B attles fought 542 million years before today helped fuel a blast that brought humans and most animals into existence. The great Cambrian Explosion was a period of unprecedented one-upmanship. Beastly claws crushed through thin skin, and soft-bodied creatures evolved shells shaped like scythes,…

The deep volcanic crater, top, was produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in April 1815 - the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history. Credit Iwan Setiyawan/KOMPAS, via Associated Press In April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook the planet in a…

It's easy to know when you've encountered a wifi hotspot in Cuba , if only because they're the only places that feel even remotely like you're walking through an American city. It's here that Havana's chaotic streets—full of neighbors chatting outside their homes, old men playing dominoes, young…

A Las Vegas man pleaded guilty to sending more than 27 million unsolicited messages through Facebook Inc. servers after gaining access to about 500,000 accounts on the social network, according to prosecutors. Sanford Wallace, 47, known as the “Spam King,” admitted to his mass spamming in 2008 and…

Joseph Cannataci, UN special rapporteur on privacy, doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter and says it is regrettable people have signed away their digital rights without thinking about it.Photograph: Adam Alexander The first UN privacy chief has said the world needs a Geneva convention style law for the…

BREAKING NEWS Tap here to turn on desktop notifications to get the news sent straight to you. EDITION TECH Meghan Markle Tops Google's Global Trending Charts For 2018 Barack Obama Beats Donald Trump In Twitter 2018 Showdown Elon Musk Ducks Out Of One Los Angeles Tunnel But Pursues Another Facebook…

As a young naturalist growing up in the Deep South, I feared kudzu. I’d walk an extra mile to avoid patches of it and the writhing knots of snakes that everyone said were breeding within. Though fascinated by the grape-scented flowers and the purple honey produced by visiting bees, I trembled at the…

A very British pet parrot named Nigel has been reunited with his owner after disappearing four years ago – but he now speaks Spanish. Nigel, a grey African parrot, flew away from his home in California in 2010 but was returned to his British owner, Darren Chick, after he was discovered in Torrance,…

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Loading Timeless Music... Polygraph THE MOST TIMELESS SONGS OF ALL-TIME Using Spotify to measure the popularity of older music. This is a story about proving, with data, that No Diggity by Blackstreet is timeless. Until recently, it was impossible to measure the popularity of older music. Billboard…

In adolescence, the brain is wired to experience pleasure more intensely than before or after. Illustration by Édith Carron C57BL/6J mice are black, with pink ears and long pink tails. Inbred for the purposes of experimentation, they exhibit a number of infelicitous traits, including a…

When you answer your phone and there's no one on the other end, it could be a computer that's gathering information about you and your bank account. Jonathan Kitchen/Getty Images Here's an experience some of us have had. The phone rings. You pick it up and say "Hello. Hello. Helloooo." But nobody…

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Mirrors like these could make QKD work via satellite. NASA Quantum key distribution is regularly touted as the encryption of the future. While the keys are exchanged on an insecure channel, the laws of physics provide a guarantee that two parties can exchange a secret key and know if they're being…

Leonie Müller's undergrad thesis will include an analysis of her months living on Germany's high-speed trains , washing her hair in the bathroom sinks and writing her papers at 100+ km/h. Her old apartment cost about $450/month and came with a jerky, feuding landlord; her train-pass costs $380 a…

Adobe Flash is on its way out, and that’s a very good thing. Photograph: Tsahi Levent-Levi/flickr Adobe’s Flash, hated the world over for slowing down computers, containing more holes in security than swiss cheese and stubbornly being the video carrier of choice until recently, is dying. Video…

Editor's Note: Tens of thousands of firefighters are currently battling wildfires in the Western United States. This year, millions of acres have been lost to fires in California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. Three firefighters died while on duty in Washington State Wednesday.…

Trading of U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds was paused more than 1,200 times in early trading on Monday as the market experienced heightened volume and volatility. Under market regulations, anytime a stock jumps up or drops by 5% or more, trading is paused for five minutes. During normal…

This weekend Twitter is buzzing about an article in The Guardian: Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children’s genes http://gu.com/p/4byz9/stw The gist of the Guardian article was that “life experience can affect the genes of subsequent generations,” with a tone enthusiastically…

Byzantine shipwrecks found during the construction of the first-ever tunnel under the Bosporus held up work for years. Photo Illustration by Raphaël Dallaporta for The New Yorker; Source: Istanbul University Yenikapi Shipwrecks Project When it came to choosing the exact location of the first tunnel…

