Flexport Inc. is one of the growing number of Silicon Valley startups targeting the shipping industry that are attracting money from venture capital firms. Above, Flexport Chief Executive Officer Ryan Petersen. Photo: Bloomberg News By Erica E. Phillips Updated Aug. 6, 2015 12:27 p.m. ET Silicon…

flickr user: Fernando Marcelo Cañuelo Language takes an astonishing variety of forms across the world—to such a huge extent that a long-standing debate rages around the question of whether all languages have even a single property in common. Well, there’s a new candidate for the elusive title of…

Highlights • A submerged, 12 m long monolith has been discovered at a water depth of 40 m, in a shallow bank of the Sicilian Channel. • Morphological evidence, underwater observations, and results of petrographic analysis testify that the monolith is man-made. • This monolith suggests a significant…

Ride the snake. (Courtesy of Tesla) When Tesla's billionaire founder Elon Musk tweeted in December that the all-electric carmaker was working on a charger "that automatically moves out from the wall and connects like a solid metal snake. For realz," no one really knew what he was talking about. Now,…

THIS week Narendra Modi's government was left looking rather red-faced. Late last week it had quietly told telecoms companies around the country to block public access to 857 porn sites, citing the need to protect public morality. Days later, on August 4th, the telecoms minister, Ravi Shankar…

On January 18 of this year, Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment under mysterious circumstances . The next day, he had been scheduled to appear before the country's Congress to deliver what was bound to be an incendiary testimony, accusing the current president,…

The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it? Hossein Derakhshan Jul 14, 2015 By Hossein Derakhshan Illustrations by Tim McDonagh S even months ago , I sat down at the small table in the kitchen of my 1960s apartment, nestled…

Roll it, flip it, fold it and even mold it into a squiggle. Your tongue can be an acrobat, regardless of whether your parents are capable of the same tricks. Every semester, John McDonald, a evolutionary biologist at the University of Delaware, asks his undergraduate students the following question:…

Why doesn’t the United States have a base on the Moon? Because getting to the Moon was a matter of national security. Setting up a permanent base there? Not so much. Through the fog of history it’s really, really easy for Americans to forget why we went to the Moon in the first place. It was…

Where does money come from? Where does it go? Who makes it? The money magician's secrets are unveiled. Here is a close look at their mirrors and smoke machines, the pulleys, cogs, and wheels that create the grand illusion called money. A boring subject? Just wait. You'll be hooked in five minutes.…

Gabriella Peñuela/FUSION This summer, Google launched an app called Photos. It's an incredible tool : If you beam your digital memories to Google's cloud, the search giant will make your photos searchable by face, by object, and even by emotion , and will use its intelligence to turn your disparate…

Y ou’ve probably heard the myth that the average person uses only 10 percent of their brain. It’s a seductive lie because it suggests that we could be more than we are. Sci-fi movies like Limitless and Lucy , whose protagonists gain super-human abilities by accessing latent mental capacities, have…

In 2014, the International Space Station had to move three times to avoid lethal chunks of space debris. The problem also threatens crucial and costly satellites in orbit. So what is the scale of the space junk problem, and what can we do about it? Forty-five years ago the associate director of…

Tesla has issued a software update for its model S car after two researchers found a way to subvert its onboard systems. It is the second time in a month that a car maker has had to act to solve security problems with its vehicles uncovered by hackers. In the latest instance, the researchers were…

Open Source Sofia Ashraf, a young female rapper from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu who rose to fame by riffing about social justice while wearing a burqa, released a new single this week about corporate responsibility that draws inspiration from an unlikely source: the risqué Nicki Minaj hit, “…

W hen Paul Kay, then an anthropology graduate student at Harvard University, arrived in Tahiti in 1959 to study island life, he expected to have a hard time learning the local words for colors. His field had long espoused a theory called linguistic relativity, which held that language shapes…

The logo of the 2015 Black Hat computer security conference, held in Las Vegas Aug. 4 - 6, 2015. (Photo: Black Hat) SAN FRANCISCO — Pen and paper instead of a laptop. Cash instead of credit cards. Face-to-face chats instead of cell phones. That's the drill for the most cautious at two big computer…

N ineteen stories up in a Brooklyn office tower, the view from Manuela Veloso’s office—azure skies, New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty—is exhilarating. But right now we only have eyes for the nondescript windows below us in the tower across the street. In their panes, we can see chairs, desks,…

