Leonard Nimoy, best known for playing the character Spock in the Star Trek television shows and films, died at 83. Credit NBC, via Photofest Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the…

Vic Suter said she was neither booked nor permitted a phone call during her interrogation in 2012. Suter acknowledged: ‘You have no rights at Homan.’Photograph: Supplied A woman who says she was shackled to a bench within Chicago’s secretive interrogation facility for 18 hours before being permitted…

Reuters Despite tens of millions of corporate dollars in last-minute lobbying, the Federal Communications Commission passed new rules Thursday reclassifying the Internet as a public utility and preventing Internet service providers from artificially slowing down the Web. Now Comcast is calling…

Opposition research is becoming a given in politics, sometimes even at the local level. iStockphoto.com Opposition research exists mostly in the political shadows. So perhaps it's fitting that this boot camp is in an generic conference room in a generic airport hotel outside of Washington, D.C. It's…

Enlarge Martial Régereau It's starting to look like Superfish and other software containing the same HTTPS-breaking code library may have posed more than a merely theoretical danger to Internet users. For the first time, researchers have uncovered evidence suggesting the critical weakness may have…

Investors in small cannabis companies lost $23.3 billion in 2014 because shady stock promoters are capitalizing on the slow tide of legalization in the US by manipulating the penny stock market with " pump and dump " schemes. Penny stocks are stocks in small companies that trade for less than five…

The Transportation Security Administration said it is unlikely to detect and unable to extinguish what an FBI report called “the greatest potential incendiary threat to aviation,” according to a classified document obtained by The Intercept . Yet despite that warning, sources said TSA is not…

We are different people at different hours of the day, but an early bird isn’t superior to a night owl. Credit Illustration by Min Heo The idea of the virtuous early bird goes back at least to Aristotle, who wrote, in his Economics, that “Rising before daylight is … to be commended; it is a healthy…

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee Norton, 306 pp, £17.99, January 2014, ISBN 978 0 393 23935 5 Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen Plume, 290 pp, £12.99,…

Quanah Parker was the last chief of the Comanches — and the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured as a child by the Comanches. Hulton Archive/Getty Images Empire of the Summer Moon By S. C. Gwynne Paperback, 384 pages Scribner List price: $16 Read An Excerpt This story was originally broadcast…

Literally, he paints her portrait, then he can fuck off — he can leave. When Leonardo DiCaprio is freezing in water, she notices that he’s dead, and starts to shout, ‘I will never let you go,’ but while she is shouting this, she is pushing him away. It’s not even a love story. Again, Captains…

February 24, 2015 | Clip Of Senate Session, Part 1 This clip, title, and description were not created by C-SPAN. User-Created Clip February 24, 2015 2015-02-24T10:24:56-05:00 https://images.c-span.org/Files/46b/20150224103447002_hd.jpg Senator Barbara Boxer discusses the funding and potential…

For the first time, scientists have shown that it’s possible for two people of the same sex to create a baby, without the need for outside egg or sperm donation. The most obvious benefits would be for homosexual couples who want to have a child together, but the method could also help couples who…

Over the past week or so there’s been a huge burst of interest in encryption software . Applications like Silent Circle and RedPhone have seen a major uptick in new installs. CryptoCat alone has seen a zillion new installs, prompting several infosec researchers to nearly die of irritation. From my…

I t is winter in upstate New York, on a morning so cold the ground squeaks loudly underfoot as sharp-finned ice crystals rub together. The trees look like gloved hands, fingers frozen open. Something lurches from side to side up the trunk of an old sycamore—a nut-hatch climbing in zigzags, on the…

As a novelist, Daniel Suarez spins dystopian tales of the future. But on the TEDGlobal stage, he talks us through a real-life scenario we all need to know more about: the rise of autonomous robotic weapons of war. Advanced drones, automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools, he…

Julissa Arce Photographer: João Canziani for Bloomberg Businessweek Photographer: João Canziani for Bloomberg Businessweek Sitting at her desk at Goldman Sachs, Julissa Arce is doing her best to keep it together. It’s September 2007. Her father is dying in Taxco de Alarcón, a small and hilly city in…

Emily Drevets Feb 21, 2015 I was talking to someone recently and he said that he really wanted to start writing sketches and film them. I asked him how often he wrote. He said he didn’t do it regularly, that he wouldn’t write for weeks and then inspiration would hit and he’d stay up all night…

