We’ve known for some time that sleep is important for the restoration and strengthening specific functions in the brain linked to memory, regulating emotions, decision-making, and even creativity. But scientists are now discovering the processes through which sleep also cleans the brain like a…

An unusually windy day gave Scandinavia another chance to show off its global superiority in clean energy yesterday. On July 9, Denmark’s wind farms generated more than enough power to meet nationwide electricity demands—with a 16% surplus of energy during the day and a whopping 40% surplus…

Update: ARNG Personally Identifiable Information Breach Incident ARLINGTON, Va. - Former and current members of the Army National Guard could be affected by a breach of personal information, Guard officials said today. This incident is unrelated to the breach of federal civilian employee personal…

Cheri Winterberg Jul 11, 2015 My youngest daughter was adopted from the Massachusetts foster care system. She’s a beautiful, African American girl with huge brown eyes that smile 90% of the time — except when she’s being sarcastic, and even then she makes me laugh. I remember clearly the day she…

Graphics by Gabriel Dance and Tom Meagher R eynaldo Rodriguez was 19 with a young son, a good job and no criminal record when he shot and killed a man. As part of an ongoing family feud, someone — Rodriguez believed it was a man named Robert Cuellar — had shot at Rodriguez's mother and brother. Then…

James B. Comey , Jr., the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation , is afraid of the dark. “The law hasn’t kept pace with technology, and this disconnect has created a significant public safety problem,” Comey said in an Oct. 16, 2014, speech at the Brookings Institution, an…

Loading... Personnel policies COMMENT 8.95 BUY COPIES Loading... A new survey report just published by Staples Advantage offers a paradoxical set of findings about US office workers. Overwhelmingly, they are happy. Yet the majority of them feel burned out. How could both things be true? Scott Behson…

CHINA'S MARKET CRASH — AND THE MAN WHO SAW IT COMING

Overnight, Trend Micro’s research teams identified a new attack in the ongoing Pawn Storm campaign that is focused on high-profile, sensitive targets. The Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ has enabled us to identify email messages targeting a NATO member as well as a US defense organization.…

A pro-euro protester waves an EU flag outside the Greek parliament in Athens.Photograph: Fotis Plegas G./EPA The Greek government capitulated on Thursday to demands from its creditors for severe austerity measures in return for a modest debt write-off, raising hopes that a rescue deal could be…

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine — Supporters of former Florida governor Jeb Bush have donated more than $114 million to bolster his presidential bid since the beginning of the year, giving the GOP contender an unprecedented campaign treasury as he heads into the highly competitive 2016 primary contest. The…

Updated at 9:40 p.m. ET The U.S. government says it's concluded "with high confidence" that the Social Security numbers of 21.5 million people were stolen from government background investigation databases. The Office of Personnel Management says that number includes 19.7 million individuals who…

On June 8, California’s Judicial Council, which governs the state’s court system, ordered judges to stop requiring people to pay bail in order to contest minor traffic tickets. It’s a small but laudable step to reform the criminal justice policies that impose heavy court fees and fines on…

Op-Ed Contributors Why Is the Federal Government Afraid of Fat? Credit Open, N.Y. BOSTON — SINCE the publication of the federal government’s 1980 Dietary Guidelines , dietary policy has focused on reducing total fat in the American diet — specifically, to no more than 30 percent of a person’s daily…

Consider your average Uber driver. He clearly works for Uber. He is indispensable to the operations of the company. It sets his pay and tells him how to do his job. It fires him if he falls below certain strict standards. But he also clearly works for himself. He has no boss. He chooses his own…

Today's selection -- from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World Jack Weatherford. Whether measured by the total number of people defeated, the sum of the countries annexed, or by the total area occupied, Genghis Khan was the most successful conqueror in world history, and he redrew the…

The Bitcoin network is being hammered by a massive spam attack, and the targets now include WikiLeaks and Voat , the upstart Reddit clone that became a home for Redditors fleeing the site after new anti-harassment policies were instituted. The onslaught began earlier this week, when thousands of…

Hedge funds that used a strategy to claim billions of dollars in tax savings will face new scrutiny from the government, according to guidance issued by the Internal Revenue Service on Wednesday. So-called basket options — complex financial structures that allowed hedge funds like Renaissance…

Zeb Hogan was already familiar with the legendary Mekong giant catfish. After all, he’d been studying the beasts, which grow to hundreds and hundreds of pounds, for years. But when a colleague in Thailand phoned him up in 2005 to say that fishermen had hauled a 646-pounder ashore, it…

