Our galaxy is positively stuffed with alien worlds. That exoplanets swarm the Milky Way, and that a good fraction of them are small, rocky, and temperate like the planet we live on, means the search for life beyond Earth is moving past the question of whether these worlds are common and on to the…

You may not know what coleoid cephalopods are, but you've definitely seen them in viral videos. They include octopuses, which can open jars from the inside ; squids, which can communicate by changing color ; and cuttlefish, whose camouflage skills are unparalleled. They're the smartest invertebrates…

Joint employment issues One of the biggest mysteries for raters at Leapforce is who they actually work for. They get paychecks from Leapforce, but their work all seems to take place via Google's Raterhub service. Leapforce CEO Jackson assured Ars by phone that Leapforce does have other clients, but…

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - To understand why it is so difficult to defend computers from even moderately capable hackers, consider the case of the security flaw officially known as CVE-2017-0199. The bug was unusually dangerous but of a common genre: it was in Microsoft software, could allow a hacker…

This was apparently the entirety of the development hardware Masahiro Sakurai used to start programming Kirby's Dream Land . Source Gaming / Famitsu Any programmer of a certain age likely has a horror story about some rinky-dink coding and workflow environment that forced them to hack together a…

A ‘lunar base’ is a phrase previously used mostly by Bond villains, but the Chinese and European space agencies are discussing creating exactly that in a new collaborative effort. The discussions were confirmed by the ESA’s Pal Hvistendahl, speaking to Bloomberg on Wednesday, and involve working…

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O n paper alone you would never guess that I grew up poor and hungry. My most recent annual salary was over $700,000. I am a Truman National Security Fellow and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. My publisher has just released my latest book series on quantitative finance in…

Gone are the days when the only way to make butter seem even healthier was to name it after a radioactive element. Wikimedia Commons Beginning in the 1910s, the girls instructed to put radium in their mouths didn't bat an eyelash. They worked for the United States Radium Corporation painting the…

To residents of Maryland, catching an occasional glimpse of a huge white blimp floating in the sky is not unusual. For more than a decade, the military has used the state as a proving ground for new airships destined for Afghanistan or Iraq. But less known is that the test flights have sometimes…

Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images We’re living longer and longer. Well, some of us. Age 100 is now an imaginable goal for young people around the world with good health care. The average woman in Japan is already living to 87 . Yet many Americans are…

I t began as routinely as any other passenger flight. At gate 15 of New York City’s JFK Airport, more than 200 men, women, and children stood in line as they waited to board a Boeing 747. They were on their way to Seoul, South Korea’s capital city. But none would ever make it to their destination.…

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view of planet Earth as a point of light between the icy rings of Saturn on April 12, 2017. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute Full image and caption This cropped, zoomed-in version of the image makes it easier to see Earth's moon -- a smaller,…

Getty Images Every day across the nation, people doing work for Google log in to their computers and start watching YouTube. They look for violence in videos. They seek out hateful language in video titles. They decide whether to classify clips as “offensive” or “sensitive.” They are Google’s…

Uber has argued repeatedly that a federal law meant to prevent price fixing prohibits its drivers from collectively bargaining. But on December 15, 2015, the Seattle City Council unanimously approved an ordinance that, for the first time in the U.S., would allow drivers for ride-hailing services…

Oxygen makes up around 20 percent of the air around you. If it fell to 5 percent, you’d pass out after 3 minutes or so. Then, your brain would start to die. To fuel itself, this gas-guzzling organ requires a constant supply of sugar and oxygen—even when you’re not doing anything. Without the vital…

So McDonald’s doesn’t make their money from selling burgers. Does that really surprise you? A lot of us don’t realize that McDonald’s isn’t really a burger-flipping restaurant chain. Well, it is, but not purely. Peel back the layers and you’ll find that the corporate entity is actually one hell of a…

A boy fishes on a bayou near Isle de Jean Charles, La., in August 2015. Louisiana is still losing about a football field of coastline every hour. Lee Celano/AFP/Getty Images Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has declared a state of emergency over the state's rapidly eroding coastline. It's an effort…

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The Morning Glory Pool in 2015. National Park Service/Public Domain When it comes to geothermal features, Yellowstone National Park holds an embarrassment of riches. Located largely inside the massive caldera of an ancient volcano, the park is home to thousands of geysers and hot springs, including…

The shamelessness was breathtaking. Having told a few jokes, summarized his manifesto , and acknowledged the victim of the so-called “Facebook-killer” in Cleveland, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened his keynote presentation at the company’s F8 developer conference like this: You may…

