The untold story of Jelani Henry, who says Facebook likes landed him in Rikers The Henry brothers , Asheem and Jelani, were born exactly one year apart to the day, in the warm Junes of 1991 and ‘92. “I always felt there was something special about that,” says their mother Alethia. “A little bit of…

L ast month, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presented the gravest assessment yet of global warming’s mounting threat, warning of mass extinction, collapsing ecosystems, widespread starvation and displacement if the world doesn’t take quick action. “Science has spoken,” U.N.…

An invite-only Alpha to help build the distributed web. It started with a simple question. What if more of the web worked the way BitTorrent does? Project Maelstrom begins to answer that question with our first public release of a web browser that can power a new way for web content to be published,…

Published on by Former operative John Kiriakou, currently in prison, was charged with a crime after helping expose widespread abuses conducted by agency by Sarah Lazare, staff writer CIA whisteblower John Kiriakou as depicted in portrait artist Robert Shetterly's "Americans Who Tell the Truth"…

Transferrin, and the iron it carries, are brought inside human cells by this receptor. NIH Bacteria, like all living things, need iron for a variety of biochemical functions. Humans and other higher order organisms have plenty of iron; we limit bacterial access to it as a means of defending against…

Nonemployed Raquell Heredia played with her one-year-old son, Giovanni, in Fontana, Calif., on Wednesday. Like many women, she is not working but wishes she were. 1 / 9 Since Kerry Devine, 32, and her friends began having children, she has noticed a stark difference between her female friends in…

SOPA was just the beginning What is "Goliath" and why are Hollywood’s most powerful lawyers working to kill it? In dozens of recently leaked emails from the Sony hack, lawyers from the MPAA and six major studios talk about "Goliath" as their most powerful and politically relevant adversary in the…

In the mid-2000s, David Markovitz, a scientist at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues took a look at the blood of people infected with HIV. Human immunodeficiency viruses kill their hosts by exhausting the immune system, allowing all sorts of pathogens to sweep into their host’s body. So…

Nature | News Feature Sharing Translations عربي Scientists have been reprogramming adult cells into embryonic ones for decades — but they are only now getting to grips with the mechanics. David Cyranoski 1 Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Nik Spencer/Nature Eggs and sperm do it when they…

Rob Smith Contributor Editor’s note: Rob Smith is CEO of Pecabu . Artificial Intelligence has been in the media a lot lately. So much so that it’s only a matter of time before it graduates to meaningless buzz word status like “big data” and “cloud.” Usually I would be a big supporter. Being in the…

The Pirate Bay was deep-sixed this week in its home port of Stockholm, Sweden , after cops raided a data center hosting the world’s most famous piracy organization. But its absence appears to have put hardly a dent in global piracy activity over the last four days. On Monday, Dec. 8, a total of…

The idea that money reveals things that our words hide has been a part of me for as far back as I can remember. My mother tells a story of how, when my father was a child, his mother, my grandmother, cooked a dish with peas. Peas used to be meaningfully more expensive than other vegetables. This was…

A World Without Work IMAGINE, as 19th-century utopians often did, a society rich enough that fewer and fewer people need to work — a society where leisure becomes universally accessible, where part-time jobs replace the regimented workweek, and where living standards keep rising even though more…

Legal Issues from the holy-fuck dept Okay, it's no secret that the MPAA hates Google. It doesn't take a psychology expert to figure that out. But in the last few days, some of the leaks from the Sony Pictures hack have revealed the depths of that hatred, raising serious questions about how the MPAA…

Gawker's Nick Denton recently revealed his company has $60m (£38m) in revenues. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian This was the year that digital media got big and got optimistic. While that’s good news for the mobile-native winners, the new influx of money and scale is bad for the second and…

The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature by William Cronon Print-formatted version: PDF In William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature , New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90. The time has come to rethink wilderness. This will seem a…

By A. Asohan April 30, 2015 (Originally published on Nov 12, 2014) Digital News Asia (DNA) continues reprints of our top 10 stories of 2014, in conjunction with the ‘DNA Top 10 of 2014’ contest. For details on the contest, click here . This story is one of my favourites: Not because of the quality…

