We usually think conservation means saving animals. But its history is tinged with blood. John Audubon, a patron saint of the American conservation movement, killed hundreds of birds, partly for sport and partly for specimens to pose for his paintings. Aldo Leopold, a father of ecological science,…

Does anyone remember Thorazine? It was an antipsychotic given to mentally ill people, often in institutions, that was so sedating, it gave rise to the term "Thorazine shuffle." Ads for Thorazine in medical journals, before drugs were advertised directly to patients, showed Aunt Hattie in a hospital…

The Innovations Issue The Oculus Rift, virtual-reality goggles. Credit Jens Mortensen for The New York Times Of all the praise heaped upon Oculus, the virtual-reality company that Facebook acquired for $2 billion earlier this year, perhaps the most significant has been this: non-nauseating . I can…

Exploring the use of technology to fight back against online surveillance.

UPDATE: These daily routines have now been adapted into a labor-of-love visualization of writers’ sleep habits vs. literary productivity . Kurt Vonnegut’s recently published daily routine made we wonder how other beloved writers organized their days. So I pored through various old diaries and…

Judge Edith Jones is no stranger to controversy. The 65-year-old jurist has served since 1985 on the notoriously fractious 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and is known for her conservative and often controversial opinions. She’s decided that a sleeping lawyer isn’t necessarily a bad one for a…

Edward Snowden’s surveillance revelations will play a key role in the future evolution of intelligence gathering.Photograph: THE GUARDIAN/AFP/Getty Images The UK’s national security boss, Robert Hannigan, should come clean on surveillance and stop attacking technology companies, privacy experts have…

Crowd watching Apollo 11 blast-off (Ralph Crane/Time Life/Getty Images) SpaceShipTwo’s tragedy shows how far the private space industry has to go — but it could still be the best hope for Florida’s struggling space coast. James Greene Jr Nov 13, 2014 By James Greene, Jr. Most towns find it hard to…

As a child many of my favourite books had food as a theme. One in particular told the story of a boy who helped save his local burger bar by becoming a gastro-sleuth to track down a lost secret ingredient. Long after losing track of the book and forgetting its title, I found myself in Edinburgh to…

By Frank Swain I AM walking through my north London neighbourhood on an unseasonably warm day in late autumn. I can hear birds tweeting in the trees, traffic prowling the back roads, children playing in gardens and Wi-Fi leaching from their homes. Against the familiar sounds of suburban life, it is…

Silk Roads come and Silk Roads go. But after every law enforcement crackdown shakes the dark web, one Russian black market always seems to survive. For more than two and a half years, the Russian Anonymous Marketplace, or RAMP, has maintained a thriving business in the Dark Web drug trade, offering…

The Stack Archive Security 81% of Tor users can be de-anonymised by analysing router information, research indicates Fri 14 Nov 2014 Share 13 Share 83 146 Shares Research undertaken between 2008 and 2014 suggests that more than 81% of Tor clients can be ‘de-anonymised’ – their originating IP…

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - After two years of popping up at high-profile events sporting Google Glass, the gadget that transforms eyeglasses into spy-movie worthy technology, Google co-founder Sergey Brin sauntered bare-faced into a Silicon Valley red-carpet event on Sunday. He’d left his pair in the…

"I feel like a door has been opened for me to succeed." An inmate seated in the last row, Joseph Demerson, told Ars that getting into a program like Code 7370 begins with accepting responsibility for one's own actions. Since being convicted of first-degree murder nearly three decades ago (he's due…

M y mental health file whirs to life in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d recently left Opus Dei, the Catholic religious order to which I’d committed my young soul, and a major depression had followed. The records printed below are out of the mouths of my many caretakers; they chronicle my…

969 shares The Laser Weapon System (LaWS) temporarily installed aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey (DDG 105) in San Diego, California in July 2012. Photo: U.S. Navy By Tony Capaccio Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Navy has deployed on a command ship in the Persian Gulf its first laser…

Brazil builds its own fiber optic network to avoid the NSA

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A boy from Coventry has become the youngest computer specialist in the world. Ayan Qureshi is now a Microsoft Certified Professional after passing the tech giant's exam when he was just five years old. Ayan, now six, whose father is an IT consultant, has set up his own computer network at home. He…

Edward Snowden may have gone public with his NSA leaks more than 18 months ago, but the rate at which we learn new information about government spying programs shows little sign of slowing. Witness today, the Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that the U.S. Justice Department is…

A question of breeding. “You don't really want to know,” Beth said, her eyes glancing up from her messy desk to the clock and back down without meeting mine. “I do want to know,” I insisted. After three years of correlating the reconstructed Neanderthal genome with modern human populations, she had…

Tech & Science Studies Tech & Science On the morning of March 2, 2005, a 14-year-old Japanese girl woke up scared. At first she thought someone was outside the house watching her, but then she decided the stranger must be inside. She wandered restlessly and, despite the cold weather, threw open all…

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations. The…

Illustration by Charlie Powell Excerpted from @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris. Out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bright twenty- and thirtysomethings clad in polo shirts and jeans perch on red Herman Miller chairs in front of silver Apple laptops and sleek,…

The lone survivor of the Virgin Galactic Ltd. crash is out of the hospital and telling a harrowing story of how he was flung from the spacecraft and only saved when his parachute automatically deployed. With the ship about nine miles above Earth, pilot Peter Siebold said the craft broke apart around…

‘Cartell’ Chat Room Traders Boasted of Whacking FX Market

Nature | News Sharing Translations عربي Idea that intestinal bacteria affect mental health gains ground. Sara Reardon Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Lester V. Bergman/Corbis Feeding mice the bacterium Bacteroides fragilis can reverse autism-like symptoms. Companies selling ‘probiotic’ foods…

The Innovations Issue Todd Zion, 38, with notes he and colleagues drew up while they were developing smart insulin, a drug that is sensitive to blood-sugar levels. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times In the fall of 1999, a young chemical engineer named Todd Zion left his job at…

There’s a joke about Larry Page that’s been making the rounds at Google X, the “moon shot” factory where Google is developing self-driving cars, high-altitude wind turbines, and a fleet of stratospheric balloons to blanket the world with Internet access: A brainiac who works in the lab walks into…

Warren Buffett’s hero was Ben Graham and with good reason – the lessons of Graham and his writing partner Dodd made Buffett an extraordinarily good investor and a billionaire many times over. Although, to a believer in the Efficient Market Hypothesis, Buffett’s not supposed to even exist – a fact…

(Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post) If you live in Washington, you know the drill: After bagging your groceries, the checkout machine asks you how many bags you used. And if you used plastic or disposable bags (rather than bags you brought on your own), you have to pay 5 cents per bag . The…

Suzanne Snider | Tokion | June/July 2006 | 12 minutes (2,918 words) This story by Suzanne Snider—which details the fantastical rise and fall of John DeLorean, a former titan of the American automotive industry—first appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of Tokion. Snider is the founder/director of…

A judge in Washington DC has ruled that a country's entire internet registry cannot be seized, averting a global diplomatic crisis. In a ruling [ PDF ] made earlier this week but released late last night, Judge Royce Lamberth focused in on a single argument presented by DNS overseer ICANN that…

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft's former chief executive, at Harvard on Wednesday. Harvard Harvard University counts two of the most successful computer programmers in the world — William H. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive — as former students. But the…

Let’s say you’re 60 years old with a manslaughter conviction, newly released on parole. The conditions you’ve signed prohibit you from driving a car without permission, ban you from going out after curfew, and forbid you from drinking alcohol or going into a bar. You did a bad thing, no doubt about…