In this three-part Tech Behind Bars series, we’re exploring the points of intersection between digital culture and America’s correctional system. (See part two here , and part three here .) On January 2, 2014, a vendor truck approached the entrance to the Sierra Conservation Center, a mid-sized…

James Simpson Feb 3, 2015 The TP-82 was for shooting bears with both barrels by JAMES SIMPSON To this day, the Russian Federal Space Agency refuses to talk about the weapon—though it’s an open secret. Astronauts heading to the International Space Station have trained with it, and some have even…

By Photo by Steve Jurvetson What does the Internet have in common with an ant colony? More than you might think. The Internet doesn’t have much in common with the common ant , of course. As the anteater in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel Escher Bach puts it, “Just as you would never confuse an individual…

Snow-covered icebergs dominate the scene near the shore of the Antarctic Peninsula, the northernmost part of the icy south polar region. Between the sun, the water and icy peaks, the beauty can be quite literally blinding. “Everything is reflective and everything’s white,” recalls filmmaker Alex…

MPs have voted in favour of the creation of babies with DNA from two women and one man, in a historic move. The UK is now set to become the first country to introduce laws to allow the creation of babies from three people. In a free vote in the Commons, 382 MPs were in favour and 128 against the…

An unpublished novel by Harper Lee is to finally see the light of day, 60 years after the US author put it aside to write To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman, which features the character Scout Finch as an adult, will be released on 14 July. Lee wrote it in the mid-1950s but put it aside on the…

0.56 percent. That's Thailand's official unemployment rate as of end-2014. It's among the lowest in the world, and compares with 9.4 percent in India and 6 percent in the Philippines in the region. This is not a recent phenomenon: Thailand's jobless rate has held below 1 percent for the most part…

Opium, "magic" mushrooms and other psychoactive substances have been used since prehistoric times all over the world, according to a new review of archaeological findings. The evidence shows that people have been consuming psychoactive substances for centuries, or even millennia, in many regions of…

Tara Alberts , University of York In a previous post I discussed how early modern Catholic missionaries sought to showcase the most up-to-date European medicines to impress their target audiences. This was also a key strategy used to gain access to royal courts throughout Asia. At the court of King…

Jeremy Hammond wrote that hackers ‘are condemned as criminals without consciences, dismissed as anti-social teens without a cause, or hyped as cyber-terrorists to justify the expanding surveillance state’.Photograph: AP The prominent Anonymous “hacktivist” Jeremy Hammond, who participated in some of…

News Sport What's On Jobs Property Motors Directory Notices Dating Your OneMK Made In MK ALL BLETCHLEY PARK: Alan Turing Banbury sheets being used as roof insulation in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park By | Posted: February 03, 2015 Alan Turing's codebreaking documents have been discovered in the roof of Hut…

US business groups are seeking "urgent discussions" over new Chinese rules requiring foreign firms to hand over source code and other measures. The groups wrote to senior government officials after the introduction of the cybersecurity regulations at the end of last year. The US Chamber of Commerce…

The builders of a $22 billion burrito empire—the founder, his father, his college buddies, key execs, and a couple of pig farmers—open up about how they won the fast-food future. And yes, they dish about McDonald's. By restaurant industry standards, Chipotle Mexican Grill does countless things…

Casey Dreier • February 2, 2015 President requests $18.5 billion for NASA in 2016, an increase of $519 million General disclaimer: these are my personal, initial reactions to the President's FY2016 NASA budget request. The Planetary Society's official statement on the FY2016 budget is now posted.…

High priest Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson and fellow members of the Asatru Association attend a ceremony at the Pingvellir National Park near Reykjavik.Photograph: Reuters Icelanders will soon be able to publicly worship at a shrine to Thor, Odin and Frigg with construction starting this month on the…

Photographer: Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images Photographer: Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images Uber faces an ever-growing cast of adversaries that includes dubious regulators , litigious drivers , hostile members of the press, and some well-funded…

Riot Games wants you to behave yourself when you play League of Legends, so it’s turned the game into a virtual lab Jeremy Hsu Jan 27, 2015 Unlisted “Uninstall and go hang yourself.” A teammate addressed those words to me as our five-person band of cartoonish champions faced defeat in the online…

