David Levine This post is about word processors, but I got the idea for it from something W. H. Auden once said about political philosophers. In 1947, talking with his learned young secretary about an anthology he was compiling, The Portable Greek Reader , he mentioned Isocrates, a Greek orator…

Chewing vibrations prompt plant to react with chemical releases Plants know and hear when they’re being eaten alive by predators. Picture a speaker at field’s edge pumping out high-frequency vibrations to corn as the rows pick up the sound and ramp up production of pest-resistant chemistry. The…

Bee colonies in Brisbane are waging war for months on end, sending waves of workers who collide, grapple and die. A genetic analysis of the battlefield fatalities showed that two different species of stingless bees were fighting for control of a single hive. The attacking swarm eventually took over…

Meet the donors, patients, doctors and scientists involved in the complex global network of rare – and very rare – blood. By Penny Bailey. His doctor drove him over the border. It was quicker that way: if the man donated in Switzerland, his blood would be delayed while paperwork was filled out and…

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary plans to impose a new tax on Internet data transfers, a draft 2015 tax bill submitted to parliament late on Tuesday showed, in a move that could hit Internet and telecoms providers and their customers hard. The draft tax code contains a provision for Internet providers…

The experience of our primary mobile screen being a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations is dying. And that changes what we need to design and build. The end of apps as we know them is near. How we experience content via connected devices – laptops, phones, tablets, wearables – is…

One day in March an email popped into 38-year-old Rachel Kuller's inbox. "You've been chosen… as one of the most likely people in the technology industry to create a company," it began. Rachel, who works for a business software firm and had neither started a business nor planned to do so, was…

by Amanda Tomas I was running to the interview, worried I’d get there late. My temp job was over as of a few days prior. Rent was due at the end of the month, and I needed a new source of income, fast. I was sending out multiple applications per day and I finally had a bite. A new start-up company…

I’m going to do it once a week for the rest of the year. You probably should, too. Jason Preston Oct 22, 2014 Photo by Gabriel Amadeus, CC License. What is it? Drinks! For perhaps the fifteenth time, while sitting together in the kitchen for breakfast, I let my wife know that I was going to go have…

MessageToEagle.com – The Vatican Apostolic Library is now digitizing its valuable ancient religious manuscripts and putting them online via its website, available for the public to view for free, as well as turning to crowd funding to help it complete its work. The Vatican Library was founded in…

Eric Adler Oct 22, 2014 Copyright law allows — perhaps even encourages — copying ideas. Ideas are always free to use and modify. What copyright law prohibits is copying the original creative expression of an idea. Since video games are collections of both ideas and expressions, we need to figure out…

LAST week, the Nobel prize in economics was awarded to Jean Tirole (see this week's Free exchange column ) for his work examining the difficulties in regulating firms with substantial market power. Mr Tirole's research is as relevant as ever, thanks to growing concern over the weight tech titans are…

An excellent tutorial from the 1930's on the principles and development of the Differential Gear. Fast Forward to if you want to skip the intro.

In an video promoting her upcoming book, “ Stonewalled,” former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson dangles a few more details about the computer intrusions that she’s been talking about — and that the Erik Wemple Blog has been chronicling — for more than a year . In past statements on the strange…

Frederic Filloux Oct 26, 2014 Google’s recent Search Box feature is but one example of the internet giant’s propensity to use weird ideas to inflict damage upon itself. This sheds light on two serious dangers for Google: Its growing disconnection from the real world and its communication…

In the end, the few Kreyos watches that shipped met few of the team's original goals: they were not at all waterproof, their batteries did not last the promised amount of time, and the firmware was buggy. The Indiegogo page is filled with dissatisfied comments, many of whom wanted refunds. "We won’t…

“When you play the game of thrones you win or you die. There is no middle ground.” Cersei Lannister, The Game of Thrones *** In 2008, Porsche was cruising. The luxury car manufacturer generated $13.5 BN in pre-tax profit, and sold a record 98,652 automobiles -- a staggering $136K profit per car…

