This is the drone in question. Eric Joe While we’ve heard of consumer drones getting in the way of commercial airliners and obstructing firefighting operations , we haven’t heard of many drones being shot out of the sky by a neighbor. But according to one drone pilot, that's exactly what occurred in…

The Phantom Time Hypothesis , developed by Heribert Illig, proposes that error and falsification have radically distorted the historical record. In his analysis, we have dilated the course of true events, so that they appear to cover far greater lengths of time than in fact passed. The so-called…

The salt flats of the vast Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia, beneath which lies roughly 50 percent of the world’s supply of lithium. Credit Olaf Otto Becker The Mental Health Issue My 20-year struggle with bipolar disorder. The salt flats of the vast Salar de Uyuni, in Bolivia, beneath which lies roughly…

Rats, like humans, have dreams about the future. When they see a treat they can’t reach, rats’ later dreams depict them walking toward it, researchers have found. The discovery may one day provide some insight into what happens in the human mind during sleep. Maps in the Brain Scientists already…

Dallas Lawrey, a drilling consultant, watches as a rig is taken apart at a drilling site 16 miles east of Watford City, North Dakota. Mara Van Ells In a field of brittle yellow grass and clotted mud about five miles north of Dickinson, North Dakota, stands a cemetery of sorts. Drilling rigs stretch…

The Mental Health Issue Credit Illustration by Andrew Rae E ighteen vials were rocking back and forth on a squeaky mechanical device the shape of a butcher scale, and Mark Lyte was beside himself with excitement. ‘‘We actually got some fresh yesterday — freshly frozen,’’ Lyte said to a lab…

When executives at Bond Street, an upstart online small-business lender, were canvassing for investors earlier this year, they made the usual checks with venture-capital funds and Wall Street banks. It didn’t occur to them to try celebrity chefs. But David Chang, the impresario behind the hip…

My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists NOV. 8, 2011 Studying Abroad | The Heidenry family's trip to Mexico in the '70s was part of their curriculum. Margaret Heidenry Tired of the constraints of the 40-hour workweek, my father, in 1972, quit his job in publishing. My parents were in their early…

One of the trick questions American History teachers ask their classes is: “When did slavery end?” The answer that is both obvious and wrong is: with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation , which you might count either as 1862 (when it was announced) or 1863 (when it went into effect). It’s…

Can an animal be a person? That is the essence of the challenge the killer whales pose to humans, especially those humans who hold them captive. But it is also a larger challenge to all of us, especially if we endeavor to take our role as stewards of the world in which we live seriously. It is a…

On Facebook, it’s the season where parents are posting pictures of K-12 graduations, including moppets in tiny mortarboards. But unlike a generation ago, today’s smallest graduates are amassing a big data trail. Just as medical and government files have been digitized — some to be anonymized and…

Africa’s black market in ivory doesn’t just sell an illegal product: recent estimates confirmed it stokes a poaching epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands of elephants over the past decade. Now, reports BBC’s Jonathan Ball , there’s a new weapon in the fight to figure out just who is killing…

Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere,…

Life@Work Steve Jobs could be unnecessarily cruel to the people who helped make his dreams come true, Tony Schwartz writes. Credit Paul Sakuma/Associated Press As I was reading Ashlee Vance’s “Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” I was alternately awed and disheartened,…

Google knowingly manipulates search results according to a research paper published Monday from several academics. The study presents evidence that the search giant sets out to hamper competitors and limit consumers’ options. The paper lands as Google prepares to release its response to the European…

Published on June 27, 2015 Houston Candida Vitale and the other fellows at MD Anderson’s leukemia treatment center had known one another for only a few months, but they already were very tight. The nine of them shared a small office and were always hanging out on weekends. But she wasn’t quite sure…

You don’t need to a Nobel Prize in economics to know that the fracking revolution has been good for the U.S. What’s not so well known is just how competitive cheap oil and gas has made American manufacturing. BCG, the Boston consultancy, estimates the average cost to manufacture goods in the U.S. is…

Always Five Cents 1905: An oilcloth sign. The Coca-Cola Company 1907: Change receivers like this one were used at cash registers to hold change made for customers. The Coca-Cola Company 1922: A print ad in the Saturday Evening Post. The Coca-Cola Company 1936: An ad highlighting 50 years of…

