concluding the company represented a “major threat” and “crisis” for…

W alter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he…

Avocados from Mexico. Apples from Chile. Broccoli from China. If you take a look at the stickers on the produce you’re buying at the grocery store, chances are they’ll read something like this. Fast-forward twenty years. Instead of driving to Whole Foods to pay top dollar for produce that was picked…

Criminals always slip up. They leave behind fingerprints. Hair. A cigarette butt. A telltale acronym. TYOP (tell you on phone), TOL (talk offline) and LDL (let’s discuss live) are red flags for prosecutors combing through the e-mail transcripts of Wall Street traders suspected of illegal activity.…

Kyle McDonald Sep 1, 2015 Last Wednesday, “ A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style ” was posted to ArXiv, featuring some of the most compelling imagery generated by deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) since Google Research’s “ DeepDream ” post. Excerpt of figure 2 from “A Neural Algorithm of…

Nextbit spent two years assembling a heavy-hitting team of mobile veterans and all summer teasing the Internet with promises of a smartphone revolution. Today, those teasers give way to a full reveal: a new website and a grand promise to re-think how phones really work. Oh, and a new phone, called…

“Describe the aroma of coffee—why can’t it be done? Do we lack the words? and for what are words lacking?—But how do we get the idea that such a description must after all be possible? Have you ever felt the lack of such a description? Have you tried to describe the aroma and not succeeded?”…

April 21, 2015 by Ashley Mannetta Cog, the robot, on view at the MIT Museum . Photo courtesy of the author. Where are the robots? By now, they were supposed to be everywhere: cleaning our homes, replacing our pets, and saving our lives. The optimistic 50s futurist would be terribly let down by…

T ragedy can strike us any time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make the best of it. When Frank’s dog was struck and killed by a car in front of his house, he grew curious what Fido might taste like. So he cooked him up and ate him for dinner. It was a harmless decision, but, nonetheless, some…

In Georgia, the state Senate got a little meta, passing a ban on bag bans last session, which would have pre-emptively prevented restrictions. While the bill failed in the House, it may prove to be a model for other state pre-emptions around the country. RELATED ARTICLES State Legislators Suggest…

Putting off a work or school assignment in order to play videogames or water the plants might seem like nothing more serious than poor time-management. But researchers say chronic procrastination is an emotional strategy for dealing with stress, and it can lead to significant issues in…

There’s nothing wrong with app install ads, but too often now, you click on a mobile search result, and when the site loads, a giant app install interstitial pops up that prompts you to install that site’s app. Those ads typically block all the content on the site until you find that little small…

UNTIL recently, for most businesses security was a question of buying decent locks, doors and windows, installing CCTV, making sure that reception staff sign visitors in and out, and trying not to leave confidential papers in the photocopier. But attacks on their computer systems, be they by…

Brazilain social wasp Polybia paulista . Credit: Prof. Mario Palma/Sao Paulo State University The social wasp Polybia paulista protects itself against predators by producing venom known to contain a powerful cancer-fighting ingredient. A Biophysical Journal study published September 1 reveals…

W hat could we not know about water? It’s wet! It’s clear. It comes from rain. It boils. It makes snow and it makes ice! Does our government actually spend taxpayer money for you to study water ?” This excerpt is from one of the last conversations I had with my dear late mother, who passed away some…

Microsoft has been among the most aggressive in the industry in challenging the U.S. on its access to customers’ information. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg Microsoft Corp. responded swiftly to a pre-dawn fax from the FBI in January. The two terrorists who…

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed Richard Feynman, the physicist, was once asked : "If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?" He…

Inside the Feminist Hackerspace Ella Riley-Adams // May 14, 2015 Hackerspaces are comfortable: That’s sort of their whole point. “We learn, share, and make things,” declares one of the original hackerspaces, NYC Resistor. Equipped with tools like 3D printers and lasers, hackerspaces are…

The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech (aphasia) consistently followed damage to a particular portion of the left hemisphere of the brain. This opened the way to a cerebral…

On the Farm: Startups Put Data in Farmers’ Hands

The huge gap between current CMS offerings and what the world needed occurred to me during my time as CTO of The Huffington Post . When we were acquired by AOL in 2011, I inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems. It wasn't long after that I soon realized they…

(Photo: wavebreakmedia/shutterstock.com ) It’s 2015, and living half your life online is unavoidable. Our personal computers have become like extensions of our brains and bodies, portals to a world where we can assume new identities, interact with strangers across the globe, and learn once…

23 Answers 23 active oldest votes 56 $\begingroup$ Strategy I would like to apply rational decision theory to the analysis, because that is one well-established way to attain rigor in solving a statistical decision problem. In trying to do so, one difficulty emerges as special: the alteration of…

fdecomite SAN FRANCISCO—Shaun Bridges, a former Secret Service agent who was investigating the Silk Road drug trafficking website, pled guilty today to charges of money laundering and obstruction of justice. Bridges' scheme was straightforward and very profitable. After Silk Road admin Curtis Green…

Neil Sloane is considered by some to be one of the most influential mathematicians of our time. That’s not because of any particular theorem the 75-year-old Welsh native has proved, though over the course of a more than 40-year research career at Bell Labs (later AT&T Labs) he won numerous awards…

The 29th annual Burning Man festival kicks off this week in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Among those paying close attention to the festivities will be the FBI’s Special Events Management unit, who have kept files on “burners” since at least 2010. In response to a 2012 Freedom of Information Act…

Imagine if the inventor of the Segway claimed to own “any thing that moves in response to human commands.” Or if the inventor of the telegraph applied for a patent covering any use of electric current for communication. Absurdly overbroad claims like these would not be allowed, right? Unfortunately,…

Author practices jumping rope with seaweed while work awaits. ``. . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949 I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I…

Poster for the film “The Man With the Golden Arm,” 1955, by Saul Bass. Who was “The Man With the Golden Arm” and where did he come from? Well, Frank Sinatra played the “Man” in the 1955 Otto Preminger film, and the movie itself was shot at RKO Studios in Hollywood. But after reading John Clifford’s…