Humans evolved over millions of years into today’s upright, bipedal walkers. Now, the evolution of some robots is on a similar track. Only the pace is much faster. In recent decades, we’ve gone from stationary robots performing repetive tasks to wheeled and four-legged robots. And now, bipedal bots…

SAN JOSE — As Silicon Valley companies seek to diversify their ranks and address the glaring absence of women, black and Latino engineers, a new report says they are overlooking a problem hidden in plain sight. Asian-Americans are well-represented at the Bay Area’s leading technology firms, but few…

On Money Credit Illustration by Andrew Rae Recently I visited a movie set. It was the first day of production, and I arrived just as the sun was coming up, but already, around 150 people were busy setting up that day’s shot in an abandoned office building. Crew members were laying electric cables…

In 1995, Harper's Magazine sent David Foster Wallace on a Caribbean cruise in the hope that he would discover something about what Americans like to do for fun. He reported back : A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem…

One of the startups I really wanted to visit during my recent Amsterdam tech tour was The Cloakroom , a young but fast-growing company that provides a personalised clothing service for men. You might know the drill if you’ve been following the trends in fashion e-commerce even just a little: rather…

Credit Illustration by Matthew Hollister In 2013, George Packer wrote in this magazine that “the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.” If anything, twenty might have been a high estimate. In the two years…

The 21-kiloton, underwater Baker nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll, 1946 U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps via Wikipedia W hen opposing nations gained access to nuclear weapons, it fundamentally changed the logic of war. You might say that it made questions about war more cleanly logical—with…

Dougles Peebles / Corbis Advertisement Editor’s Picks Does Hawaii Need a Unified Grid? 800,000 Microinverters Remotely Retrofitted on Oahu—in One Day Hawaii’s legislature voted yesterday to stake the state’s future on renewable energy . According to House Bill 623, the archipelago’s power grids must…

Disruptions The Jungle, a homeless encampment of tents and shacks in San Jose, Calif., was cleared in December of last year. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times When I lived in Silicon Valley, I was struck by not just the region’s income disparity, but also by the lack of compassion that wealthy…

Convent of San Nicolò, Treviso/Scala/Art Resource Cardinal Nicholas of Rouen, detail from Tommaso da Modena’s fresco cycle of forty Dominican scholars, 1352 “What do we see when we read (other than the words on the page)?” asks Peter Mendelsund in a welcome and fascinating new book. Or more…

The SpaceX Dragon V2, during a test of its abort system. (NASA) This morning at 9 am ET, SpaceX tested the abort system of its new Dragon V2 capsule , a spacecraft that will take astronauts to the International Space Station starting in 2017 — and perhaps someday into deep space. The Dragon V2's…

Empathy Cards were inspired by L.A.-based designer Emily McDowell’s experiences as a cancer patient and survivor. Courtesy of Emily McDowell Los Angeles–based designer Emily McDowell was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 24, enduring nine months of chemo and radiation before going…

Life is hard on Krizo. The small Pacific island has seen it all: tsunamis, cyclones, mudslides, pandemics, mining disasters, rebel uprisings, and volcanic eruptions. If it's a devastating catastrophe, then it's happened on Krizo. Krizo is God's little punching bag, but thankfully, it doesn't…

Home Security Thank you Your message has been sent. Sorry There was an error emailing this page. By Lucian Constantin Romania Correspondent, IDG News Service | More good reads Think Superfish-like adware and its cousins are dead? They're not. Here's how... Joint effort guts Superfish 'Secure'…

Illustration by Pete Gamlen I magine walking into a coffee shop, ordering a cappuccino, and then, to your surprise, being informed that it has already been paid for. Where did this unexpected gift come from? It transpires that it was left by the previous customer. The only snag, if indeed it is a…

Who waits until the plane’s engines are “fully switched off” before switching on their mobile phones? No one, right? So I fired up my phone as soon as the wheels hit the ground. It vibrated merrily with an SMS message: “Your Blacklane driver is waiting for you, you can contact him at this number:” I…

By David Ochsner In Jack Finney’s novel Time and Again, the protagonist Simon Morley is taken to a top-secret government facility where time travel is made possible through self-hypnosis. Simon views what seem to be a series of historically accurate movie sets—complete with live actors performing…

