China tightens Great Firewall by declaring unauthorised VPN services illegal Hong Kong China Asia World Business Economy Tech Sport Channels SCMP Editorials Opinion Harry's View Letters SCMP Columnists Cliff Buddle Bernice Chan Robert Delaney Cary Huang Yonden Lhatoo Alex Lo Tammy Tam Luisa Tam Wang…

On Arthur C. Clarke's centenary, Andrew Robinson lauds a prescient, original writer. When Arthur C. Clarke died in 2008, Nature 's obituarist — astrophysicist and science-fiction writer Gregory Benford — hailed him as “the most famous of science-fiction writers” (G. Benford Nature 452 , 546; 2008).…

Every January, Angela Ceberano sets goals for the 12 months ahead. And on Sunday nights, she plans and organises the coming week. Sometimes, I just want to get rid of all the technology and just sit down in a quiet space with a pen and paper But instead of spreadsheets and fancy smartphone apps, the…

Sites on the so-called dark web, or darknet, typically operate under what seems like a privacy paradox: While anyone who knows a dark web site's address can visit it, no one can figure out who hosts that site, or where. It hides in plain sight. But changes coming to the anonymity tools underlying…

Many more students have defaulted on or failed to pay back their college loans than the U.S. government previously believed. Last Friday, the Education Department released a memo saying that it had overstated student loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools and provided updated…

NOT AN ASTRONAUT; NO AFFILIATION WITH NASA. I was dressed up for Halloween. Presented on October 31st, 2016 at Stack Overflow’s Remote Meetup in Philadelphia. #PhillyCheeseStack If you want to try landing the shuttle for yourself for fun, try F-Sim http://www.f-sim.com/ (I have no affiliation...…

Summary: A new study sheds light on how the brain helps us to learn and make decisions in the real world. Source: Princeton University. The Wizard of Oz told Dorothy to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” in an effort to distract her, but a new Princeton University study sheds light on…

Physics Light particles normally do not “feel” each other because there is no interaction acting between them. Researchers at ETH have now succeeded in manipulating photons inside a semiconductor material in such a way as to make them repel each other nevertheless. Two light beams crossing each…

Female shark learns to reproduce without males after years alone

Five Architectural Easter Eggs Hiding on Gothic Cathedrals

We want to hear from you! Help shape our future by taking the 2017 Atlantic Audience Survey. Click here to get started. Martin Kunze wants to gather a snapshot of all of human knowledge onto plates and bury it away in the world’s oldest salt mine. In Hallstatt, Austria, a picturesque village nestled…

How easy do you find it to judge whether the two sequences are same or different? Researchers say the task might be easier if you are able to ‘hear’ the flashes. One in five people is affected by a synaesthesia-like phenomenon in which visual movements or flashes of light are “heard” as faint…

Zhou Shuoji is not a bitcoin believer. He says the cryptocurrency will never replace its traditional forebears, and he calls most of its proponents fanatics. But for Zhou, a 35-year-old high-speed trader in Beijing, bitcoin is also too good to resist. His computers trade it 24 hours a day, seven…

Physics Light particles normally do not “feel” each other because there is no interaction acting between them. Researchers at ETH have now succeeded in manipulating photons inside a semiconductor material in such a way as to make them repel each other nevertheless. Two light beams crossing each…

This is part of an ongoing Motherboard series on the proliferation of phone cracking technology, the people behind it, and who is buying it. Follow along here . The hackers have been hacked. Motherboard has obtained 900 GB of data related to Cellebrite, one of the most popular companies in the…

The Mind of an Octopus

These Are the World's Most Innovative Economies

Artificial intelligence can predict when patients with a heart disorder will die, according to scientists. The software learned to analyse blood tests and scans of beating hearts to spot signs that the organ was about to fail. The team, from the UK's Medical Research Council, say the technology…

Technology is commanding our attention in infinite, insurmountable loops. A country trip off-grid helped me escape. There are a thousand beautiful ways to start the day that don’t begin with looking at your phone. And yet so few of us choose to do so. For twenty-eight days this winter I lived on the…