Frank Schembari loves books — printed books. He loves how they smell. He loves scribbling in the margins, underlining interesting sentences, folding a page corner to mark his place. Schembari is not a retiree who sips tea at Politics and Prose or some other bookstore. He is 20, a junior at American…

The Chicago police department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site. The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as…

Across October and November of last year, some unlucky users of the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet, Blockchain.info , and one of the better-known exchanges, LocalBitcoins , had their usernames and passwords silently pilfered. They were robbed of significant sums, probably tens of thousands of…

In Estonia, it takes voters less than a few minutes to vote for president on their mobile phones. The technology for super-quick electronic voting exists, but its available in only a few countries around in the world . Estonia’s Prime Minister explained in a YouTube video how easy it is to vote:…

There’s a strange techno-utopianism in the air. Maybe it’s because algorithms are everywhere today, dominating every aspect of our lives. With the processing power of modern computing, these invisible mathematical programs influence what we read, what we buy, with whom we socialise – helping us…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zfqw8nhUwA Gabriel Weinberg Feb 24, 2015 Disclosure: I’m the Founder & CEO of DuckDuckGo , the search engine that doesn’t track you. I may be biased, but I’m also well-informed. We already put legal limits on financial, medical, military, transportation,…

One by one they flickered to life. Venus , first, in 1962, and two and a half years later, Mars . Our spacecraft flew by those planets, orbited them, and became manmade meteors streaking toward the first soil we couldn’t generically call "earth." Later, when we grew ambitious and confident in our…

A ‘Thames slum’: a timber hut on top of an old cargo barge. Photograph: Sam Forbes M ost Londoners will know someone suffering from the extortionate expense of finding a place to live. For those trapped in the rental market, the outlook is particularly bleak. In 2011 the Resolution Foundation…

Some tests show that reading from a hard copy allows better concentration, while taking longhand notes versus typing onto laptops increases conceptual understanding and retentionPhotograph: Don McPhee for the Guardian My son is 18 months old, and I’ve been reading books with him since he was born. I…

Predictions of what people look like using a DNA analysis tool compared with photos of the actual people. The faces here, which look a bit like video game avatars, are actually portraits drawn from DNA. Each rendering was created by plugging an individual genetic profile into a predictive tool…

Last week I broke the story that contract chicken farmer Craig Watts, who had let animal-welfare activists film in the barns where he raises poultry for Perdue Farms, filed for whistleblower protection against the company because he felt retaliated against. In his complaint – made to the Department…

The legal attack hit Kevin Folta in early February. After receiving a FOIA request from US Right to Know—a nonprofit dedicated to exposing “ the failures of the corporate food system “—the University of Florida notified Folta, a food and agricultural science professor at the university, that he…

How Keats coped with fever. Tuberculosis seemed to pursue Keats his whole life. In 1821, three months after he learned of Keats’s death, Percy Shelley wrote Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats , in which he described the poet as a delicate, fragile young flower of a man: Oh gentle child,…

MOSCOW — On very rare occasions, almost always at night, Edward J. Snowden leaves his secret, guarded residence here, somewhere, in Russia. He is always under close protection. He spends his days learning the language and reading. He recently finished “Crime and Punishment.” Accompanying him is…

Late on the evening of January 11, 2013, someone sent me an interesting email. It was encrypted, and sent from the sort of anonymous email service that smart people use when they want to hide their identity. Sitting at the kitchen table in the small cottage where I lived in Berkeley with my wife and…

As a journalist, Laura Poitras was the quiet mastermind behind the publication of Edward Snowden’s unprecedented NSA leak. As a filmmaker, her new movie Citizenfour makes clear she’s one of the most important directors working in documentary today. And when it comes to security technology, she’s a…

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Compared with other recreational drugs — including alcohol — marijuana may be even safer than previously thought. And researchers may be systematically underestimating risks associated with alcohol use. Those are the top-line findings of recent research published in the journal Scientific Reports ,…

Several months ago, I was talking to a college senior about her career plans. She wanted a job with flexible hours , and I asked why. The young woman said she wanted the freedom to take a short nap right after lunch when her energy flagged the most and the ability to work late at night when her…

In 1952, Alan Turing, a British mathematician best known for his work on code-breaking and artificial intelligence, was convicted of engaging in homosexual acts and sentenced to chemical castration. Amid that personal drama, he still found the time to publish a visionary paper on the mathematics of…

This lecture explores decision avoidance in business. Why is costly inaction attractive? Why do individuals (and organisations) sometimes hesitate even though they know they probably have more to lose by not taking a risk? We also explore the other side of the coin: when is inaction the highest form…