WASHINGTON — He was, in many ways, a perfect spy — a man so important to Cuba’s intelligence apparatus that the information he gave to the Central Intelligence Agency paid dividends long after Cuban authorities arrested him and threw him in prison for nearly two decades. Rolando Sarraff Trujillo has…

Workers destroy confiscated ivory in Dongguan, southern Guangdong province, China.Photograph: Vincent Yu/AP A major new study provides disturbing proof that the crisis facing African elephants is even worse than people imagined, driven by the exploding trade in illegal ivory in China. The study ,…

Eric Jackson was sitting in his hotel room on Sea Island, Ga., watching his kids splash around in the pool, when he clicked “publish” on his latest blog post for Forbes.com. Jackson, an influential hedge-fund manager, had become fixated on Yahoo and the efforts of its chief executive, Marissa Mayer,…

Climbing onto the largest vessel the world has ever seen brings you into a realm where everything is on a bewilderingly vast scale and ambition knows no bounds. Prelude is a staggering 488m long and the best way to grasp what this means is by comparison with something more familiar. Four football…

During our next flight, SpaceX will attempt the precision landing of a Falcon 9 first stage for the first time, on a custom-built ocean platform known as the autonomous spaceport drone ship. While SpaceX has already demonstrated two successful soft water landings, executing a precision landing on an…

Even if the explanation for the methane turns out to be geological, the hydrothermal systems would still be prime locations to search for signs of life. Credit NASA SAN FRANCISCO — Life on Mars ? Today? The notion may not be so far-fetched after all. A year after reporting that NASA’s Curiosity…

Advertisement Image: NASA Langley Research Center It has been accepted for decades that Mars is the next logical place for humans to explore. Mars certainly seems to offer the most Earth-like environment of any other place in the solar system, and it’s closer to Earth than just about anyplace else,…

When you think about the early 80s, a few things probably come to mind: gauzy impressions of synthesizers, Hollywood blockbusters, and computers, all filtered through the saturated lens of degraded VHS tape. Computers are People, Too!, a Disney documentary about computer art released in 1982, might…

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Joel Benjamin Jeff Bezos and I have a long history, dating from my days on Wall Street and the early years of Amazon.com. Today, he's an investor in Business Insider, and I remain an Amazon shareholder. I tried not to let any of that be a factor when I interviewed him recently at our annual…

Some neuroscientists think that giving up handwriting will impact on how future generations learn to read. Photograph: Erhan Dayi/Alamy I n the past few days you may well have scribbled out a shopping list on the back of an envelope or stuck a Post-it on your desk. Perhaps you added a comment to…

Update: O n December 15, Judge Edward Shea issued his written opinion in United States v. Vargas, which you can read here . The public got an early holiday gift today when a federal court agreed with us that six weeks of continually video recording the frontyard of someone's home without a search…

Cheryl Graham/Getty Images For more than a decade, a powerful app called Metasploit has been the most important tool in the hacking world: An open-source Swiss Army knife of hacks that puts the latest exploits in the hands of anyone who’s interested, from random criminals to the thousands of…

For some, the Elf on the Shelf doll, with its doe-eyed gaze and cherubic face, has become a whimsical holiday tradition — one that helpfully reminds children to stay out of trouble in the lead-up to Christmas. For others — like, say, digital technology professor Laura Pinto — the Elf on the Shelf is…

Published on December 15, 2014 GULFPORT, Miss. — In June, NASA finished work on a huge construction project here in Mississippi: a $349 million laboratory tower, designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space. Then, NASA did something odd. As soon as the work was…

Photo Credit Getty Images Phys Ed Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness. We all know that exercise can make us fitter and reduce our risk for illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease. But just how, from start to finish, a run or a bike ride might translate into a healthier life has…

Apple Inc. halted online sales of its products in Russia due to “extreme” ruble fluctuations, showing how the currency’s swings are rippling out to international businesses. The iPhone and iPad maker stopped sales from its Web store as Russia’s currency lost as much as 19 percent today, with a…

Backblaze is transitioning from using 4 TB hard drives to 6 TB hard drives in the Storage Pods we will be deploying over the coming months. With over 10,000 hard drives needing to be purchased over the next several months, the choice of which 6TB hard drive to use is critical. Let’s take a look at…

