The Awl Be less stupid. The Awl Be less stupid.

Larry Lebofsky has always been fascinated with Ceres, the biggest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Even the license plate on his 2005 Toyota Matrix reads “1CERES.” In the late 1970s, the planetary scientist made some of the first observations that suggested Ceres—which is a…

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives. On our second date, eight months before my nervous breakdown, I met her 85-pound pit bull mix, Pavlov. I’d just parked my blue motor scooter in her driveway, feeling jittery but intent to woo, when I noticed the beast…

Last summer, I met Granny. I was on a whale-watching boat that had sailed south from Vancouver Island, in search of a famous and well-studied group of killer whales (orcas). Two hours after we set off, we started seeing black fins scything through the unusually calm and glassy water. We saw a dozen…

Mukesh Singh, convicted of rape and murder, awaits execution on India's death row. Mr. Singh was interviewed about the crime in a BBC documentary, which the Indian government has tried to suppress. NEW DELHI — A British-made documentary about a grisly gang rape in India spread throughout social…

eso1509 — Science Release 5 March 2015 A primitive ocean on Mars held more water than Earth’s Arctic Ocean, and covered a greater portion of the planet’s surface than the Atlantic Ocean does on Earth, according to new results published today. An international team of scientists used ESO’s Very Large…

A Quebec man charged with obstructing border officials by refusing to give up his smartphone password says he will fight the charge. The case has raised a new legal question in Canada, a law professor says. Alain Philippon, 38, of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Que., refused to divulge his cellphone password…

This post and its headline were updated on March 7 at 11:45am in Hong Kong, based on additional reporting. US president Barack Obama was sharply critical of China’s newest security demands for foreign companies this week, saying that plans to “snoop and keep track” of users of US-made technology…

The 2.8m-year-old human lineage jaw bone fossil was found in the Afar region Ethiopia by fossil hunters.Photograph: Brian Villmoare/PA A lower jaw bone and five teeth discovered on a hillside in Ethiopia are the oldest remains ever found that belong to the genus Homo , the lineage that ultimately…

New Zealand is conducting mass surveillance over its Pacific neighbours, reports citing documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden say. Calls, emails and social media messages were being collected from Pacific nations, the New Zealand Herald said. The data was shared with other members of…

​Today marks the centennial of the founding of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that would eventually evolve into NASA. Its establishment represents the United States government's first serious efforts to explore the skies and space, forming the bedrock of the…

Lisette, 20, was born and raised in Côte d’Ivoire. To make a living, she sells grains of millet at the local market in Zuenoula. But without ID documents to prove her birthplace, or her ancestral ties to Burkina Faso, she might as well be invisible. Bereft of a nationality and many fundamental human…

A ROOKIE'S GUIDE TO NICK CAVE, OUR TRUE PRINCE OF DARKNESS

Discoid cockroach with attached electronic backpack (battery on top, board attached to the forewings). The electrodes enter the body through the pronotum. Credit: Journal of the Royal Society Interface , DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2014.1363 (Phys.org)—A team of researchers at Texas A&M University has found a…

A massive digital camera will begin taking detailed snapshots from a mountaintop telescope in Chile in 2021. In just a few nights, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will amass more data than the Hubble Space Telescope gathered in its first 20 years of operation. This unprecedented stream of images…

It could have been any other morning. Felipe de Jesús Peréz García got dressed, said goodbye to his wife and kids, and drove off to work. It would be a two hour commute from their home in Monterrey, in Northeastern Mexico's Nuevo León state, to Reynosa, in neighboring Tamaulipas state, where Felipe,…

Running dog-Thing. The Thing scampers across the Antarctic tundra in a dog suit. A Norwegian helicopter gives chase with bad aim and incendiaries. It’s in humanity’s best interest to kill the dog before it transforms into a “ pissed-off cabbage ” made of twelve dog tongues lined with thorny dog…

A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution.