Standing on the Washington Mall at the turn of the new millennium, it was impossible not to be struck by America's power and global pre-eminence. Victory in the Cold War made it the hegemon in a unipolar world. Few argued when the 20th Century was dubbed the "American Century", a term first coined…

On March 24 536AD the sky suddenly darkened across continental Europe as a thick dust cloud rolled in and stayed put for 18 months. Historians such as Prokopios record that the Sun shone as dimly as the Moon, sparking summer frosts and snow showers and providing too little light to ripen crops and…

Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in “The Graduate.” Image by Everett How much money is the right amount to make a movie? How much time should it take to shoot one? How long should it take to write and refine a screenplay? And what’s the artistic price of sketchy writing, scant budgeting, and rapid…

You say you want a backdoor to encryption, James Comey, but you’ve never said how it’ll work in practice.Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP I t’s never a good sign when you have to declare during a debate that “ I really am not a maniac .” But that’s what FBI director Jim Comey found himself saying in…

futureatlas.com / Flickr Where Electric Vehicles Actually Cause More Pollution Than Gas Cars Eric Jaffe Jun 29, 2015 If you think EVs are always greener, these county-level maps will take you by surprise. The idea that gasoline cars might cause less environmental harm than electric vehicles seems…

09 Jul 2015,by Owen Tudor in International The European Parliament has finally voted on its resolution about the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership, or TTIP, the EU-US trade deal being negotiated by Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom and US Trade Representative Mike Froman. Most of the news…

Nasa has released the most detailed picture yet taken of dwarf planet Pluto, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft. Taken from a distance of 8m kilometres, the relative close-up of the icy world on the fringes of the solar system was sent back to earth on 8 July. A distinct heart shape can be seen…

SAN FRANCISCO—In the past decade, Moxie Marlinspike has squatted on an abandoned island, toured the U.S. by hopping trains, he says, and earned the enmity of government officials for writing software. Mr. Marlinspike created an encryption program that scrambles messages until they reach the intended…

The north tower of the Golden Gate Bridge is seen surrounded by fog on September 8, 2013, in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images San Francisco's fog is famous , especially in the summer, when weather conditions combine to create the characteristic cooling blanket that sits over the Bay Area.…

0 Shares Media Options Download Video Download Audio Get DVD Other Formats This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate Image Credit: Reuters 0 Shares This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate FBI Director James Comey is set to testify against encryption…

Thanks to technology, we’re reading more than ever—our brains process thousands of words via text messages, email, games, social media, and web stories. According to one report , the amount people that read tripled from 1980 to the late 2000s, and it’s probably safe to say that trend continues…

Last Wednesday, The Intercept published an expose on the NSA's XKeyscore program . Along with information on the breadth and scale of the NSA's metadata collection, The Intercept revealed how the NSA relies on unencrypted cookie data to identify users. As The Intercept says: "The NSA’s ability to…

Principals in Burlington, Iowa, will soon wear tiny clip-on body cameras like this. A school district in southeastern Iowa has purchased 13 small, clip-on cameras that principals and assistant principals will wear during their interactions with students and parents. The district is one of the first…

(Albert Gea/Reuters) Lies are a fact of life. But technology may soon make them obsolete. "Almost everybody lies now and then," said Tim Levine, chair of the Communications Studies Department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Most people are pretty good at it, in that you can't tell when…

My dad said, 'It costs as much as a house,' and I said, 'I'll live in an apartment'. The maker and the marketer JG: You and Steve Jobs had a really formative five years where you were making things together and you figured out what your strengths are. SW: We never made things together because Steve…

A render of the wooden structures planned for the Baobab development in Paris.Illustration: Michael Green Architecture The world is in the midst of a tall building boom, with more skyscrapers being built now than ever before. From the outside, these towers present the epitome of the modern city,…

Google is one of the most advanced search and advertising platforms on the Internet, but a research paper suggests the company may lack the ability to keep discriminatory and privacy policy-violating advertisements off its services. Research conducted by three computer scientists from Carnegie…

Freebooters may be helping to establish Facebook as a destination of choice for viral video online. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Screenshot via Facebook. Photos by Thinkstock. Destin Sandlin is a missile flight test engineer from Alabama who moonlights as a YouTube star. His science-y…

How did it all begin? Aftabe started in the spring of 2014 in Tehran. A bunch of kids who studied in one of the best high schools in Iran, just took Konkoor exam (a standardized test widely used for college admissions in Iran) and instead of playing around or just studying their courses, they wanted…

On Monday the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the National Security Agency (NSA) can temporarily resume for six months its bulk collection of metadata about Americans' phone calls. The program had ended on June 1 when the law it was based upon, Secton 215 of the USA Patriot Act,…