An image of a hydrothermal vent field along the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge, close to where Loki was found in marine sediments. (Centre for Geobiology /University of Bergen, Norway/ by R.B. Pedersen) A new microbe found a mile and a half below the Atlantic Ocean just gave scientists a major clue on the…

Why Freightliner Parts Service Demand Detroit Freightliner Vans Warranty and Extended Coverage Financing Brochures and Videos Driver Training Blog and Newsletters Team Run Smart Freightliner Racing Custom Truck Services Real Cost of Ownership Mobile App Press Releases Merchandise Dealers TRUCKS THAT…

Chris Yarzab Two legal activist groups have lost their appeal in a public records lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department regarding license plate reader (LPR) data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties…

Tech Talk Transportation Self-Driving 6 May 2015 | 20:00 GMT Software-based receiver corrects the inherent errors GPS measurements, providing position with two centimeters By Photo: Cockrell School of Engineering/University of Texas at Austin Advertisement Editor’s Picks Protecting GPS From Spoofers…

Spider silk is one of the more extraordinary materials known to science. The protein fiber, spun by spiders to make webs, is stronger than almost anything that humans can make. The dragline silk spiders use to make a web’s outer rim and spokes is amazing stuff. It matches high-grade alloy steel for…

Can algorithms form price-fixing cartels? Credit Illustration by Boyoun Kim On the day after Easter this year, an online poster retailer named David Topkins became the first e-commerce executive to be prosecuted under antitrust law. In a complaint that was scant on details, the U.S. Department of…

It started innocently enough. Ken Jennings, a baby-faced computer engineer, printed the phrase “Who is Jones?” onto his Final Jeopardy lightbox . Jennings, who had bet $17,201 of the $20,000 he had earned during the first two rounds, clenched his teeth nervously — and then exhaled once host Alex…

Cody Wilson claims that State Department restrictions violated his right to free speech. Credit Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times When is a gun not just a gun? When it’s also constitutionally protected free speech. That is the legal argument being made by Cody Wilson, a Texas man who…

Welcome to a huge resource on pricing psychology. Whether you’re marketing a new product, selling items on eBay, or negotiating a deal on your house, you’ll learn 42 tricks to make your price seem lower. PDF Bonus : This article is 9,368 words. Click to so that you can reference it later. Table of…

In Baltimore in 1910, a black Yale law school graduate purchased a home in a previously all-white neighborhood. The Baltimore city government reacted by adopting a residential segregation ordinance , restricting African Americans to designated blocks. Explaining the policy, Baltimore’s mayor…

A more recent version of this report is available at epi.org/147963 . Executive summary Economic inequality is, at long last, commanding attention from policymakers, the media, and everyday citizens. There is growing recognition that we need an inclusive economy that works for everyone—not just for…

T here is now widespread agreement across the political spectrum that wage stagnation is the country’s key economic challenge . Wages for the vast majority of American workers have stagnated or declined since 1979 —and wage stagnation’s reach has broadened over the last dozen years to include…

The film follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and…

A view of the National Security Agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images The National Security Agency's practice of collecting data about Americans' telephone calls in bulk goes beyond what Congress intended when it wrote Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, a…

Can the dairy business be any worse for cows than we thought? A new study says yes, actually. When a calf is immediately and permanently taken from its mother, that separation does more psychological harm than we knew. Calves raised in isolation from other cows grow up reacting differently to…

Tuesday, December 2, 2014 WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today outlined a progressive economic agenda to reverse a 40-year decline of the American middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else in the United States. In a Senate floor speech, Sanders…

(Image: Wikimedia Commons) NEW YORK -- A former National Security Agency official turned whistleblower has spent almost a decade and a half in civilian life. And he says he's still "pissed" by what he's seen leak in the past two years. In a lunch meeting hosted by Contrast Security founder Jeff…

Sam Tsemberis, founder and CEO of Pathways to Housing, stands near one of the buildings in NE Washington D.C. that offers housing to formerly homeless. (Photo by Reza A. Marvashti for The Washington Post) The process of innovation is often one of mystery. Where does an idea come from? How do…