Photo Credit iStock Photo Eating spicy food is associated with a reduced risk for death, an analysis of dietary data on more than 485,000 people found. Study participants were enrolled between 2004 and 2008 in a large Chinese health study, and researchers followed them for an average of more than…

DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE exploit found in the wild Posted: August 3, 2015 by Last updated: March 31, 2016 Last month, Stefan Esser blogged about a zero-day vulnerability in OS X, without having informed Apple about the problem first. Unfortunately, today has brought the discovery of the first known…

Silicon Valley has a tendency to believe that every disruption in society is necessary and just — especially when those disruptions benefit the wealthy tech employees who are driving out everyone else in San Francisco. Washio , a two-year-old startup that provides on-demand laundry service, caters…

We recently changed our mission statement at Microsoft to “empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.” Last week, in Kenya, I had a firsthand opportunity to see this mission in action. We often read about the world being flat, with people having access to information from…

Filed under: Opinion. “Disruption” isn’t always what you think it is. It’s known under a number of names: The Sharing Economy . The Collaborative Economy . The Gig Economy . Because of its “fresh” and “disruptive” model, undeniable financial incentives in the middle of a global economic recession,…

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the lead agency tasked with protecting civilian government computer systems, agrees that the Senate's Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) is fundamentally flawed. DHS's letter to Senator Al Franken, which voiced many concerns about the bill, joins…

You use YouTube, everyone uses YouTube, so you know the “301+” number that this headline refers to. Before a video goes bananas with views, it gets paused at “301+” for some period of time just to make sure that the counts aren’t being fluffed up by bots. Sure, it’s a nice notion, but man is it…

At first, Shri Kulkarni didn't think it was a big deal. It was the middle of the night in September 1982, and he was at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, using the enormous radio dish to hunt for pulsars: the ultra-dense, rapidly spinning corpses of massive stars. He had just detected his first…

Intelligence agencies' secretive techniques for spying on mobile phones are seldom made public. But a UK security firm has shown the BBC how one tool, sold around the world to spooks, actually works. It allows spies to take secret pictures with a phone's camera and record conversations with the…

H istorians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state’s Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first…

China plans to set up “network security offices” staffed by police inside major Internet companies, a move to strengthen the government’s grip on the world’s largest population of Web users. The Ministry of Public Security will add police officers at “critical” companies to help boost defenses…

3-D printing has been around in various forms since the 1980s, originally as a means of quickly producing affordable prototypes for the manufacturing industry. Recently, researchers have found some amazing healthcare and biological applications for 3-D printing technology. From custom prosthetics to…

On the heels of Netflix’s institution of ‘unlimited’ paid maternity and paternity leave for its employees, Microsoft this morning announced that it is bolstering its own parental leave policies for both mothers and fathers that work at the firm. Previously, Microsoft offered eight weeks of paid…

Few people in the tech world can truly be said to “need no introduction.” Stephen Wolfram is certainly one of them. But while he may not need one, the breadth and magnitude of his accomplishments over the past four decades invite a brief review: Stephen Wolfram is a distinguished scientist,…

So says Jennifer Granick , Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, who gave the keynote address at the ( somewhat infamous ) Black Hat security conference today. Once, techno-utopians could say things like “ The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes…

On Tuesday, Southern California tutor Timothy Lance Lai pleaded guilty to computer fraud and burglary for placing keylogging software on teachers' computers to steal login credentials which he used to change students' grades and look at upcoming testing material. Lai was sentenced to one year in…

Giving up the house key makes it brave. Anyone can sleep in the office for a night, a few nights, even most of the time. But to remove the option of escaping the office entirely—that’s what makes it heroic in Silicon Valley. And Matthew Weaver is always ready to be a hero. Like, for instance, when…

Chen Yaying and Liu Jun, who go by the names Kiki and John, in their lingerie store in Asyut, with their Egyptian assistant Rahma Medhat. Photograph by Rena Effendi / INSTITUTE The city of Asyut sits in the heart of Upper Egypt, at a crescent-shaped bend in the Nile River, where the western bank is…

Continued public health surveillance of sleep quality, duration, behaviors, and disorders is needed to monitor sleep difficulties and their health impact. Sleep is increasingly recognized as important to public health, with sleep insufficiency linked to motor vehicle crashes, industrial disasters,…