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Why Egg Freezing Is an Impossible Choice - Issue 22: Slow - Nautilus

prime.nautil.us

L ast fall, I went to an egg freezing cocktail hour. The downstairs bar of the glossy SoHo hotel was thronged with women in heels and sleek business attire. Club music thumped, cameras flashed, and I narrowly missed being hit by a videographer angling a tripod over the crowd. The evening was hosted…

Mar 20, 2015

Schneier on Security: Cisco Shipping Equipment to Fake Addresses to Foil NSA Interception

schneier.com

Cisco Shipping Equipment to Fake Addresses to Foil NSA Interception Last May, we learned that the NSA intercepts equipment being shipped around the world and installs eavesdropping implants. There were photos of NSA employees opening up a Cisco box. Cisco's CEO John Chambers personally complained to…

Mar 20, 2015

Burma's bizarre capital: a super-sized slice of post-apocalypse suburbia

theguardian.com

A 14-lane highway in the centre of Naypyidaw, the capital of Burma.Photograph: Nic Dunlop/Panos Pictures Driving through Naypyidaw, the purpose-built capital of Burma, it could be easy to forget that you’re in the middle of one of south-east Asia’s poorest countries. On either side of the street, a…

Mar 20, 2015

Deep Racism: The Forgotten History Of Human Zoos

the-open-mind.com

Sandra Annette Bullock, born in Arlington, Washington, D.C. You might recall Sandra starring in the films – Demolition Man (1993) and Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993) were memorable yet her stardom only came with the smash hit Speed (1994). She won the Oscar for her role in The Blind Side (2009)…

Mar 20, 2015

Thing Piece: The Ugliest Sign in America — Matter — Medium

medium.com

Dan Koeppel Mar 19, 2015 By Dan Koeppel I’m just going to come out and say it: This is the most ubiquitous ugly object in America. Sure, our nation is obsessed with miltary-sized automobiles for personal use, backyard Bigfoot statues, and chicken nuggets— and all those things are grotesque and…

Mar 20, 2015

"Roads were not built for cars": how cyclists, not drivers, first fought to pave US roads

vox.com

A League of American Wheelmen chapter in the 1880s, at the start of the cyclist-driven push for paved roads. ( Courtesy of Carlton Reid ) Nowadays, it's common to view city streets as largely a place for cars . Bikes, if anything, are seen as a very recent intrusion on them. But the surprising truth…

Mar 20, 2015

The Straight Dope: Did Disney's The Lion King rip off an old Japanese TV series?

straightdope.com

Dear Cecil: While waxing nostalgic over our favorite cartoons from the 60s and 70s with some friends, we suddenly realized that Disney's The Lion King bears a striking resemblance in plot and cast to the Japanese-made 60s TV series Kimba the White Lion (of which we can all remember every word of the…

Mar 20, 2015

Why Does The International Space Station Have Such A Weird Shape?

gizmodo.com

I feel like a parent that was just told their child is ugly. As an engineer, I look at the ISS and think " of course it looks that way, why would it look different? " Where a fictional spacecraft has the luxury of having its design dictated by style, real spacecraft are constrained by budget,…

Mar 20, 2015

A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked | WIRED

wired.com

While you’ve likely never heard of companies like Yesware, Bananatag, and Streak, they almost certainly know a good deal about you. Specifically, they know when you’ve opened an email sent by one of their clients, where you are, what sort of device you’re on, and whether you’ve clicked a link, all…

Mar 20, 2015

Research news - Amazon’s carbon uptake declines as trees die faster - University of Exeter

exeter.ac.uk

The Nature paper shows how the Amazon’s carbon sink has declined as tree death accelerated. Image courtesy Peter van der Sleen Amazon’s carbon uptake declines as trees die faster The most extensive land-based study of the Amazon to date reveals it is losing its capacity to absorb carbon from the…

Mar 19, 2015

Tim Cook On Apple's Future: Everything Can Change Except Values

fastcompany.com

Fast Company: How does Steve Jobs’s legacy live on at Apple? Tim Cook: Steve felt that most people live in a small box. They think they can’t influence or change things a lot. I think he would probably call that a limited life. And more than anybody I’ve ever met, Steve never accepted that. He got…

Mar 19, 2015

Administration sets record for withholding government files

bigstory.ap.org

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press. The government took longer to turn over files…

Mar 19, 2015

The Reality of People: An Interview with Dian Hanson

theparisreview.org

Zodiac Lovers Day-Glo poster, 1973. Dian Hanson has made a career of “ probing the subtleties of male lust .” In 1976, she began to edit such successful fetish magazines as Juggs , Oui , Leg Show , and Outlaw Biker . Pornography, at that time, had just gone through one of its more awkward phases.…

Mar 19, 2015

Who Invented the Computer Virus?

priceonomics.com

The first truly viral computer viruses were spread through floppy disks The earliest computer viruses were pretty tame. In fact, the very earliest viruses -- like “Creeper” which just displayed the message “I’M A CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU CAN” -- were not only innocuous experiments in computing, but…

Mar 19, 2015

US Threatened Germany Over Snowden, Vice Chancellor Says - The Intercept

firstlook.org

German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel (above) said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country. “They told us they would stop…

Mar 19, 2015

Will the U.S. Senate Allow Big Media to Hold Blind People for Ransom?

eff.org

In Jewish religious law, there is an offence called lifnei iver (literally, “before the blind”), that prohibits placing stumbling blocks before blind people, deriving from a verse of scripture also accepted by Christians and Muslims. This offense seems so obvious that it hardly requires a scripture…