For more than two centuries, time has been felt to be passing more and more quickly. Scholars tell us that since the twin revolutions of the 18th century — industrial and political — a general sense of time speeding up has been recorded with regularity in documents of all kinds. Political and…

I am a doodler. The staff at Studio 360 knows this pretty well --- I've been sketching them during meetings for a decade with mixed results. So I was fascinated to discover a blog by Erik Kwakkel , a scholar of medieval texts at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He posts doodles that date from…

flore vasseur Dec 15, 2014 Unlisted I met Larry Lessig in an empty train, one cold evening of November 2013, somewhere between Marseille and Paris. He had boarded before me and was trying to force the door into the sitting compartment. At the time, I had just published a novel on the collusion…

Fat can be breathed out as well as burned off as you lose weight, biochemists who have studied metabolism at a microscopic level say. But they warn that people still need to huff and puff with exercise to keep slim - hyperventilating on its own will not do the trick. The Australian team traced the…

We wrote a book! Priceonomics has released our second book, Hipster Business Models . This is a book about people who come up with new ideas and, instead of screwing around, they just try them. They learn how to make things, sell them, and keep grinding -- usually for years -- until they get it…

This investigative report reveals that: Shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead. In 2012, one-time co-CEO Jim Balsillie quit the board and cut all ties…

Life uncovered by the deepest-ever marine drilling expedition has been analysed by scientists. The International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) found microbes living 2,400m beneath the seabed off Japan. The tiny, single-celled organisms survive in this harsh environment on a low-calorie diet of…

Findings Credit Viktor Koen Just be yourself. The advice is as maddening as it is inescapable. It’s the default prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws. Relax. Act natural. Just be yourself. But when you’re nervous,…

Los Angeles traffic is worse than usual as hordes of parched citizens evacuate a concrete tomb that once supported millions of lives. Savvy entrepreneurs are selling bottled water from wheeled coolers for $40 a piece. Windshields are caked with desert dust and cars are overheating. The city is…

Here's the pit being dug to reach broken Bertha. WSDOT Seattle By on Jun 5, 2015 Get your daily dose of good news from Grist Subscribe to The Beacon This post was originally published on Dec. 16, 2014, and is being republished now as part of our Seattle series . Unfortunately, the megaproject…

We Americans measure things our own way. Our yardsticks are marked in feet and inches (and eighths of inches), measures that are unfathomable to foreigners, nearly all of whom have been brought up in a decimals-only environment. They tend to see our traditional weights and measures as the very…

For the past decade, if you wanted to download copyrighted material and didn't want to pay for it, it's likely you turned to The Pirate Bay . Up until a police raid took it offline last week , it was the most popular place to grab Sunday's episode of The Newsroom or Gone Girl months before the…

Current research is targeting the ability of H.I.V. to stay dormant in memory T cells. Credit Illustration by Harry Campbell One morning in the winter of 1981, my wife came home after her on-call shift at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center and told me about a baffling new case. Queenie was an…

Steve Jobs with an iPod in October 2005. Credit Paul Sakuma/Associated Press OAKLAND, Calif. — A jury took about three hours to reject an antitrust lawsuit — 10 years in the making — that accused Apple of using a software update to secure a monopoly over the digital music market. The eight-member…

Early Friday evening Sen. Elizabeth Warren took to the Senate floor and gave a plain-spoken, barn-burning speech that could make history and put her into serious contention to be the next President of the United States. There are only a handful of political speeches that have such historic impact.…

I was born in 1973 in Czechoslovakia. It was a small country in the middle of Europe, unfortunately on the dark side of the Iron Curtain. We had never been a part of Soviet Union (as many think), but we were so-called “Soviet Satellite”, side by side with Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. My…

In the last year or so, there have been quite a few stories on the use of passive WiFi tracking by advertisers, retailers, and analytics startups. Most of these articles focus on the significant privacy and security concerns associated with this practice, but few of them get into the details of how…

In September, when it wasn’t quite autumn in New York but after the long hot summer had ended, I rode up an elevator in New York’s Flat Iron district to the offices of First Look Media to meet with the guerrilla editors of The Racket. The Racket has since folded, without ever launching. Which is a…

Fay-Wei Li stepped out of his car and looked around. There was not much to see aside from an old wooden fence and a soggy ditch strewn with roadside detritus. Could this really be the spot? A biologist at Duke University, Li had driven seven hours from North Carolina to these exact coordinates in…