The trees that shade, cool and feed people from Ventura County to the Mexican border are dying so fast that within a few years it's possible the region will look, feel, sound and smell much less pleasant than it does now. "We're witnessing a transition to a post-oasis landscape in Southern…

The inside story on what it’s like to join our global network of correspondents on the ground The Economist Apr 19, 2017 Daniel Knowles, Africa correspondent for The Economist , in Laikipia, central Kenya, speaking to a Turkana farmer about tensions between farmers and nomadic pastoralists. Flip…

Research Press Release | April 18, 2017 In the microgravity experiments at the International Space Station (ISS), scientists revealed that supercooled water containing antifreeze glycoproteins accelerates and oscillates its ice crystal growth rate. This seemingly contradictory result may lead to a…

NASA's Cassini spacecraft will make its final close flyby of Saturn's haze-enshrouded moon Titan this weekend. The flyby marks the mission's final opportunity for up-close observations of the lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons that spread across the moon's northern polar region, and the last…

The audio maker Bose, whose wireless headphones sell for up to $350, uses an app to collect the listening habits of its customers and provide that information to third parties—all without the knowledge and permission of the users, according to a lawsuit filed in Chicago on Tuesday. The complaint…

Zenaida Munño and her newborn. She used to walk through orange groves on a daily basis for exercise when she was pregnant with one of her sons, who was later diagnosed with autism.Photograph: Sam Levin for the Guardian A white cloud of pesticides had drifted into Fidelia Morales’s back yard,…

David Grann was already interested in writing a book about the serial murders of members of the Oklahoma-based Osage Indian tribe when he visited the Osage Nation Museum . On one wall was a panoramic photo of members of the tribe taken in 1924, but there was a panel missing. When Grann asked the…

While federal environmental officials scrambled to protect Lake Michigan from a cancer-causing metal spilled into a northwest Indiana tributary, their political bosses in President Donald Trump's administration are pushing a new budget that would scuttle efforts to crack down on the pollutant…

One man said he was held in an informal detention facility with more than a dozen gay men who were all tortured on a daily basis.Photograph: Putra Kurniawan/EyeEm/Getty Images At least once a day, Adam’s captors attached metal clamps to his fingers and toes. One of the men then cranked a handle on a…

February 23, 2018 marks National Skip the Straw Day , a day to remember the impact of single-use plastics and efforts to stem the tide of litter and waste. Of the eight million tons of plastic trash that flow every year into the world’s oceans, the plastic drinking straw is surely not a top…

(Bigstock) Of the many pesticides that American farmers have embraced in their war on bugs, neonicotinoids are among the most popular. One of them, called imidacloprid, is among the world’s best-selling insecticides, boasting sales of over $1 billion a year . But with their widespread use comes a…

Photo by fastfun23 via iStock With national policy likely to compound the income and wealth gap in the coming years, states and localities are fighting back. Across the country, local jurisdictions aren’t waiting for federal action or corporate governance reforms to close the wage gap. In December,…

Hazardous waste sites are scattered all across the country, from a Brooklyn canal once surrounded by chemical plants to a shuttered garbage incineration facility in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. There are more than 1,300 of these spots in all — dubbed “Superfund sites” by the federal government — where…

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee | Longreads | February 2017 | 18 minutes (4,276 words) Longreads is proud to feature an exclusive excerpt from Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life , the forthcoming memoir by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee . Lee’s story was first featured on…

Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined

By Trevor Johnson 15 April 2017 The existence of a secretive unit within London’s Metropolitan Police that uses hacking to illegally access the emails of hundreds of political campaigners and journalists has been revealed. At least two of the journalists work for the Guardian . Green Party…

An organization campaigning against foreign drug imports has deep connections to the lobbying group PhRMA, which includes Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Bayer. Bill Diodato/Getty Images A nonprofit organization that has orchestrated a wide-reaching campaign against foreign drug imports has deep ties to the…

Like the best marketing terms, “vanlife” is both highly specific and expansive. Photograph by Jeff Minton for The New Yorker Emily King and Corey Smith had been dating for five months when they took a trip to Central America, in February, 2012. At a surf resort in Nicaragua, Smith helped a lanky…

A view of the ice canyon that now carries meltwater from the Kaskawulsh glacier, seen here on the right, away from the Slims river and toward the Kaskawulsh river.Photograph: Dan Shugar/University of Washington Tacoma An immense river that flowed from one of Canada’s largest glaciers vanished over…