You've never seen our planet quite like this before. Researchers in Australia have mapped the Earth's seafloor in unprecedented detail. The digital map -- published online in the journal Geology on August 5, 2015 -- shows an ocean-less Earth that's color-coded with 13 hues to indicate different…

"Can you have sex in World of Warcraft ?", a question that has been asked several times on Yahoo! Answers , is not an easy one to answer. Technically, I mean, no. The characters will not fornicate with each other for your viewing enjoyment—although one user helpfully suggested a way to visually…

A California two-spot octopus, at home in the lab. Michael LaBarbera The octopus is one of Earth's most striking creatures, able to exert fine control over a complex and flexible body all while constantly adjusting its coloration through specialized organs on its skin. The creatures also appear to…

September 1, 1985, 1:05 a.m., the North Atlantic Robert Ballard is belowdecks on the R/V Knorr, a 279-foot research vessel owned by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, staring at a bank of screens. He wears a blue cap and a blue shirt and his face is lit by the humming blue…

The position you sleep in could have a significant effect on your neurological health, a new study has found. Researchers say that sleeping on your side, in what’s known as the lateral position, may help to remove waste products in the brain that contribute to neurological diseases such as…

New cars built in Detroit loaded for rail transport, 1973. (Photo: Environmental Protection Agency) One of the more puzzling and damaging features of the American labor market in the last few decades has been the failure of real (i.e. inflation-adjusted) wages and benefits to keep up with the…

Golem.de At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung has unveiled what appears to be the world's largest hard drive—and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND flash chips rather than spinning platters. The rather boringly named PM1633a, which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to…

For the first time, scientists have recorded from individual brain cells during the dreaming phase of sleep. After each rapid eye movement (REM) they recorded bursts of activity that match what happens when we are awake and we see - or imagine - a new image. They suggest that these well-known…

© Provided by Business Insider Inc mark zuckerberg Facebook cancelled a Harvard student's internship after he created a Google Chrome plugin that highlighted serious privacy flaws in the social network's messaging service, Boston.com reports. In May, computer science and mathematics student Aran…

A tool that I created to use some of the known methods of disabling tracking in Windows 10. CYRILLIC LANGUAGES WARNING ПРЕДУПРЕЖДЕНИЕ ДЛЯ КИРИЛЛИЧЕСКИХ ЯЗЫКОВ Slavic languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbo-Croatian (for Standard Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin),…

New homes stand next to shopping centers and apartments under construction at the Playa Vista community development in Los Angeles, California, U.S., on Monday, June 29, 2015. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon Americans living in rentals spent almost a third of their…

Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them. Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these…

Officer John Rodrigues in Chula Vista, Calif., uses a smartphone with facial recognition software built in. Credit Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times SAN DIEGO — Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify…

UPDATE: Google has corrected this behavior as of Android OS 5.0 (“Lollipop”). Every time you turn on ‘Location’ services on an Android phone, you’re shown a ‘Location consent’ prompt, like this one: GPS is a ‘passive’ system – a GPS receiver figures out your geographic coordinates by finding a…

In This Review By Tom Burgis PublicAffairs, 2015 352 pp. $27.99 Purchase version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? Discussions about the fate of Africa have long had a cyclical quality. That is especially the case when it comes to the question of how to explain the region’s persistent underdevelopment. At…

It may be the most scrutinized day of the Nixon administration: June 30, 1971, the day that the Supreme Court decided in a 6–3 vote that the government had no legal right to prevent the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers . The Papers’ revelations about Vietnam had infuriated Nixon…

Bob Jagendorf The UK government is using some dishonest claims to push through an unnecessary and deeply worrying change to copyright law. If the tweak to the law goes ahead, the maximum jail time for online copyright infringement will be the same as offline—10 years—even if you don't gain…

A RE YOU THE SOCRATES of the National Security Agency? That was the question the NSA asked its workforce in a memo soliciting applications for an in-house ethicist who would write a philosophically minded column about signals intelligence. The column, which would be posted on a classified network at…

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Boris Sofman Aug 3, 2015 Unlisted The AI Scientist Behind Anki Tells Us that We Are Not Doomed to Be Ruled by Robots An autonomous car will one day kill a human. No one disputes this. We are on the brink of breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) that will have the potential to do…

Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive, leaving them reliant on male relatives or paid services to get to stores, school, and (increasingly) work. So when Uber launched in Riyadh in early 2014, its impact went beyond the general convenience of tech-enhanced ride hailing. The company has made…

Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Aug. 11, 2015, 8:06 PM GMT / Updated Aug. 11, 2015, 7:44 PM GMT By Devin Coldewey Ever wonder what it would look like inside the brain and nerves of a creature while it…

Lugo, Spain A cluster of picture-pretty stone homes lies at the bottom of a verdant valley here in northern Galicia, where the only sound comes from wind rustling fig and peach trees. Called O Penso when residents lived here – the very last of whom left about a decade ago – the hamlet is now for…

Adapted from Wikimedia / Lauren Giordano / The Atlantic On January 11, 2013, James Heilman, an emergency-room physician and one of Wikipedia’s most prolific medical editors, was standing watch over the online encyclopedia’s entry for a back procedure called a kyphoplasty. The page originally…

I’ve known the mother sitting in front of me at this parent-teacher conference for years, and we have been through a lot together. I have taught three of her children, and I like to think we’ve even become friends during our time together. She’s a conscientious mother who obviously loves her…

Uzbekistan Airways passengers will be directed to a “special weighing machine” at the departure gate, to determine each person's average weight with their hand baggage. The airline said that individual passengers' weights would not be disclosed, and “full confidentiality of results is guaranteed”,…

While it may never find a place in health-fad diets, the bacon bap and its saturated fat is no longer considered a shortcut to heart disease Getty Images The saturated fats found in meat and dairy produce are not as bad for health as previously believed, a study has found. However, the scientists…

John Brennan was about to say he was sorry. On July 28, 2014, the CIA director wrote a letter to senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss — the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) and the panel's ranking Republican, respectively. In it, he admitted that the CIA's penetration…

Swedish prosecutors will drop their investigation into sexual assault allegations against Julian Assange on Thursday because of the statutes of limitation, the BBC has learned. The Wikileaks founder still faces the more serious allegation of rape. But prosecutors have run out of time to investigate…

With assistance from Joseph Bonneau, Lee Tien, and Jamie Williams Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto would never have qualified for a license under California’s proposed virtual currency regulation A.B. 1326 (Dababneh) is a bill that would require “virtual currency businesses” to apply for and obtain…

The wily ATM hackers are at it again with a new form of card data gathering system, a “shimmer.” These super-thin card readers slide right into the card slot and are technically invisible unless you go poking around inside the ATM. This shimmer was found in Mexico and it is unclear if it was…

K EN WAMSLEY SOMETIMES DREAMS that he’s playing softball again. He’ll be at center field, just like when he played slow pitch back in his teens, or pounding the ball over the fence as the crowd goes wild. Other times, he’s somehow inexplicably back at work in the lab. Wamsley calls them nightmares,…

Our brain’s ability to process information and adapt effectively is dependent on a number of factors, including genes, nutrition, and life experiences. These life experiences wield particular influence over the brain during a few sensitive periods when our most important muscle is most likely to…

A full draft of the copyright chapter of the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, leaked on Wednesday morning, suggests that Canada will have to significantly change its laws to stay in line with the treaty's wide-ranging rules on everything from internet piracy to copyright terms. The…

briefings - august 5-6 white paper presentation source Keynote The Lifecycle of a Revolution In the early days of the public internet, we believed that we were helping build something totally new, a world that would leave behind the shackles of age, of race, of gender, of class, even of law. Twenty…

Not Everyone Can Program: As Seen In Pixar’s Ratatouille When you fall into the programming rabbit hole, you will notice the effort taken to encourage others to begin their journey into the programmatic arts. You will see boot camps, offering to turn you into a developer of mythological proportions…

Photograph by Justin Bishop. It’s a balmy night in Manhattan’s financial district, and at a sports bar called Stout, everyone is Tindering. The tables are filled with young women and men who’ve been chasing money and deals on Wall Street all day, and now they’re out looking for hookups. Everyone is…

How I Work The How I Work series asks heroes, experts, and flat-out productive people to share their shortcuts, workspaces, routines, and more. Have someone you want to see featured, or questions you think we should ask? [Email Nick](mailto:nick.douglas@lifehacker.com). John Scalzi is a Hugo…

A team at CERN is working with the European Space Radiation Superconducting Shield (SR2S) project to develop a superconducting magnet that could protect astronauts from cosmic radiation during deep-space missions. The idea is to create an active magnetic field to shield spacecraft from high-energy…