Coal-powered electric plants There are 511 coal-powered electric plants in the U.S. They have generated 34 percent of the nation’s electricity this year. The leading fuel for electricity generation in the country, coal is most popular in the Midwest, Appalachia and the East Coast, but is also the…

Phil South Monday, June 15, 2015 It's easy from the lofty heights of our present day, Marty McFly style futuristic 2015 to forget the past of VR and what we’ve had to do to get here. It's been a difficult birth, all things considered, and long one. As bizarre as it may seem our personal old…

When I ran through years and years of homepage designs by Twitter the other day, it was like hopping into a DeLorean and heading back in time. It was really interesting seeing what the company had in mind for its most important page in 2009…and then quickly changing it within months. I’m not the…

JACOB BERESHElM was fifteen when he was charged with murder. It is now more than three years ago, but the touch of his hand is cold upon mine, with mortal fear, as I write. Every few minutes, during our long talk on the night of his arrest and confession, he would spring to his feet, and, clutching…

In a move that could set a crucial precedent for all service providers, Google pushed back against the expansion of what's become known as the Right to be Forgotten (RTBF) ruling, and refused to comply with a notice issued by French data protection agency Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et…

Multimedia Theories of Everything, Mapped By Natalie Wolchover August 3, 2015 Explore the deepest mysteries at the frontier of fundamental physics, and the most promising ideas put forth to solve them. Emily Fuhrman for Quanta Magazine, with text by Natalie Wolchover and art direction by Olena…

Major movie studios are again trying to make a website they don’t like disappear without a trial. This time , the studios are asking for one court order to bind every domain name registrar, registry, hosting provider, payment processor, caching service, advertising network, social network, and…

Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, poet, architect, and engineer Michelangelo (March 6, 1475–February 18, 1564) is celebrated as one of the greatest and most influential artists of all time. In 1505, thirty-year-old Michelangelo was commissioned to build a tomb for the newly elected Pope Julius…

A security guard watches a demonstration of a DJI Technology Co. Inspire 1 drone in Shenzhen, south China's Guangdong province. Associated Press China is curbing its exports of advanced drones and supercomputers, in the country’s latest move to tighten control over technologies linked to national…

If a city knows what intersections are full of smog, it could add trees or change stop light schedules to improve the air its citizens breathe. Google Earth’s Outreach program that equips nonprofits and public-benefit organizations with data wants to give the world these insights. So today, Google…

Why is classical music so hard to enjoy on streaming services? In one word, it's metadata. Metadata is the information that coexists with every digital music file: each and every piece of information about a selection of music that a listener might find useful to know, and what makes the information…

It was the moment we were waiting for and the moment we dreaded. Stephanie Lee had been hospitalized since the day before Christmas Eve 2014, at Mount Sinai, in New York. She had a room on the palliative-care floor. The doctors who cared for her were at pains to say that they could make her more…

In this latest round of Newegg vs. the patent trolls, Newegg went against a company that claimed its patent covered SSL and RC4 encryption, a common encryption system used by many retailers and websites. This particular patent troll has gone against over 100 other companies, and brought in $45…

By Heini Järvinen Microsoft has renewed its Privacy Policy and Service Agreement. The new services agreement goes into effect on 1 August 2015, only a couple of days after the launch of the Windows 10 operating system on 29 July. The new “privacy dashboard” is presented to give the users a…

Tom Cruise as 'Maverick' was one example of military-aviation cool; Tom Wolfe gave us others in 'The Right Stuff.' Early this month an Air Force F-16, under the command of an experienced Air Force pilot, rammed into a small-civilian Cessna 150 propeller plane, not far from Charleston, South…

Facebook Inc. was ordered by a German privacy watchdog to allow users to have accounts under pseudonyms on the social network. Facebook may not unilaterally change such accounts to the real names of users and may not block them, Johannes Caspar, Hamburg’s data regulator, said in an e-mailed…

July 28, 2015 9:01 pm By Terry Myerson / Executive Vice President, Windows and Devices Group When we first unveiled Windows 10 in September , we outlined our plans for a new era of Windows. We wanted to create a Windows that empowered people and organizations to do great things. Our vision was one…

And other tales from the shrouded country’s complex information underground. Jieun Baek is currently a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. She has been studying North Korea for over a decade, during which she has spent time with hundreds…