The future of protecting an open Internet has been the subject of fierce debate, and potential changes to the rules by the Federal Communications Commission could affect your online experience. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission this week is widely expected to propose regulating…

Credit Photograph by Lyn Alweis/The Denver Post via Getty In 1922, in “ Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The words that we have at our disposal affect what we see—and the more words there are, the…

Internet giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Taboola have reportedly paid AdBlock Plus to allow their ads to pass through its filter software. The confidential deals were confirmed by the Financial Times , the paper reported today . Eyeo GmbH, the German startup behind Adblock Plus, said it did not…

Tom Szaky talks 19 to the dozen. It's as if he doesn't want to waste a single minute of the hour-long interview I have with him. But then waste is a subject dear to his heart. He is the founder and chief executive of social enterprise TerraCycle, a company whose aim is eliminating waste. "It's a…

A panel on mindfulness, meditation, self-care and mental health. TheLi.st Jan 28, 2015 This is a transcript of TheLi.st panel, “ How Not To Have A Meltdown in 201 5" at Knoll New York on January 14, 2015, featuring David Gelles , author of “ Mindful Work: How Meditation is Changing Business from the…

It's a small MusicWorld, after all Our Pono Player came pre-loaded with only one song—unsurprisingly, a Neil Young cut—so we visited a variety of online shops to grab MP3 and FLAC editions of albums. In the case of the Pono Player, we had to use its ugly-but-serviceable app to buy and download…

One of the Internet’s most targeted, and yet also most hard-to-kill sites is back again following a raid on its servers over seven weeks ago: The Pirate Bay resides once again at its familiar “.se” URL, offering a database that appears to be fairly intact, with torrents mostly in place up to its…

United Launch Alliance's Delta II rocket took off Saturday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying the SMAP satellite into orbit. NASA/Bill Ingalls The launch of a small satellite won’t fix the the drought in the American West—now entering its fourth year —and it won’t change…

Eric Simons is the San Francisco-based author of “The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession.” Two weeks ago, a man who earns his living by chasing other men in pursuit of a leather prolate spheroid handed a team staffer a football that felt soft. The staffer reported this…

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A Verizon Wireless store in San Francisco. Users who do not want to be tracked for ad-targeting purposes will soon be able to opt out of the program. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Updated, 2:52 p.m. | Verizon Wireless, which has been under fire by privacy advocates since late last year, has decided…

Episode 600: The People Inside Your Machine Listen · 22:49 22:49 Download Embed < iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/382657657/382781392" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> Transcript Amazon's Mechanical Turk is named after the…

A portrait of William Shakespeare from around 1610. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images Some of the finest, most quoted verses in the English language were dedicated to him, and for centuries literary scholars have tried to establish his identity. Now fresh research suggests that the mysterious Mr…

In our Petition for Investigation of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast, we point out that TWC's High-Speed Internet service has a 97 percent profit margin and a number of people asked how that statistic was derived. Simple. Time Warner Cable provides the information, (with some caveats). Below is…

Tech Co-Branded Websites Created for Purdue, UMass Amherst, and UC Davis

The world has entered an era of “peak food” production with an array of staples from corn and rice to wheat and chicken slowing in growth – with potentially disastrous consequences for feeding the planet. New research finds that the supply of 21 staples, such as eggs, meat, vegetables and soybeans…

Many of us are being swept on to the labour scrapheap because of automation.Photograph: Joe Partridge/Rex Y ou take a large chunk of a country’s tax revenues and pay people a few thousand pounds a year to do nothing. That’s the essence of an unconditional basic income scheme – and it took less than…

Bruce Black had been preparing for this moment for most of his life. Growing up, he always wanted to be a pilot. After graduating from New Mexico State University in 1984 with a degree in geology, Black was commissioned as an officer in the Air Force. He spent years as an instructor pilot before…

Andy Baio Jan 28, 2015 As Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory Google wrote its mission statement in 1999, a year after launch, setting the course for the company’s next decade: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it…