WASHINGTON—The Justice Department has been building a national database to track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S., a secret domestic intelligence-gathering program that scans and stores hundreds of millions of records about motorists, according to current and former officials…

When the University of Rochester’s Eric Mamajek tells other astronomers about the object he and his colleagues discovered about 430 light-years from Earth, they tend to be skeptical—very skeptical. And no wonder: What he’s found is a giant ring system, sort of like Saturn’s, but some 200 times…

Kaspersky A comparison of malware codes: Regin is on the left; QWERTY, published by SPIEGEL, is on the right. Just weeks ago, SPIEGEL published the source code of an NSA malware program known internally as QWERTY. Now, experts have found that it is none other than the notorious trojan Regin, used in…

P aul J. Steinhardt does not look like a firebrand. With his wiry spectacles and buttoned-up bearing, he would not seem out of place in an office of accountants. But the Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science is an academic agitator, vocally criticizing the leading theory of the…

Spain planned to attack Britain's new colony in Australia with a 100-vessel armada as part of an operation designed to "take the fight to the British in the Pacific", according to newly uncovered archival documents. The documents, discovered in Spanish navy archives, reveal that King Carlos IV…

The withdrawal made Brett want to die. The 12-year-old had only been cut off for a few hours, and his mind was already wandering to a dark and dangerous place. Looking out the window of his family's three-story home in Wassenaar, a suburb of the Hague, in the Netherlands, the American transplant…

From the Cell Image library Adam J Calhoun Dec 17, 2014 How will we crack the brain? If you would like see things straight out of a science fiction movie, you should visit a neuroscience laboratory. Technology and science has advanced so quickly that I am not sure the public understands how advanced…

A study has linked commonly used medicines, including over-the-counter treatments for conditions such as insomnia and hay-fever, to dementia. All of the types of medication in question are drugs that have an "anticholinergic" effect. Experts say people should not panic or stop taking their…

Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer, and his wife, Holly, leaving the courthouse in Alexandria, Va., after his conviction. Credit Kevin Wolf/Associated Press WASHINGTON — Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, was convicted of espionage Monday on charges that he…

We have a problem when it comes to stopping mass surveillance. The entity that’s conducting the most extreme and far-reaching surveillance against most of the world’s communications—the National Security Agency—is bound by United States law. That’s good news for Americans. U.S. law and the…

Dave Catchpole/Flickr Every once in a while, I am asked what I “make.” A hack day might require it, or a conference might ask me to describe “what I make” so it can go on my name tag. I’m always uncomfortable with it. I’m uncomfortable with any culture that encourages you take on an entire identity,…

In June 1968, Karl Philberth arrived at Jarl-Joset Station, a forlorn cluster of buildings near the center of the Greenland Ice Sheet. He had traveled for two weeks to reach this place, trundling along at walking speed in a caterpillar-tracked personnel carrier. A series of beacon towers, planted in…

The most-read article in the history of this magazine is not about war, politics, or great works of art. It’s about the admissions policies of a handful of elite universities, most prominently my employer, Harvard, which is figuratively and literally immolated on the cover. It’s not surprising that…

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA Quinn Norton Jan 23, 2015 I’ll Go First I started studying the computer underground back when I worked in tech, as an early web developer, in the mid 1990s. I found the world fascinating, and I interviewed people and wrote about it, initially for myself. I…

Nafeez Ahmed Jan 22, 2015 Inside the secret network behind mass surveillance, endless war, and Skynet— part 1 By Nafeez Ahmed INSURGE INTELLIGENCE , a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project, breaks the exclusive story of how the United States intelligence community funded, nurtured and…

“MY BIG fear,” says Paul Ryan, an influential Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is that America is losing sight of the notion that “the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life.” “Opportunity,” according to Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts,…

Alex Alsup Jan 24, 2015 “Cell phones, laptops, Facebook, Skype, chat-rooms: all allow the NSA to build what it calls ‘a pattern of life,’ a detailed profile of a target and anyone associated with them.” — The Guardian What if a surveillance program based on the same mosaic theory principles as the…

I still remember when I first heard the song by Peter Gabriel, “Solsbury Hill.” Something about that song—the lyrics, the melody, the unusual 7/4 time signature—gave me chills. Even now, years later, it still can make me cry. Who among us doesn’t have a similar story about a song that touched us?…