Physics Light particles normally do not “feel” each other because there is no interaction acting between them. Researchers at ETH have now succeeded in manipulating photons inside a semiconductor material in such a way as to make them repel each other nevertheless. Two light beams crossing each…

The design of Whatsapp trades off some security for usability, although experts say targeted, systematic surveillance would be very difficult.Photograph: Ritchie B Tongo/EPA A design feature that could potentially allow some encrypted messages to reach unintended recipients is present within the…

With mere days left before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House, President Barack Obama’s administration just finalized rules to make it easier for the nation’s intelligence agencies to share unfiltered information about innocent people. New rules issued by the Obama administration…

The latest privacy and security improvements in Firefox [This post originally appeared on Medium ] Firefox is the only browser that answers only to you , our users; so all of us who work on Firefox spend a lot of effort making your browsing experience more private and secure. We update Firefox every…

Materials The X-ray crystal structure of a 192-atom-loop molecular 819 knot featuring iron ions (purple), oxygen atoms (red), nitrogen atoms (dark blue), carbon atoms (shown in metallic grey, with one of the building blocks shown in light blue) and a single chloride ion (green) at the center of the…

Neanderthal sculptures, named Nana and Flint, at the Gibraltar Museum. Credit Jaap Scheeren for The New York Times Skip to contentSkip to site index Feature New research shows they shared many behaviors that we long believed to be uniquely human. Why did science get them so wrong? Neanderthal…

An exhibition to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the first human trials of penicillin has recently opened at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. ‘ Back From The Dead ‘ traces the “miraculous and precarious” nature of antibiotics from the 1940s onwards, placing the story of penicillin…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demos an Oculus VR headset with touch controller. Facebook Mark Zuckerberg's dream of gadgets that let humans read each other's thoughts and communicate with brain waves may be moving closer to reality. A secretive hardware research division that Facebook created last…

Enlarge Getty | Drew Angerer Pharmaceutical giant CVS announced Thursday that it has partnered with Impax Laboratories to sell a generic epinephrine auto-injector for $109.99 for a two-pack—a dramatic cut from Mylan’s Epipen two-pack prices, which list for more than $600 as a brand name and $300 as…

Your Money Adviser Most student loan borrowers are young adults, but the number of older Americans with education loans has quadrupled in the last decade. Many of them say that difficulties with loan servicers are adding to their debt-management struggles. Americans age 60 and older are the…

In 1929 John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2029 people in the developed nations could enjoy a perfectly civilised standard of living while working for 16 hours a week. His hope was for our precious hours of extra leisure to be devoted to such edifying pursuits as playing Grand Theft Auto and…

Photo: AP This week, the FCC finally completed its investigation of so-called “zero-rating” schemes, finding that AT&T is likely violating net neutrality rules by charging outside video providers more for free streaming. Nevertheless, the carrier is unlikely to face punitive action—the man poised to…

This is not a social justice argument. I'm not writing this post to shame you into taking some altruistic action for the greater good. What I'm going to present here is pure dollars and cents. Consider the two following investment options for your personal portfolio: Option A: Invest in a handful of…

My Childhood Home A paean to the strange suburbs of Baltimore. St. George and the Dragon , by Lewis Carroll, 1875. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art , Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005. If you play that game where you pick your porn-star moniker by using the name…

Some anonymous wise person once observed that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But Wolfgang Streeck, a 70-year-old German sociologist and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, thinks capitalism’s end is inevitable and fast…

Photo from Wikimedia. Lafayette, Louisiana, has a population of around 125,000. That makes it about the 200th largest city in the country; not really big but not really all that small either. It has a unique culture and geography, but the layout and design of the city are very ordinary American. Get…

Deanna White told a contractor she couldn’t afford the $42,200 loan he recommended for improvements to her house in Inglewood, Calif. The contractor, she recalled, said she wouldn’t be on the hook because the loan was part of a “government program.” She applied and was approved. Two years later, Ms.…