Stewart Butterfield had one objective when he set out to raise money for his startup last fall: a billion dollars or nothing. If he couldn’t reach a $1 billion valuation for Slack, his San Francisco business software company, he wouldn’t bother. Slack was hardly starving for cash. It was a rocket…

A team of Scottish scientists has made light travel slower than the speed of light. They sent photons - individual particles of light - through a special mask. It changed the photons' shape - and slowed them to less than light speed. The photons remained travelling at the lower speed even when they…

I’ve been using the Internet in one form or another since the mid-80’s. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff happening on our global network. On Tuesday, I experienced something extraordinary. It all started with a text message from my partner Ged at 8:30 AM: Mail server down. Please take…

Cemetery at Bunhill Fields, Finsbury, London, 1866.Illustration: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy A s well as sewerage, another “waste removal” problem plagued London in the 19th century: the disposal of the dead. There was little dispute about the means. Burial was the norm; cremation a…

On 10 February 1853, a ship named the Charles Mallory arrived in port in Honolulu, Hawaii, having made the journey from San Francisco in only 13 days, a near-record time, particularly for a ship of its small size. The Charles Mallory was among the newest breed of ships that benefited from the latest…

Three years ago, I posted a piece here titled “The Hierarchy of Innovation,” which argued, speculatively, that the focus of innovation has followed Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, beginning with Technologies of Survival and now concentrating on Technologies of the Self. With The Glass Cage…

My Google Youtube rep contacted me the other day. They were nice and took time to explain everything clearly to me, but the message was firm: I have to decide. I need to sign on to the new Youtube music services agreement or I will have my Youtube channel blocked. This new music service agreement…

Nature | News Feature Sharing By splicing animals together, scientists have shown that young blood rejuvenates old tissues. Now, they are testing whether it works for humans. Megan Scudellari 1 Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Illustration by Gary Neill Two mice perch side by side, nibbling a…

This is my Imaginary Boyfriend, Ryan Gosling. (Drive/Handout) One of the core premises of Invisible Boyfriend , the wildly viral new service that invents a boyfriend to deceive your pestering family and friends, is that the user will not, under any circumstance, fall in love with her fictional beau.…

The ultimate archery trick. Proving that Hollywood archery is not historical. It is not possible to tell the whole story about archery in a 5 minute video. so this video is definitely not the whole truth! Historic archery is a lot of different methods and much is forgotten but archery can be much…

China is cracking down on VPNs, software that allows internet users to access Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and others services blocked in the country, according to state media and service providers. People’s Daily reports that China’s ‘Great Firewall’ internet censorship system was “upgraded for…

Story Highlights The birth and death trends of U.S. business must be reversed The economy is more important to security than the military America has misdiagnosed the cause and effect of job creation The U.S. now ranks not first, not second, not third, but 12 th among developed nations in terms of…

He's already served more than two years in prison on charges related to sources within the Anonymous hacktivist entity. A court in Dallas has sentenced Barrett Brown to 63 months in federal prison, minus 28 months already served. For count one in the case, he receives 48 months. For count 2, he…

Protestors came out when the Silk Road trial began, but left after the first day. Aurich Lawson The Silk Road Trial Silk Road’s alleged hitman, “redandwhite,” arrested in Vancouver Judge shuts door on attempt to get a new trial for Ross Ulbricht Drug reform groups blast Silk Road founder Ross…

T he history of Artificial Intelligence,” said my computer science professor on the first day of class, “is a history of failure.” This harsh judgment summed up 50 years of trying to get computers to think. Sure, they could crunch numbers a billion times faster in 2000 than they could in 1950, but…

A static map of the spaceship’s layout in Hadean Lands . Image courtesy Andrew Plotkin The best video game I played last year is a science-fiction thriller about alchemy, and it has no graphics or sound effects. With little more than text, it manages to be far more impressive and innovative than the…

