Women at Work Credit Ji Hyun Yu Nearly three-quarters of American mothers with children at home are employed. That fact doesn’t necessarily make it any easier for mothers to drop a toddler at day care or miss school plays. The mommy wars might seem like a relic of the 1990s, but 41 percent of adults…

Mark Buchanan May 17, 2015 Many optimists think so. But a close look at the statistics suggests that the idea just doesn’t add up Credit: Ivy Mike A spate of recent and not so recent books have suggested that “everything is getting better,” that the world is getting more peaceful, more civilized,…

What happens when we digitize the process that makes law and welfare decisions? Photo illustration by Slate . Photo by Stanislav Fridkin/Thinkstock. Public services are becoming increasingly algorithmic, a reality that has spawned hyperbolic comparisons to RoboCop and Minority Report , enforcement…

GCHQ/Crown Copyright The UK government has quietly passed new legislation that exempts GCHQ, police, and other intelligence officers from prosecution for hacking into computers and mobile phones. While major or controversial legislative changes usually go through normal parliamentary process (i.e.…

Meet Peeple , a connected peephole to screen who is knocking on your door. Whenever someone knocks on your door, Peeple snaps a picture and send it to your phone. This way, whether you are home or away, you can monitor who is passing by your home. Peeple is competing in our Hardware Battlefield at…

Credit Kristian Hammerstad In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers…

Boston Public Library A federal drug case in Massachusetts has shed new light on how the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) law enforcement unit uses something as simple as IP logs on the postal tracking website to investigate crimes. According to a December 2013 affidavit of an ongoing federal…

The Wytfliet atlas of 1597, which contains some of the earliest maps of the New World, was stolen by a librarian at the Royal Library of Sweden and made its way to Sotheby’s in London.Photograph: Repro: Kungliga biblioteket Thefts of rare books, maps and manuscripts from national libraries have…

“Add little to little and there will be a big pile.” —Ovid W hen we build complex technologies, despite our best efforts and our desire for clean logic, they often end up being far messier than we intend. They often end up kluges : inelegant solutions that work just well enough. And a reason they…

The Dutch city of Nijmegen is building a flood-control channel for the River Waal (left). In the process, it is also creating an island for recreation as well as prime property that can be developed into a new heart of the city. Room for the River Waal A Dutch City Makes Room for Its River and a New…

Can something as simple as height explain women's lower earning power? It's funny how, in the space of 20 years or so, "height research" has gone from an oddball, poorly respected area of research to a fully legitimate, active branch of the larger field of anthropometry . People who work in this…

Economic View Credit Christophe Vorlet It is hard to avoid the feeling that our current economic problems are more than just a cyclical downturn. We know that the economy has gone through some bad times. But what exactly are we experiencing? One relatively optimistic view is that observed…

Not as sad as it looks. (Winslow Townson/AP Photo) On any given Friday night, bars, restaurants and movie theaters tend to fill up with people spending time with friends, lovers, and family. But when the weekend comes, those who find themselves on their own are likelier to be found on the couch, at…

Axact, which has its headquarters in Karachi, Pakistan, ostensibly operates as a software company. Credit Sara Farid for The New York Times Seen from the Internet, it is a vast education empire: hundreds of universities and high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled…

Back in 2012, we pointed you to an awesome project at Syracuse University that creates artificial lava flows for science, art, and outreach. They don’t use some mild, room-temperature stand-in for lava, they do it the artisanal way: melting small batches of basalt in a serious furnace and pouring…

I actively resent having a Google+ account. It's a bloated desert of half-finished ideas. Even the Google employees I know seem to have stopped using it. It's a necessary evil when dealing with Google products, sadly. I haven't used it in months and my profile tells people not to contact me there.…

Sadly, the decline in free speech at American universities, and the proliferation of ludicrous “trigger warning” mandates for books and courses, are topics covered largely by the right-wing media, so often I must hold my nose as I examine their sources. But even a right-wing venue can get stuff…

