A Twitter user. "The revelations of NSA activity have served 'as an excuse' for some governments to 'augment their own monitoring capabilities'." Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA T he internet is not a culture in itself. It has no values and works indifferently either for or against freedom and…

Steve Jobs was a notoriously stubborn individual with strong ideas about what made Apple's products great. Sticking to his guns typically paid off dividends for Jobs and Apple, even when vocal critics mocked the company's decisions. But since Jobs' death in 2011, Apple ( AAPL ) has been slowly…

Experiment will combine signals from hundreds of radio dishes to make cosmic atlas 19 January 2015, SKA Organisation HQ, Jodrell Bank Observatory – Scientists from around the world have joined forces to lay the foundations for an experiment of truly astronomical proportions: putting together the…

It’s a curious case, and a dubious honor to be sure, to be in Facebook’s position. To simultaneously have two of the worst rated applications, and two of the top ranked by number of downloads is a unique achievement. As of this writing, as reported by App Annie, Facebook is ranked at number 3, and…

Michael Cohen expected to testify that Trump engaged in criminal conduct The president’s ex-lawyer will detail what he claims to know about Trump’s contacts with Russians and other sensitive matters related to the president. So far, six ‘red flag’ orders to remove firearms have been issued in Mass.…

Gérard de Villiers, the author of the best-selling S.A.S. espionage series. Credit Denis Rouvre for The New York Times Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title “Le Chemin de Damas.” Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its…

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends Less than a month ago, I purchased Google Glass. What I didn’t realize was that as a “Glass Explorer,” my journey of discovery would be a relatively short one. Google has announced it’s to stop selling Glass to the general public — which presumably foreshadows an end in…

The author takes an alpaca to the drugstore. There’s a lot of confusion about what emotional-support animals can legally do. Photograph by Patricia Marx What a wonderful time it is for the scammer, the conniver, and the cheat: the underage drinkers who flash fake I.D.s, the able-bodied adults who…

Observatory Think your friends know you well? Researchers have developed a computer model that can judge someone’s personality more accurately than their friends and family — using nothing but the subject’s Facebook activity. Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University tested…

Daniel J Levitan: ‘When trying to concentrate on a task, an unread email in your inbox can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.’ Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you…

The NSA's mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars -- a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway. Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with…

Adam Berry/Getty Images Explaining why Americans pay so much more for health care than anyone else is really quite easy: Americans are charged higher prices for health care than anyone else. Here are 15 charts proving the point, but in case you don't want to flip through those graphs (side note:…

Matthias Gebauer/SPIEGEL ONLINE Mauritanian national Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held at Guantanamo for 12 years now without trial and despite a dearth of evidence. A diary he kept of his torture is now being published around the world. SPIEGEL presents some excerpts. Country roads and dirt tracks…

Gueldner Aug 25, 2014 Killed by Google Thursday Night in New Orleans April 1994 The lazy ceiling fan spun in the humid Louisiana night. It was weighted poorly, letting out a loud squeak every fifth revolution. Annoying, but fixing it would have been more annoying. I pushed myself up from the…

Jamie Chung I’ve finally settled on a pre-talk regimen that enables me to avoid the weeks of anticipatory misery that the approach of a public-speaking engagement would otherwise produce. Let’s say you’re sitting in an audience and I’m at the lectern. Here’s what I’ve likely done to prepare. Four…

If thinking about the billions of bacteria taking up residence in and on your body gives you the willies, you probably won’t find it comforting that humans are also full of viruses. These maligned microbes are actually intertwined in the very fibers of our being—about 8 percent of our genetic…

Empty vessels: how a Hong Kong cruise into 'international waters' can be a lonesome affair 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…

Chris Dixon Jan 17, 2015 I know a brilliant young kid who graduated from college a year ago and now works at a large investment bank. He has decided he hates Wall Street and wants to work at a tech startup (good!). He recently gave notice to his bosses, who responded by putting on a dog and pony…

Readers have been dreading the rise of e-books since before the technology even existed. A 1991 New York Times piece predicting the imminent invention of the personal e-reader spurred angry and impassioned letters to the editor. One reader wrote in to express his worry that the new electronic books…