Mar 18, 2015

The NSA Is Going to Love These USB-C Charging Cables

gizmodo.com

Thanks to Apple's new MacBook and Google's new Chromebook Pixel , USB-C has arrived. A single flavor of cable for all your charging and connectivity needs? Hell yes . But that convenience doesn't come without a cost; our computers will be more vulnerable than ever to malware attacks , from hackers…

Mar 18, 2015

Incredible 3D Printing Technique Looks Like Sci-Fi

popularmechanics.com

A new innovation by Carbon3D, unveiled Monday at the TED2015 conference, could finally move 3D printing out of the hobby shop and onto every factory floor. Imagine you're in an emergency room with a blood vessel blockage. To save your life, a surgeon will first insert a tube, and carefully guide it…

Mar 18, 2015

It’s time to start talking seriously about Basic Income — Basic income — Medium

medium.com

or: How we can save ourselves from the coming robot revolution Jim Pugh Mar 18, 2015 Baxter, an industrial robot capable of learning new skills Let’s start with the bad news: The robots are stealing our jobs. That may sound like science fiction hyperbole to many of you, but it really shouldn’t —…

Mar 18, 2015

The Science of Near-Death Experiences

theatlantic.com

N ear-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. The 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real , about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States. The book it was based on, published in 2010,…

Mar 18, 2015

MDSec Blog: Apple iOS Hardware Assisted Screenlock Bruteforce

blog.mdsec.co.uk

We recently became aware of a device knownas an IP Box that was being used in the phone repair markets to bruteforce theiOS screenlock. This obviously has huge security implications and naturally it was something we wanted to investigate and validate. For as little as £200 we were able toacquire one…

Mar 18, 2015

Memory in the Flesh: Can memories survive outside the brain?

theverge.com

By Arielle Duhaime-Ross The bomb was the size of a shoebox. The brown paper packaging that enveloped it was standard for US mail at the time, and its contents provided no indication — no ticking clock, no lit fuse, no clicking sound — of the explosion to come. Resting on the kitchen counter that…

Mar 18, 2015

Warren Buffett Just Wrote His Best Annual Letter Ever

gatesnotes.com

Please complete your account verification. Resend verification email. This verification token has expired. Your email address has been verified. Update my profile. Your account has been deactivated. Sign up to re-activate your account. View all newsletters in the newsletter archive You are now…

Mar 18, 2015

The Dark Web's Top Drug Market, Evolution, Just Vanished | WIRED

wired.com

In the 18 months since the Silk Road online black market for narcotics was taken down by a swarm of three-letter agencies, a site known as Evolution has taken its place at the top of the dark web drug trade. Now Evolution, too, has suddenly dropped off the face of the internet. But unlike its Silk…

Mar 18, 2015

The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

motherboard.vice.com

Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of small Finnish game developer Colossal Order, is having a good day. When I call her, it's only been a few hours since she learned that Colossal Order's SimCity -like game, Cities: Skylines , has sold more than half a million copies in its first week. The first 250,000 of…

Mar 18, 2015

8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced for Every One Man

psmag.com

Threshing wheat in ancient Egypt. (Photo: Carlos E. Solivérez/Wikimedia Commons) Once upon a time, 4,000 to 8,000 years after humanity invented agriculture, something very strange happened to human reproduction. Across the globe, for every 17 women who were reproducing, passing on genes that are…

Mar 18, 2015

Why Many Smart, Low-Income Students Don't Apply To Elite Schools

npr.org

Kristen Hannah Perez, a low-income, high-achieving student from Celina, Texas, plans to attend Dartmouth College next fall. Shereen Meraji/NPR Right now, high school seniors across the country are trying hard not to think about what is — or isn't — coming in the mail. They're anxiously awaiting…

Mar 17, 2015

Wealth and power may have played a stronger role than 'survival of the fittest'

sciencedaily.com

The DNA you inherit from your parents contributes to the physical make-up of your body -- whether you have blue eyes or brown, black hair or red, or are male or female. Your DNA can also influence whether you might develop certain diseases or disorders such as Crohn's Disease, cystic fibrosis,…

Mar 17, 2015

Ancient Whale Skull Helps Place Humanity's First Steps : DNews

news.discovery.com

The huge gap between current CMS offerings and what the world needed occurred to me during my time as CTO of The Huffington Post . When we were acquired by AOL in 2011, I inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems. It wasn't long after that I soon realized they…

Mar 17, 2015

For Asian Americans, Wealth Stereotypes Don't Fit Reality

nbcnews.com

When Rosa Chen first heard one of her college classmates ask her if she was rich, she says she didn’t quite understand where the idea was coming from. “Everyone I grew up around was struggling economically like us,” she said. Chen, 19, grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of three daughters of…

Mar 17, 2015

BREAKING NEWS: Spam Filtering Service had access to Clinton Classified Emails « Dvorak News Blog

dvorak.org

Not often do we break news on Dvorak News but today we do. Hillary Clinton used a spam filtering service MxLogic to filter her spam and viruses. What this means is – employees at MxLogic, now owned by McAfee – had full access to all her classified state department email in unencrypted form . Here’s…

Mar 17, 2015

In Search of Japanese Roots | DiscoverMagazine.com

discovermagazine.com

Unearthing the origins of the Japanese is a much harder task than you might guess. Among world powers today, the Japanese are the most distinctive in their culture and environment. The origins of their language are one of the most disputed questions of linguistics. These questions are central to the…

Mar 17, 2015

White House office to delete its FOIA regulations

usatoday.com

Melting snow and barricades sit in front of the White House on March 12, 2015, in Washington, D.C. (Photo11: Mark Wilson, Getty Images) WASHINGTON — The White House is removing a federal regulation that subjects its Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, making official a policy…

Mar 17, 2015