A great problem in U.S. education is that gifted students are rarely pushed to achieve their full potential. It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers. Among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose students took the PISA…

Michael Crichton Spotlight on Michael Crichton’s Technological Developments Referring to computers in 1983, Michael Crichton predicted that “these powerful devices” would be everywhere, and that they would alter every aspect of human life, “from the way we run our societies to the way we run our…

Graffiti artist Banksy has announced an exhibition at a derelict seafront lido in Weston-super-Mare. The Dismaland show - which will also feature work from Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer and Jimmy Cauty - will take over the Tropicana site for five weeks. "I loved the Tropicana as a kid, so getting to…

Blind Faith in China’s Stock Market Credit Jasper Rietman BEIJING — In late June, as the Chinese stock market was in a tailspin, a joke began making the rounds. “We played the market when we thought stocks had hit rock bottom,” one investor says to another, “only to find there was a basement below.…

Feature Credit Illustration by Andrew Rae O n July 11, 2000, in one of the more unlikely moments in the history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orrin Hatch handed the microphone to Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, to hear his thoughts on art in the age of digital reproduction. Ulrich’s…

E very evening as the sun sets, Robb Wolf begins his nightly ritual: While his two daughters play, he slowly dims the lights, just a few lumens every 20 to 30 minutes, until the house, in Reno, Nevada, is dark. The family is asleep before 8 p.m. and awake before dawn, as Wolf imagines our ancestors…

Sagawa used free verse to explore her interiority through imagery: rather than relying on traditional forms, she expressed an individual relationship with the world and with nature. Credit ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAN MURADOV Sagawa Chika, born Kawasaki Ai in 1911, died of stomach cancer in 1936, before…

‘Woodcraft for Women’ by Kathrene Sutherland Gedney Pinkerton (1916) Both Girls Scouts and Camp Fire Girls started in the early 1900s, when camping was an increasingly widespread activity and girls were finally encouraged to embrace the great outdoors, which had long seemed reserved for boys. Books…

Google joined hands with Facebook to try and prevent the Internet and Mobile Association of India , which represents some of the largest Internet companies in India, from taking a stand that counters Zero Rating. According to emails exchanged between IAMAI’s Government Relations committee members,…

Three years ago, Oracle founder Larry Ellison bought a Hawaiian island. He also unwittingly bought the Lana’i Animal Rescue Center and its 400 feral cats. BuzzFeed News pays a visit. Andrew Dalton “They’re the island’s cats,” Kathy Carroll says as I literally trip over Shelby, a gray tabby who won’t…

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WHILE residents of Melbourne enjoy another year in the world’s most liveable city, according to the 2015 Global Liveability Ranking from our corporate cousin the Economist Intelligence Unit, spare a thought for those who live in the 57 cities that have steadily deteriorated over the last five years.…

B y Miami standards, the con pulled by Ibes Gomez seems minor. Small potatoes. Mostly just bad checks. A little hot paper to launch a tire business. Another bad check after a car sale went south. And also, yes, a few more checks, totaling an amount of some substance, that caught everyone’s attention…

People eating at the Brave Horse Tavern on the Amazon campus in Seattle in June. Credit Matthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times On Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, across the legal profession and the corporate world, a growing chorus of companies are singing the praises of a kinder workplace,…

Genes, like people, have families — lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member. That ancestor multiplied and spread, morphing a bit with each new iteration. For most of the last 40 years, scientists thought that this was the primary way new genes were born — they…

Hacking of Tax Returns More Extensive Than First Reported, I.R.S. Says

By Paul Duguid My principal connection to the field of history is through an undergraduate course I co-teach called “ History of Information .” It’s a course that seeks to take students from Lascaux to WhatsApp and beyond in fifteen weeks: its key transitional phrase, as my colleague notes, is…

It’s impossible to imagine life without smartphones. Everything about our lives can now be contained in the palm of our hand. Personal details, professional contacts, banking details, photos, medical data, it’s all there, so you’d expect your smartphone to be secure. But in this special…

Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in April, 1967, reporting the story that became “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” “That piece is a blank for me,” she said later. Credit Photograph by Ted Streshinsky / Corbis In the late spring of 1967, Joan Didion, accompanied by a photojournalist named Ted…

Studying cephalopods may illuminate the evolution of brains of all sorts

On September 30, 2012, agents from the FBI contacted U.S. Customs and Border Protection at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago with an urgent request. They wanted bags from two passengers on an outbound flight to Beijing pulled for immediate inspection. The passengers didn’t track as dangerous…

Breathing exercises, an example of the healthy living espoused by John Harvey Kellogg at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Michigan. (Photo: Cbl62/ Wiki Commons ) Veggie burgers and imitation meat are downright common these days, but it took a long time for meat analogues to earn respect at the table.…

More than a year after its 2014 launch and the popularity of the now famous Popcorn Time video streaming application is showing no signs of fading away. However, since millions of people use the various forks of the software every day, Popcorn Time is increasingly attracting the attention of…

A picture released on August 18, 2015 by Nature Communications shows a OH 86 hominin manual proximal phalanx in (from L-R) dorsal, lateral, palmar (distal is top for each) and proximal views A tiny, 1.85 million-year-old bone from the little finger of a human ancestor unearthed in East Africa has…

I saw my first Sun workstation in the winter of 1992, when I was an undergraduate at Purdue University. At the time, I was a student in the Krannert School of Management, and a childhood love of computers had just been reawakened by a mandatory computer programming course I had taken during the fall…

Social network diagram. Credit: Daniel Tenerife/Wikipedia New research has revealed that having mentally healthy friends can help someone recover from depression or even remain mentally healthy in the first place. But crucially having depressed friends does not make you more likely to become…

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use . Samsung makes a lot of things that you might not realize, from medical technology to automated drone guns, but a new paper from the company’s Texas head of R&D Farooq Khan shows just how widely the company is…

By the end of its run in 2000, Peanuts was an institution. It had become an omnipresent part of American culture, and that’s not a compliment. (Note: this piece originally ran on August 20, 2015.) The general response to reading the average Peanuts strip in the 80s and 90s was a ‘meh’ half-smile — a…

Irises by Vincent van Gogh. The new study suggests that the advantageous genes which confer creativity or intelligence may express themselves as illness when other risk factors are present.Photograph: Alamy Serious mood disorders such as bipolar may be the price humans have had to pay for our…

I went to college in a rolling campus up on a forested hill, where the woods served as a playground on bored Sunday evenings, and frequent late-night power outages meant sneaking into empty administrative buildings, or finally searching for that deserted amphitheater tucked away in the forest,…

MIT and Samsung discovered that one of the three basic components of batteries, the electrolyte, could help extend the batteries’ lifetime indefinitely, in theory, if it is changed to a solid state from the current liquid form. SEOUL (Yonhap) — The U.S.-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology…

The most valuable innovation at the heart of Facebook was probably not the social network so much as the creation of a tool that convinced hundreds of millions of people to hand over so much personal data for so little in return. ILLUSTRATION BY JORDAN AWAN Not long ago, Zeynep Tufekci, a…

© AP Photo/Mike Groll Supporters of a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers rally in front of a McDonald's, July 22, 2015, in Albany, N.Y. Crowded. That’s how Ed Rensi remembers what life was like working at McDonald’s back in 1966. There were about double the number of people working in the store…