I have been really enjoying literarystarbucks.tumblr.com , which publishes complicated jokes about what famous authors and fictional characters order at Starbucks. I like it so much I wish I knew more great literature, so I could get more of the jokes. Since the creators seem to be restricting…

Linda Tirado photographed by Scott Suchman near her home in Washington DC for the Observer New Review. I n the autumn of 2013 I was in my first term of school in a decade. I had two jobs; my husband, Tom, was working full-time; and we were raising our two small girls. It was the first time in years…

This feature was originally published in the February 2015 issue of Popular Science. Kenneth Nealson is looking awfully sane for a man who’s basically just told me that he has a colony of aliens incubating in his laboratory. We’re huddled in his modest office at the University of Southern California…

Illustration by Christoph Niemann In 2004, when Danny Meyer opened a burger stand named Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, it didn’t look like the foundation of a global empire. There was just one location, and Meyer was known for high-end venues like Gramercy Tavern. But the lines became…

I’ve been writing about the early development of Warcraft, but a recent blog post I read prompted me to start scribbling furiously, and the result is this three-part, twenty-plus page article about the development of StarCraft, along with my thoughts about writing more reliable game code. I’ll be…

Bruce Schneier, Harvard Berkman Center Fellow, talks with Edward Snowden about government surveillance and the effectiveness of privacy tools like encryption to an audience at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Part I of the Institute for Applied Computational Science's (IACS)…

Shoppers and tourists walk through a shopping street in front of the Sensoji temple in Tokyo, Japan, on Thursday, Aug. 8, 2013. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg Mike Huckabee thinks, inspired by the president’s daughters’ love of Beyonce, that America…

Google told WikiLeaks it had been unable to say anything about the Justice Department warrants as a gag order had been imposed.Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/Getty Images Google took almost three years to disclose to the open information group WikiLeaks that it had handed over emails and other…

After the deluge of gifts many people have exchanged at Christmas, January seems a good time for soul-searching over the Western obsession with stuff, writes trend forecaster James Wallman. We have more stuff than we could ever need - kit we don't use, toys we don't play with, and clothes we don't…

BASEL, Switzerland – When Kevin Herbert has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool – LSD-25. "It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is…

Each summer budding authors flock to writing workshops like Clarion , Clarion West , and Odyssey , which help prepare students for a career in fantasy and science fiction by offering them the chance to work closely with established pros in the field. For many students, the experience proves…

Jonathan Mayer, a lawyer and computer scientist, highlighted technology used by Turn, an advertising software company. Credit Jeff Chiu/Associated Press For the last several months, cybersecurity experts have been warning Verizon Wireless that it was putting the privacy of its customers at risk. The…

The major connections within the brain's left hemisphere. NIH The New York Times Magazine recently ran a cover article about mapping the connectome, all of the connections that link all of the neurons in someone's brain. Many of these connections are formed and reinforced as a result of our…

Olympia by Édouard Manet. Photograph: Corbis F or a long time, I’ve been nostalgic for the era of shock. It’s with a certain fondness that I reflect on the crazed year of 1857, which began with Gustave Flaubert in court for his first novel, Madame Bovary (in the presence of a stenographer, hired by…

Five years ago, the Philadelphia police thought that carrying Arabic-language flashcards was enough to warrant the arrest of an innocent traveler. A settlement reached today in a lawsuit I brought against the police department makes it clear that it is not. Travelling by plane can be a long and…

In the Middle Ages, the nation that was to give the world the full English widely skipped breakfast. Yet, by 1600, a culinary non-entity had become a key part of our daily routine. Why the change? Ian Mortimer investigates April 1, 2013 at 10:00 am Want to read more? Become a BBC History Magazine…

The leading German computer club has rejected EU anti-terror plans to tap online chatter, instead calling for all online communication to be encrypted. Politicians, meanwhile, are seeking ways to read encoded messages. Germany's main hackers' association contradicted EU security officials on…

by Eve Fisher One of the great advantages of being a historian is that you don't get your knickers in as much of a twist over how bad things are today. If you think this year is bad, try 1347, when the Black Death covered most of Europe, one-third of the world had died, and (to add insult to injury)…

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When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon’s founding is part of the forgotten…