The Art of Gentrification The Art of Gentrification When the artist Donald Judd bought his loft at 101 Spring Street in the late 1960s, SoHo was beginning to transform from a “blighted” industrial area to a luxury neighborhood. Today, Judd’s loft is a time capsule of SoHo’s transformation, which has…

Marcus Baram Jan 18, 2015 On the evening of April 4, 1968 , teen music sensation Stevie Wonder was dozing off in the back of a car on his way home to Detroit from the Michigan School for the Blind, when the news crackled over the radio: Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated in Memphis.…

Barbara Beskind, 90, is a designer at IDEO who works with engineers on products that improve the quality of life for older people. Nicolas Zurcher/Courtesy of IDEO In Silicon Valley's youth-obsessed culture, 40-year-olds get plastic surgery to fit in. But IDEO, the firm that famously developed the…

WASHINGTON — The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable…

Amazon is known for having low prices. But a study conducted by a startup called Boomerang Commerce reveals that Amazon’s pricing strategy is much more nuanced than simply undercutting the competition. Boomerang, founded by Amazon veteran Guru Hariharan, makes software that tracks prices on shopping…

Basaaly Moalin was convicted of financing Somali extremists, in the only case where the N.S.A.’s phone-records program was decisive. Credit Illustration by Brian Stauffer Almost every major terrorist attack on Western soil in the past fifteen years has been committed by people who were already known…

Cattle dot the pastures at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center in southern Nebraska, along with bunkers that once stored ammunition for World War II. Credit Leslye Davis/The New York Times At a remote research center on the Nebraska plains, scientists are using surgery and breeding techniques to…

Choose or chuck? … A hand taking Charles Dickens's Great Expectations from a bookshelf. Photograph: CBW /Alamy According to the book review website Goodreads I recently finished reading my 1,000th book. They didn’t notify me of this, there’s no gold star on my profile and my book collection did not…

Two Ironing Women Edward Degas I n his book Boredom: A Lively History , an oxymoronic title if ever there was one, Peter Toohey argues that the eponymous feeling has plagued our species since ancient times. “Boredom is a universal experience, and it’s been felt in most eras,” says Toohey, a…

I pour a cup of coffee, sharpen my pencil, and get ready to create. I’ve dusted off a half-conceived novel outline I abandoned three years ago, but this time I’m not waiting for my muse to intervene. Instead I hit the play button on the Creative Thinker’s Toolkit, an audio lecture series from The…

Proust had his cork-lined bedroom; Emily Dickinson her Amherst hidey-hole; Mark Twain a gazebo with magnificent views of New York City. Where, then, did the father of English poetry do his work? From 1374 till 1386, while employed supervising the collection of wool-duties, Chaucer was billeted in a…

At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies quietly deployed radars that let them effectively see inside homes, with little notice to the courts or the public. At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies use the handheld Range-R radar device, which can detect whether anyone is on the other side of a…

Jamesburg Earth Station: Lone Signal “None knows whence creation arose; And whether he has or has not made it; He who surveys it from the lofty skies. Only he knows—or perhaps not.” This is an edited snippet from a 3,500-year-old Vedic creation myth. I sent each of its 143 characters streaming on a…

A woman holds up a placard that reads in French, "I am Charlie" as she and others gather at the Place de la Republique in the French capital Paris, on January 7, 2015, following an attack by unknown gunmen on the offices of the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo. JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images By a…

Photo: DARPA The DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals will feature an upgraded ATLAS humanoid robot and a US $2 million prize for the winner. Advertisement We’ve always known that the ATLAS DRC humanoid robot was due for some serious upgrades before the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals , because having a…

Ernst Stuhlinger (1913-2008) Ernst Stuhlinger wrote this letter on May 6, 1970, to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration. At the time Dr. Stuhlinger was Associate Director for Science at the…

For the first time, more than half of U.S. public school students live in low-income households, according to a new analysis from the Southern Education Foundation . Overall, 51 percent of U.S. schoolchildren came from low-income households in 2013, according to the foundation, which analyzed data…

Reposted on the anniversary of the assassination of Rev. King. MB This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a very personal, subjective perspective. The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what…

January 15, 2015 | Liz Kennedy In the five years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision the dominance of big money over politics and policy has grown, seemingly without restraint and with dire consequences for representative self-government. A functioning democracy requires a government…