The world governing body of football, Fifa , is facing an unprecedented crisis on the eve of its congress in Zurich after Swiss authorities arrested a string of officials on corruption charges and opened criminal proceedings over the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. More than a dozen…

Henry Folger, 1910. Credit Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library Amazon Local Booksellers Barnes and Noble When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. “The Millionaire and the Bard,” by Andrea Mays, is an American love story. It…

It’s hard to convey the importance of Dante’s place in Italian culture, but there are many possible explanations for the poet's enduring hold on the country. Credit Image via Getty On April 24th, Samantha Cristoforetti, Italy’s first female astronaut, took time off from her regular duties in the…

Hackers gained access to personal information of 104,000 taxpayers this spring, downloading an online service the Internal Revenue Service uses to give Americans access to their past tax returns, the agency said Tuesday. The information included several years’ worth of returns and other tax…

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded. On Dec. 21, 1866, a year and a half after Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Ulysses S. Grant ostensibly closed the book on the Civil War’s final chapter at Appomattox Court House, another soldier, Capt. William Fetterman, led cavalrymen from Fort Phil Kearny,…

Selbe <3 / Flickr The Highway Lane Next to Yours Isn’t Really Moving Any Faster Eric Jaffe May 26, 2015 It’s what researchers call a “roadway illusion.” Details are still emerging about the tragic car crash that killed John Nash, the mathematician celebrated in A Beautiful Mind , and his wife,…

"Come general, the affair is over, we have lost the day," Napoleon told one of his officers. "Let us be off." The day was June 18, 1815. By about 8 p.m., the emperor of France knew he had been decisively defeated at a village called Waterloo, and he was now keen to escape from his enemies, some of…

in Education, K-12 , Music , Television | May 2nd, 2014 7 Comments Advertisement Experimental electronic musician and inventor Bruce Haack’ s compositions expanded many a young consciousness, and taught kids to dance, move, meditate, and to be endlessly curious about the technology of sound. All of…

Flickr: Corbet Ratcliff When Maria Vrind, a former gymnast from Volendam in the Netherlands, found that the only way she could put her socks on in the morning was to lie on her back with her feet in the air, she had to accept that things had reached a crisis point. “I had become so stiff I couldn’t…

When we talk about how nuclear weapons work, we inevitably mention the “critical mass.” This is the amount of fissile material you need to create a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. But it’s a very tricky concept, one often poorly deployed and explained, and the result, I have found while teaching…

I’ve been listening to the excellent Season 2 of the podcast Startup , which gives an inside look at YCombinator startup The Dating Ring (NYT coverage here ). The episodes are all great. They talk about many important topics, but I had some specific comments on fundraising for dating products .…

The browsers we will talk about There are five major browsers used on desktop today: Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera. On mobile, the main browsers are Android Browser, iPhone, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, UC Browser, the Nokia S40/S60 browsers and Chrome–all of which, except for…

Evan Spiegel begins a conversation in the offices of his startup, Snapchat, by propping a sneakered foot onto an Eames chair, leaning back, and acknowledging how infrequently he speaks to the press. “I literally have not done this in so long,” he says, before taking a sip from something called a…

Activists who support challenges to Obama’s immigration plan protest in New York.Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images The White House accused a federal appeals court of “misinterpreting the facts and the law” on Tuesday after it dealt a potentially devastating blow to Barack Obama’s hopes of…

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear this week that, while the Senate is rapidly approaching recess, the Senate “will stay in [session] until a deal is struck to extend” the Patriot Act. McConnell has also introduced legislation for both long-term and short-term reauthorization…

cinefil_ A security researcher said he found a way to game Starbucks gift cards to generate unlimited amounts of money on them. Both he and the coffee chain are grumbling after he used a fraudulent card to make a purchase, then repaid the amount and reported the vulnerability. Egor Homakov of the…

When we say that the U.S. is a wealthy country, what exactly does that mean? Typically, people are referring to per capita GDP, but that's an income measure, not a wealth measure. Let's talk wealth measures. It may surprise you to know that the average household net worth in the U.S. as of 2010 was…

A Coquitlam teen who prompted numerous “swatting” incidents last year on families around Canada and the U.S. pleaded guilty last week to a dozen more charges. The 17-year-old, who cannot be identified under a publication ban because of his age, has now admitted to a total of 23 offences of…

Skip to main content You are here Home / Explore film & TV / Latest from the BFI / BFI news, features and opinion / Features A philosophical future-noir fable drenched in the heady perfume of death, Blade Runner is returning to cinema screens 33 years after its troubled birth. The tale of grizzled…