A young, captive Cape vulture Chelsea Biondolillo T he sun is hot and high over Hartbeetspoort, South Africa, the air thick with humidity and flies. On the dirt in front of us are the remains of three cows. Bridgette Cahill asks, “Ready to get your hands dirty?” Her fellow volunteer Nobuhle Thelma…

By Mick Krever, CNN CIA agents who tortured inmates can be prosecuted anywhere in the world, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights and Counter-Terrorism, Ben Emmerson, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday. “They are considered as war crimes, they are crimes of international…

In the late hours of Tuesday night, the Pirate Bay abruptly disappeared from the Internet, the result of a surprise raid on the site’s servers by Swedish police in Stockholm. But forget the big-picture questions of Internet freedom or intellectual property. The real problem, for millions of…

Physicists have a problem with time. Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward. Of course the world we experience…

Skinny Puppy @ Best Buy Theatre, 12/2/2014 ( more by Greg Cristman ) Canadian industrial band Skinny Puppy have invoiced the U.S. government $666,000 in royalties after learning their music was used as a torture device at Guantánamo Bay: Cevin Key, the band’s keyboardist, says the band at first…

In the years after World War II, Albert Einstein took up the mantle of confronting racism in America. He became a good friend and comrade of the prominent opera singer Paul Robeson, co-chaired an anti-lynching campaign, and was an outspoken supporter of W.E.B. Du Bois . But, it was in January 1946,…

One of this week's Patch Tuesday updates for Windows 7 has been withdrawn after some users discovered that it blocked installation of software containing digital signatures, including first- and third-party software, and even other Windows updates. The problem update is called KB3004394. The purpose…

Op-Ed Contributor The Sony Hack and the Yellow Press “Jolie a ‘Spoiled Brat’ From ‘Crazyland,’ ” says The New York Post . “Shocking New Reveals From Sony Hack,” says The Daily Beast . “Sony’s Hacked Emails Highlight Hollywood’s Problems With Diversity,” says The Huffington Post . “You’re Giving…

Photo Suresh Ramamurthi and his wife bought Citizens Bank of Weir, right, in a small Kansas town, with a goal of clearing industry logjams. Credit Steve Hebert for The New York Times The redbrick bank in Weir, Kan., in a building cater-corner from the mortuary on Main Street, does not look much like…

(Credit: The Guardian) Edward Snowden on Friday evening called on Amazon.com, one of the world’s largest retailers, to provide routine encryption for its customers to prevent governments from snooping on the reading habits of their citizens. Snowden, appearing by video link at a surveillance…

smp-stories-top-widget Norway’s major secrets are being administered here, right in the centre of Oslo. A number of the most important state institutions are situated within a radius of one kilometer: The Prime minister’s office, the Ministry of defence, Stortinget (parliament) and the central bank,…

Sally A. Mercedes prepares to sing at the Triad Theater in Manhattan. Ms. Mercedes is also a writer/life coach. Credit Yana Paskova for The New York Times The forward slash. In the age of texting and Twitter bios, it has become a ubiquitous piece of punctuation for those who want quick shorthand to…

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission can take action against patent trolls when the patent-holding firms engage in unfair business practices, even as the agency works to complete a study on their business model, a commissioner said. The FTC plans to complete its ongoing study of patent licensing…

The Karner blue butterfly is a tiny thing, with colorful wings that extend just an inch across and a life that rarely wanders more than 600 feet from where it began. Its caterpillars can only eat wild lupines — a flower that’s become less abundant in the wild because of development and habitat…

Terence McKenna viewed cannabis , psilocybin , DMT , LSD, and other psychedelics as "catalysts of intellectual dissent." He wrote in The Archaic Revival (1991) that his assumption about psychedelics had always been that they were illegal "not because it troubles anyone that you have visions" but…

A Tibetan family rests outside Jokhang Monastery in Lhasa on March 4, 2014. Photo by Jacky Chen/Reuters Climbing a mountain in Tibet is no easy feat. The atmosphere is already thin on the world’s highest plateau—the oxygen level is just 60 percent of what it is at sea level—and adding elevation…