If an alien managed to visit our Universe from a parallel reality, there is a high chance they would not even notice we exist. In a way that's obvious: the Universe is enormous and our planet is but a small, pale blue dot. But it's worse than that: the aliens might not even notice all the stars and…

Bloomberg Need help? Contact us We've detected unusual activity from your computer network To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot. Why did this happen? Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading.…

Photo Credit Bob Staake A common impairment with lifelong consequences turns out to be highly contagious between parent and child, a new study shows. The impairment? Math anxiety. Means of transmission? Homework help. Children of highly math-anxious parents learned less math and were more likely to…

#HANDSOFFOURMEDS Don't shut down the pharmacy of the developing world! Millions of people around the world rely on affordable medicines made in India to stay alive. PEOPLE IN 35 COUNTRIES ARE SAYING "#HANDSOFFOURMEDS" ! 4.289 over 20.000 Take action now! Urge Indian Prime Minister Modi to protect…

In the summer of 1945, with the war in Europe over, Allied forces rushed to unravel the secrets of Nazi V2 rockets. These terror weapons, built by slave labourers, did little to affect the outcome of the war – but they had the potential to change the world. “There was an unseemly scramble to get…

Expedition 44 crew members Kimiya Yui (left) of JAXA and NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren on the International Space Station. NASA NASA It’s been a rough year for the people who keep the International Space Station (ISS) working. In June, Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated less than three minutes…

Legal Issues from the tail-tucked dept Remember the 4th Amendment? We hear it's making a comeback. Back in May, we had a story about another court explaining to the government that, contrary to popular belief within Homeland Security, the 4th Amendment does still apply at the border, and thus Border…

Basil D Soufi The newly appointed UN special rapporteur on privacy, Joseph Cannataci, has called the UK's oversight of surveillance "a rather bad joke at its citizens’ expense," and said that the situation regarding privacy is "worse" than anything George Orwell imagined in his novel 1984 . Speaking…

fix windows 10 By default, Windows sends a lot of your information to their servers sometimes without asking you to opt-in. Follow this guide to fix Windows 10 and restore your privacy. Windows 7 & 8.1 spies too. Fix it using our short manual Contents During Installation 1. Do NOT use Express…

It’s a sea of black graduation gowns in the belly of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn one rainy Tuesday evening in June. On the floor of the stadium, where the basketball court should be, sit thousands of students awaiting the start of the 75th Commencement of the New York City College of Technology,…

Warnings not to eat anything your grandmother (or great grandmother or great-great grandmother) would not recognize as food have echoed around the web since Michael Pollan first promoted this rule of eating . Pollan could have assigned a date to the moment when new and supposedly dangerous foods…

A majority of graduates in the UK are getting jobs where they do not need a degree, according to a report . Here, three graduates who found themselves in that situation share their experiences. Paul Holden, Sheffield I graduated in 2010 with a master's in town planning and transport, which I have…

Zak Bickel / The Atlantic Yale University Library has long been familiar with controversy, even several centuries before it decided to make thousands of VHS tapes with titles like Naughty Roommates , Sorority Babes in the Dance-a-Thon of Death , and What the Swedish Butler Saw part of its…

5.7k SHARES Share Reddit Digg Skype Telegram Flipboard On September 29, 1957, an explosion in a steel storage tank containing liquid nuclear waste led to the release of a massive 2 MCi of radioactive material. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale, making it the…

The classic promotional launch video and then commercial for the first 32bit operating system for PCs by Microsoft (not the first overall though. IBM OS/2 came much earlier for example). Bill Gates hired the living rock legends "The Rolling Stones" for the music of the launch video, the now stones…

Clay Allsopp Aug 23, 2015 Friday morning, I had a magical moment with my Karma Go mobile hotspot. It changed my opinion of Karma from “useful hotspot doodad” to “maybe game-changing and special,” and it hooked me on the peer-to-peer economy. My Karma My day started off like most weekdays, with a 45…

A tarp covers an abandoned house, at left, that was torn down this year in Yokosuka. Credit Kentaro Takahashi for The New York Times YOKOSUKA, Japan — Ever since her elderly neighbor moved a decade ago, Yoriko Haneda has done what she can to keep the empty house she left behind from becoming an…

America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But America’s relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most homicidal — in large…