In the early 1990s, the first Crypto War began. With the release of Phil Zimmerman’s PGP in 1991, for the first time in history, anyone could encode and exchange a message that no law enforcement agency had the technical ability to intercept and decode. Fearing that criminals would be able to hide…

In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (you had to store values in cells on a worksheet), without locals, without subroutine calls: in short it was almost…

State of the Art Credit Stuart Goldenberg When Marissa Mayer was offered the chief executive job at Yahoo in the summer of 2012, she had a script for returning the pioneering Internet company to the tiny club of Silicon Valley powerhouses. To many in the tech industry, the very thought of Yahoo…

Photo Credit Getty Images Phys Ed Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness. To combat afternoon slumps in enthusiasm and focus, take a walk during the lunch hour. A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle…

In the last few years, we’ve seen a continued exponential increase in cyber attacks, with different purposes in mind: blocking bank operations, listening to military communications, stealing customer IDs, and taking the greatest secrets held by corporations and governments – their “crown jewel”…

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a “college of last resort” explains why.

The Silk Road 2 trial was made possible by a six-month long attack on Tor, according to recently pubished court documents. Prosecutors are still making their case against the alleged Silk Road 2 kingpin, Blake Benthall (not to be confused with the Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht, who is also currently on…

Sometime between fifteen and thirty thousand years ago , probably in the Middle East, the long, protracted process of domestication began to alter the genetic code of the wolf, eventually leaving us with the animals we know and love as domestic dogs. While there are several different theories as to…

Stomp on the gas in a new Ford Mustang or F-150 and you’ll hear a meaty, throaty rumble — the same style of roar that Americans have associated with auto power and performance for decades. It’s a sham. The engine growl in some of America’s best-selling cars and trucks is actually a finely tuned bit…

February 11, 2019 Windows Experience Blog Windows 10 Tip: 3D embedded animations By Athima Chansanchai Thinking about ways to make your PowerPoint presentation stand out? How about adding 3D embedded animations? Thanks to the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, you… Read more February 7, 2019 Microsoft…

Edvard Munch's "The Scream." (AP Photo/Sotheby’s Auction House) Fear is one of our most basic evolutionary instincts, a sudden physical jolt to help us react to danger more quickly. In the modern world, fear often seems excessive -- in the absence of wild animals to flee, we're left screaming over…

It’s the end of October, when the days have already grown short in Redmond, Washington, and gray sheets of rain are just beginning to let up. In several months, Microsoft will unveil its most ambitious undertaking in years, a head-mounted holographic computer called Project HoloLens. But at this…

From the February 2015 issue of Inc. magazine

Wormhole simulation. Credit: Davide and Paolo Salucci Based on the latest evidence and theories our galaxy could be a huge wormhole (or space-time tunnel, have you seen "Interstellar?") and, if that were true, it would be "stable and navigable". This is the hypothesis put forward in a study…

REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom Mark Byrnes Jan 16, 2015 Thousands of carp, tilapia and catfish will be relocated to less absurd settings by Bangkok officials. Devoid of shoppers for years, Bangkok's New World shopping center is losing the thousands of fish that have more recently called the condemned…

The Associated Press reports that healthcare.gov–the flagship site of the Affordable Care Act, where millions of Americans have signed up to receive health care–is quietly sending personal health information to a number of third party websites. The information being sent includes one's zip code,…

“Physics probably favors detection and the ultimate demise of stealthy systems .” So predicted the Hart-Rudman Commission in 1999. Sixteen years later, it’s time for the Department of Defense to ask tough questions about whether to continue investing scarce resources into stealth technology.…

Library of Congress How Lady Day was in the middle of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics fight for survival. Johann Hari is a London and New York-based journalist. He will be talking about his book at lunchtime at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on the 29th of January, at lunchtime at the 92nd Street…

One of my favorite articles from The Onion concerns the imagined allure of “the button” : Despite being constantly tempted by the seductive power of having an apocalyptic arsenal at his fingertips, President Barack Obama somehow made it through another day Tuesday without unlocking the box on his…