This post has been corrected. Since cursive writing was omitted when the Common Core academic standards was drafted in the US in 2010, the debate on the value of learning penmanship has raged. Some argue that the skill is obsolete, akin to learning how to use an abacus in the age of supercomputers.…

When it comes to infidelity, men often get away with blaming their behaviour on the 'biological urge' to spread their seed. But recent research suggests that women may also inherit the impulse to cheat. In fact, scientists have found one gene in particular that seems to be linked to a woman's…

I’m not going to lie to you – being wealthy is a lot of fun. And I’m not just talking about novelty fun that you get from driving around in a fancy car. True wealth is more of a big picture thing – freedom from negative stress and a higher confidence about how great life is. It hits you like a pack…

Latke mix with crickets! Cricket game By on May 25, 2015 Get your daily dose of good news from Grist Subscribe to The Beacon I was completely unprepared for Andrew Middleton when he showed up at my front door with a bag full of crickets, which he wanted to cook for my family. This was my fault. We’d…

Jean-Sébastien Lagrange and Raphaël Ménard with their Zero Energy Furniture Climatic Table. © Colombe Clier, VIA 2015 Consisting simply of a surface and legs, the table is one piece of furniture that has remained largely the same for thousands of years. But now, a French design duo has come up with…

I n the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the “Wason selection task,” is often claimed to be “the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning,” in the words of one…

I t’s become common to think about cultural change the same way we think about biological evolution—so common that it may obscure whether the comparison really works. Though there remain many questions yet to answer about biological evolution, it’s a process that’s well-understood. We know, in great…

T he r e get s to be a point when the question is, whose side a r e you on? N o w , I’m Secretary of State of the United States and I’m on our sid e . —Secretary of State Dean Rusk What follows is based on sixty years of experience in public life and journalism. It arises from deepening concern…

MARGRATEN, Netherlands — They haven’t forgotten. For 70 years, the Dutch have come to a verdant U.S. cemetery outside this small village to care for the graves of Americans killed in World War II. On Sunday, they came again, bearing Memorial Day bouquets for men and women they never knew, but whose…

Federal prosecutors are closing in on criminal charges against General Motors Co. over a faulty ignition switch linked to more than 100 deaths, but they are still weighing whether to charge individual employees, according to people familiar with the matter. The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office has…

The Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, who died with his wife in a car crash in New Jersey on Sunday, has rightly been described as a genius. Nash, who died at 86, helped transform a variety of disciplines through his work on game theory, and was recently awarded the Abel Prize to go with…

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Barack Obama Alex Wong/Getty Images Something that often gets obscured in debates over the Trans-Pacific Partnership is that experts who disagree about Barack Obama's trade deal often don't have a lot of disagreements about the specific policies the…

We buy too many clothes, and we pay too little for them. That's the message of "The True Cost," a new documentary on the perils of the fashion industry, which is being released next week. The film is a sweeping, heartbreaking and damning survey of the clothing economy. It covers malformed children…

In America, we love to talk about crime. Usually, the rhetoric is focused on the acts we can see : bank heists, stolen bicycles and cars, alleyway robberies. But often, the more egregious crimes are the ones that are “unseen” -- those that happen behind closed doors in Wall Street suites, or over…

Frederic Filloux May 25, 2015 On the ad blocking front, the situation keeps getting worse. Until now, the media industry pretended to ignore the problem, perhaps waiting for a miracle cure. This might turn into a long lull. In coming weeks, a large analytic firm will release disturbing figures on…

By Sören Preibusch Communications of the ACM,May 2015,Vol. 58 No. 5, Pages 48-55 10.1145/2663341 Comments Credit: Gluekit; Gage Skidmore / Flickr Mass media have been reporting on global-scale state surveillance following former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden's exposure of PRISM in June 2013.…

Apple, thirsting for deep big data DNA, has acqui-hired FoundationDB. That's great for Apple and great for the still small FoundationDB team. It's not so great, however, for the open-source community that was forming around FoundationDB's open-source projects. In anticipation of the big…

A recent danish study [ 1 ] showed that infections can impair cognitive ability. In fact, ensuing infections can affect cognitive performance (as measured by an IQ test), long after the infection has resolved. This effect persists more than 15 years after the most recent infection, and is…

If you travel through the suburbs of the Indian capital, Delhi, you will see miles and miles of built homes with nobody living in them. In fact, Anshuman Magazine, chairman and managing director of property consultancy firm CBRE South Asia, said in a recent article that "around 12 million completed…

In a string of whitewashed villages in the mountains of the Italian island of Sardinia, there are 21 centenarians in a population of 10,000. Only about four in 10,000 Americans reach the 100-year mark. So what do the Sardinians know that our own diet-and-health obsessed country doesn’t? In April, I…