Study after study reveals the same thing: it simply isn't healthy to sit for extended periods of time every day. But making the switch and buying a standing desk is a big commitment. That's where Ikea comes in: the company has brought its stylish looks, reasonable prices, and goofy Swedish names to…

Illustration by Robert Neubecker Video sites are by far the biggest consumers of bandwidth on the Web: Netflix, YouTube, Twitch … MindGeek. Or maybe that last one doesn’t ring a bell? MindGeek (formerly known as Manwin) has over 100 million daily visitors and is one of the top 10 consumers of…

I'm predicting that Google will end Gmail within the next five years. The company hasn't announced such a move -- nor would it. But whether we like it or not, and whether even Google knows it or not, Gmail is doomed. What is email, actually? Email was created to serve as a "dumb pipe." In mobile…

Wireless carrier T-Mobile US has been quietly upgrading its network in a way that makes it harder for surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on calls and monitor texts, even on the company’s legacy system. The upgrade involves switching to a new encryption standard, called A5/3, that is harder to crack…

Email Employees at extremely fast growing companies have an exciting opportunity to meet many smart, interesting new people. This also presents a challenge: memorizing their names. It might seem impossible after you reach a certain size and have multiple offices around the world. Maybe knowing…

Some things don't go together: Cats and dogs, New York Yankee and Boston Red Sox fans, Linux and Windows... or do they? In San Francisco, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, and I quote, " Microsoft loves Linux ." As far back as 2008, Microsoft was beginning to cotton up to open-source software. Wow.…

When work began on JSMESS a couple years ago, I knew that it was probably somewhat easy to do all this conversion work for MAME (the arcade side) as it was for MESS (the computer and console side). I specifically chose not to, because I was not interested in a pile of work just to make another game…

While there were a variety of rumors that Microsoft would soon ship a wearable device of some kind, the actual announcement and release—with mere hours between them—was a bit of a surprise. It was so uncharacteristically un-Microsoft . Not only did the company manage to keep most of the information…

It makes me sad to point out that we as a community have failed the web . Whatever happened to progressive enhancement ? You know, that simple rule where you are supposed to put content at the forefront . Everything else is secondary to content, right? People want to see your content first. Once the…

Fixed CEO David Hegarty offers “justice as a service” A San Francisco startup liberates users from the oppression of parking tickets Andrew Leonard Nov 3, 2014 Unlisted One lousy day in September, San Francisco resident Mark Wolff discovered he had parked his car in the wrong place — for two…

Sheri G. Lederman has been teaching for 17 years as a fourth-grade teacher in New York’s Great Neck Public School district. Her students consistently outperform state averages on math and English standardized tests, and Thomas Dolan, the superintendent of Great Neck schools, signed an affidavit…

What is arguably the most powerful of the U.S. government's surveillance authorities is also the most secretive, and it operates with the least amount of oversight. Today, we're releasing a new set of documents concerning Executive Order 12333 that we — alongside the Media Freedom and Information…

For nearly a century, “reality” has been a murky concept. The laws of quantum physics seem to suggest that particles spend much of their time in a ghostly state, lacking even basic properties such as a definite location and instead existing everywhere and nowhere at once. Only when a particle is…

Op-Ed Contributor Not a Flight of Fancy Credit Johnny Sampson SEATTLE — ONE clear winter day in 1909, in Hampshire, England, a young man named Geoffrey de Havilland took off in a twin-propeller motorized flying machine of his own design, built of wood, piano wire and stiff linen hand-stitched by his…

Earlier this year, after raising $1M in May, Lawrence Lessig’s Mayday PAC announced an ambitious goal to raise $5M by the 4th of July—a goal which they met mere hours before the deadline. One of the remarkable things about this campaign is how transparent they’ve been through the whole process. In…