The going rate for a stolen identity is about twenty bucks. Tens of millions of people have lost their private information in data breaches over the past few years. But what happens after that—how the data are leveraged for financial gain—remains murky. Many of those stolen records end up for sale…

The Swedish military is studying a video taken by shipwreck hunters who say it shows a wrecked submarine, just off the country’s eastern coast, which appears to be Russian. Ocean X Team, the company behind the discovery, said on its website: “It is unclear how old the submarine is and for how long…

Image Credit Martin St-Amant – Wikipedia – CC-BY-SA-3.0 Four years into writing this blog, I thought I had seen almost everything when it comes to the most common financial suicides committed by the middle class. But today I was hit in the head by a shocking realization: When choosing between buying…

Impossible Foods cheeseburger Impossible Foods Google has made a play to buy a hot startup in the fake meat industry called Impossible Foods, reports The Information . The deal reportedly fell through when the two couldn't agree on price. Google was said to have offered between $200 million and $300…

Richard Borge for the Boston Globe Being fast means working hard and being smart — from answering calls around the clock to having the quickest wit at meetings. Slowness is for the lazy, the aloof, or even the dumb. When we talk about slowing down, we usually mean taking it easy, certainly not being…

Jennifer Pan, 28, fed her parents lies about her success and then hired hit men to kill them. (Court exhibit) For a while, Jennifer Pan’s parents regarded her as their “golden” child. The young Canadian woman, who lived in the city of Markham just north of Toronto, was a straight A student at a…

The New Health Care Credit Yarek Waszul In the last few years, I’ve watched a continuing battle among my friends about which is worse for you: artificial sweeteners or sugar. Unless you want to forgo all beverages that are sweet, you’re going to run into one of these. Rather than rely on anecdote or…

The State of Georgia in the US is suing the owner of the Public.Resource.org website for publishing the State of Georgia's own laws online. According to the lawsuit [PDF] filed this week, Carl Malamud has "engaged in an 18 year long crusade to control the accessibility of U.S. government documents…

Water Cooler The new dating website OpenMinded.com promotes what it calls “ethical cheating.” When the news broke recently that hackers had breached Ashley Madison , the dating website that helps married people find out-of-wedlock romance, the Internet responded with a lot of snark and not much…

Valve’s Steam is the biggest platform in the PC gaming market, with Valve themselves being one of the most prominent companies in the gaming industry as a whole. Steam has millions of accounts all over the world, and in some cases people have invested literally thousands of dollars into their own…

Wanda Austin-Peters, who owned a Subway franchise in Albany for 10 years, said labor costs represented around 50 percent of the business’s annual expenses. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times WASHINGTON — The fight for a $15 minimum wage has gained momentum in New York, California and…

First published: Monday 27 July 2015 4:45PM By: Jeremy Story Carter Image: A scene from the original 1989 edition of Prince of Persia . (Supplied) You might not know his name, but Tommy Tallarico is probably responsible for the music in your favourite video game. RN Afternoons learns how a homeless…

This open letter was announced July 28 at the opening of the IJCAI 2015 conference on July 28. Journalists who wish to see the press release may contact Toby Walsh . Hosting, signature verification and list management are supported by FLI; for administrative questions about this letter, please…

The history of the Commodore Amiga, a documentary created on a Amiga 2000! It's a Pixel THING social_media: YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/user/ThePixel... Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/PixelThing Twitter | https://twitter.com/Pixel_THING Patreon | https://www.patreon.com/PixelTHING…

Updated: July 28, 2015 | The story certainly seemed like a blockbuster: A criminal investigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton by the Justice Department was being sought by two federal inspectors general over her email practices while secretary of state. It’s hard to imagine a much more significant…

Image Credit: Syda Productions / Shutterstock When was the last time you suspended all notifications on your phone? Maybe in airplane mode or at night (and even then, only if your alarm can still work), right? Of course, you don’t want to miss your boss’ urgent email, an alert about a family…

There has been a steady stream of studies over recent years that suggests long-term night-working is extremely bad for your health. It's a sobering thought for those who have to work at night, writes Sarah Montague. I've been getting up in the dead of night to go to work for years. It's the price…