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about changes in pop music over time. In particular, I wanted to get a feel for whether or not pop music in the United States is getting less intelligent (a common criticism from older folks). To prove or deny this claim, I defined “less intelligent” as having…

Autopsy at Hotel-Dieu by Henri Gervex W hen Italian authorities confirmed that James Gandolfini had just died in Rome of an apparent heart attack in 2013, many reports in American media fronted the fact that Gandolfini’s body would be autopsied, “as required by Italian law.” They emphasized this…

Janet Bannister, a general partner at a seed capital investment fund, founded Kijiji, a Canadian online classified service owned by eBay. Although Kijiji is now used by almost half of all Canadians, eBay continues to advertise it heavily. Credit Ryan Enn Hughes for The New York Times TORONTO — If…

FBI flight hacker claims queried by security experts

If you sold every share of every company in the U.S. and used the money to buy up all the factories, machines and inventory, you’d have some cash left over.

With the number of mobile phone subscriptions shortly expected to exceed the total global population, what is the next great connected device going to look like ? Hint: It’ll have four wheels. Gartner predicts that there will be 250 million connected cars on the road by 2020. That means one in every…

There are not many people who have become multimillionaires as a direct result of misbehaving at school, but Jack Cator is one of them. Back in 2005, the then 16-year-old was annoyed that his secondary school in Norfolk, eastern England, had put strict blocks on its computer network, to prevent the…

My 12-year-old son, Philip, has nonverbal autism but can communicate with others by typing. He keeps a blog where he describes his experiences living with autism and clears up common misconceptions. He wrote this essay in response to the question, “What do you want people to be aware of on Autism…

The billionaire CEO of Continental Resources told a dean at the University of Oklahoma that he wanted earthquake researchers dismissed

Joe Jaszewski / The Idaho Statesman / AP Customers bag their own groceries at checkout counters at WinCo Foods on Fairview Avenue in Boise, Idaho, on July 1, 2013 Retail analysts say the world’s biggest retailer has reason to fear a small grocery chain that’s based in Idaho and boasts a business…

After a few of his images appeared in the new Kurt Cobain documentary Montage of Heck, photographer Kirk Weddle has finally released 19 previously unseen photos

Baltimore officials, trying to collect some $40 million in long-unpaid water bills, have shut off service to more than 1,600 customers in the past six weeks. But records reviewed by The Baltimore Sun show the city's enforcement has been starkly uneven. While large commercial properties owe the…

Hasta la vista, Uncle Sam! A record 1,335 Americans gave up their passports in the first three months of the year, according to new data released by the U.S. government. That's nearly 40% of the 3,415 Americans that renounced citizenship last year , suggesting that U.S. renunciations will again hit…

I’d like to show you a way to obtain a computer science background that doesn’t involve enrolling in a university program. Maybe you’ve completed an introductory Java course, and now you’d like to pursue a software development position. Or maybe you already have some formal CS training, and you’d…

There is a wide array of obstacles facing the drone deliveries proposed by Amazon and Google. If the deliveries do happen, however, researchers from the mechanical engineering lab at Stanford University believe they have made a technological leap in the science of the drone’s landing. Working with…

Growing up in some places — especially liberal ones — makes people less likely to marry, new data shows. Related Article Places that make being married at age 26... Less likely More likely The place where you grow up doesn’t affect only your future income, as we wrote about last week . It also…

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - "Smart Relief" is a mobile app for parental control of Android smartphones. South Korea's government funded the app, which alerts parents to possible bullying based on its monitoring of phrases and words used in smartphone messages and in online searches. The developer says…

Report of Lightning Strike, Philosophical Transactions, 1778. Source: The Royal Society Researchers are estimated to waste 15 million person-hours a year on unpublished submissions to scientific journals. How can we make scientific communication more efficient? This was one of the questions raised…