Credit Liz Grauman/The New York Times The privacy policy for Hulu, a video-streaming service with about nine million subscribers, opens with a declaration that the company “respects your privacy.” That respect could lapse, however, if the company is ever sold or goes bankrupt. At that point,…

Bees entering the beehive of accounting expert and amateur beekeeper Marie Skjelbred on the 12th floor of a modern building in Oslo.Photograph: PIERRE-HENRY DESHAYES/AFP/Getty Images From flower-emblazoned cemeteries to rooftop gardens and balconies, Norway’s capital Oslo is creating a “bee highway”…

There are Facebook pages devoted to adult colorers. There are coloring clubs . People who motivate themselves to pay off debt by coloring . Game of Thrones is making a coloring book . What this means: Coloring is now a normal adult activity. Thanks largely to a recent wave of publicity over the…

Own-Mailbox: your mailbox protecting your privacy! Plug it in at your home to read and write emails privately from anywhere in the world. Watch the video Own-Mailbox is a personal email server you can run in your own home, with strong privacy protection measures integrated at its core. It provides…

Adam Levey 1. Youngstown, U.S.A. The end of work is still just a futuristic concept for most of the United States, but it is something like a moment in history for Youngstown, Ohio, one its residents can cite with precision: September 19, 1977. For much of the 20th century, Youngstown’s steel mills…

Story highlights U.N. warns of "looming humanitarian disaster" in North Korea due to drought with famine likely to follow Even state media, which usually paint a rosy picture, have expressed concerns U.N. official calls on international community to provide help Seoul, South Korea (CNN) Even a…

Eating eggs with your salad helps boost absorption of carotenoids — the pigments in tomatoes and carrots. Photo illustration by Meredith Rizzo/NPR What are the makings of a great salad? You need fresh greens, of course, and then a layer of colorful vegetables like tomatoes and carrots. That's a good…

For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for you. ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the…

Schoolgirls in Ethiopia examine a new feminine product: underwear with a pocket for a menstrual pad. Courtesy of Be Girl Inc. When Elynn Walter walks into a room of officials from global health organizations and governments, this is how she likes to get their attention: "I'll say, 'OK, everyone…

Primal posture: Ubong tribesmen in Borneo (right) display the perfect J-shaped spines. A woman in Burkina Faso (left) holds her baby so that his spine stays straight. The center image shows the S-shaped spine drawn in a modern anatomy book (Fig. I) and the J-shaped spine (Fig. II) drawn in the 1897…

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Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast Is there anything more likely to make you shit your pants out of a mix of fear and anger than getting a federal subpoena out of the blue? Well, yes, there is: getting a gag order that prohibits you from speaking publicly about that subpoena and even…

Windows XP has long been an OS Microsoft begrudgingly kept alive far longer than it could have ever imagined. Initially released in 2001, official support for Windows XP persisted all the way through April 2014. At the time, Microsoft noted that after 13 years of support, it was time for the company…

Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up? Why protest SOPA and not suffering? Why are today’s working poor so quiescent? I’m not the only one posing this question. “Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” asks The Economist . “Why don’t voters demand more redistribution?” wonders David Samuels , a political…

Raw Data Credit Jon Krause The Large Hadron Collider sprung back to life this month, smashing subatomic particles with nearly double the energy used to discover the Higgs boson , a landmark in understanding the makeup of the physical world. With the Higgs now in the bag, researchers are setting…

This is the story of how I got punched in the face by the internet. Sai Jun 25, 2015 It’s the summer of 2011, a few months after one of my darkest periods . I’m working day and night on freelance projects and need to find something to keep me sane. Meanwhile, Google+ comes out of the doors exploding…

The human body is one of the most common objects encountered in art, whether in paintings, sculptures or other objects. Things have not changed much since medieval times, when artists loved to fill their work with human figures – commonly saints or individuals affiliated with biblical stories. Among…

exclusive Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast It was already being described as the worst hack of the U.S. government in history. And it just got much worse. A senior U.S. official has confirmed that foreign hackers compromised the intimate personal details of an untold number of government…

Left: a collection of confiscated fraudulent bomb detectors. Right: James McCormick, an architect of the scam, arriving for his sentencing in London on three counts of fraud, May 2013. Left, photograph by James Mollison; right, by from Rex/REX USA. On a Sunday morning in the fall of 2009, a 26-seat…

Add designated driver to the list of things your smartphone can do with a car. Luxe, a fast-growing startup that uses a phone’s GPS to offer a personal...