GRIP firmly, maintain eye contact. What you do during a handshake is clear. But after? Research published this week suggests that humans, like other animals, use smell when they greet each other. Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, took note of an observation made by…

Pneumatic messaging blows cylindrical carriers in tubes, carrying messages and small items in closed systems, which were pioneered and developed in London in the 1850’s, ironically to support a new electric communications technology, the telegraph. Britain’s first telegraph line went from Paddington…

EFF joined more than sixty civil liberties organizations and public interest groups from across the world yesterday in calling upon the world's governments to support the creation of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The special rapporteurs are independent experts…

Published on: Mar 3, 2015 Like this column? Sign up to subscribe to email alerts and you'll never miss a post.

Brazilian researchers in Rio de Janeiro have released thousands of mosquitoes infected with bacteria that suppress dengue fever. The hope is they will multiply, breed and become the majority of mosquitoes, thus reducing cases of the disease. The initiative is part of a programme also taking place in…

(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Technology companies are scrambling to fix a major security flaw that for more than a decade left users of Apple and Google devices vulnerable to hacking when they visited millions of supposedly secure Web sites, including Whitehouse.gov, NSA.gov and FBI.gov. The flaw…

This is the story of how a handful of cryptographers ‘hacked’ the NSA. It’s also a story of encryption backdoors, and why they never quite work out the way you want them to. But I think I’m getting ahead of myself a bit here. Today’s Washington Post has the story of a nasty bug in some TLS/SSL…

By Ryan Mac, David M. Ewalt and Max Jedeur-Palmgren It's 7 p.m. on a Monday in Stockholm, and Markus Persson sits on the terrace of his ninth-story office, sipping the speedball of alcoholic beverages, a vodka Red Bull. Three hours ago he committed to not drinking today, still in recovery from a…

Hillary Rodham Clinton had no government email address. Credit Liam Richards/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have…

Scientists have figured out what makes Indian food so delicious

Hourglass Ömer Akyürek Mar 3, 2015 The average person worldwide lives about 64.3 years. This would be 33.819,228 minutes. Seems a lot right? But on average people spend 444 minutes (!) every day looking at screens, or 7.4 hours. That breaks down to 147 minutes spent watching TV, 103 minutes in front…

One of the basic wonders of astronomy is the ability to explore deep time alongside deep space. When telescopes capture light from very remote objects, they are also producing a snapshot of a distant, bygone past, which often contradicts what astronomers expect to see in the universe's infancy. Case…

It's an interesting time to be a computer security researcher. Last week, Kaspersky Lab released a report about a new family of malware from an entity they called "The Equation Group" . The report demonstrated for the first time that firmware-based attacks, previously only demonstrated in lab…

Last month, I spent my final vacation night in Honduras in San Pedro Sula, considered the most dangerous city outside of the war-torn Middle East . I would not have been scared, except that I traveled with my wife and our four children, aged 5, 7, 14 and 18. On our last taxi ride, we could not find…

Sosyal Medya 21. yüzyılda devrimler televizyon veya radyodan duyrulmaya gerek kalmadan önce tweetlenecek, bloglanacak, Facebook’ta paylaşılacak ya da YouTube’da yayınlanacaktır. En son yaşanan devrimler için yapılan bilimsel bir araştırmada 3 milyondan fazla Devamı

You might resemble or act more like your mother, but a novel research study from UNC School of Medicine researchers reveals that mammals are genetically more like their dads. Specifically, the research shows that although we inherit equal amounts of genetic mutations from our parents -- the…

I talian scientists have actually developed an artificial LED sunlight system that seriously looks just like real daylight streaming through a skylight. The LED skylight uses a thin coating of nanoparticles to recreate the effect that makes the sky blue, known as Rayleigh Scattering. This means that…

Matter Researchers traced the origins of two subtypes of H.I.V.-1. One strain seems to have passed to humans from gorillas. Credit Matthias Graben/imageBROKER, via Corbis Thirty-four years ago, doctors in Los Angeles discovered that some of their patients were succumbing to a normally harmless…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Monday sharply criticized China’s plans for new rules on U.S. tech companies, urging Beijing to change the policy if it wants to do business with the United States and saying he had raised it with President Xi Jinping. In an interview with Reuters,…