From the October 1927 Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons. Hendrik Lorentz, Leiden University, seated between Madame Curie and Einstein, chaired the conference. Credit: iharsten Permafrost, oxygen, hydrogen — it all looks like science to me. But these terms actually have…

Prototype Chase Adam, 26, a former Peace Corps volunteer, is the founder of Watsi. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times TWO years ago, Chase Adam, a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica, was riding a bus through a town called Watsi, when a woman got on board asking for money. Her son, she said,…

New court decisions in recent years have chipped away at the principle that you "have the right to remain silent" upon arrest. iStockphoto.com "You have the right to remain silent." Any devotee of TV crime dramas or police procedural shows hears the phrase regularly. But new court decisions in…

PBS NewsHour Logo: Home Full Episodes Podcasts Subscribe Live Sep 3, 2014 9:00 PM EST By — PBS NewsHour Transcript Audio As online hacking becomes more common, interest in the individuals and groups behind such cyber attacks rises. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with David Kushner of The New Yorker on the…

Picasso’s greatest works came early; Cézanne’s came late. Credit Illustration by Gerald Scarfe Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The…

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation.…

None of us likes being scammed, and David Modic is no different. But it’s not the fact that scammers try to trick us into handing over our money that bothers him – it’s the way they can rob people of something far more important: their hope. Take the abuse of dating websites. “People go on dating…

It is not every day you can announce the discovery of thousands of new mountains on Earth, but that is what a US-European research team has done. What is more, these peaks are all at least 1.5km high. The reason they have gone unrecognised until now is because they are at the bottom of the ocean.…

Alex Washburn / WIRED It’s been just two months since researcher Karsten Nohl demonstrated an attack he called BadUSB to a standing-room-only crowd at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showing that it’s possible to corrupt any USB device with insidious, undetectable malware. Given the…

Don Draper has opened a 37th floor window into the art of post-war American advertising, but a new exhibit of illustrations called Mac Conner: A New York Life is attempting to fill in the picture without all the alcohol-fueled melodrama. Born in 1913, McCauley "Mac" Conner studied art via…

Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea — in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event — that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one…

A quixotic historian tries to hold oil and gas companies responsible for Louisiana’s disappearing coast. A refinery and wetlands near Myrtle Grove, La. Jeff Riedel for The New York Times In Louisiana, the most common way to visualize the state’s existential crisis is through the metaphor of football…

Surrounded nowadays by so much science fiction material in the form of print or movies, it is often hard to think of the beginnings of SF as a popular genre. And it’s even harder to believe that this popularity was mainly the result of only one man’s efforts, some 90 years ago. Hugo Gernsback, a…

Você é brasileir@? O que o olhar do estrangeiro evidencia sobre nós mesm@s (sem esquecer de refletir também os opinadores…). Ler sobre esses autores e pensadores que aprofundam o pensamento sobre o Brasil ajuda a entender e, quem sabe, ajude a melhorar a nossa relação com as identidades que…

Abner Dean What is the social function of the novel? I’m not thinking about the pay-off for the author, who gets to develop a skill and earn a living from it and accrue a prestigious public image into the bargain. Nor about the rewards for the publisher, who may, or more likely may not, make a…

The federal investigation echoed tactics used for the Mob: get low-level workers to inform on those farther up the hierarchy. Illustration by Concepción Studios. Clockwise from Top: Louis Lanzano / Bloomberg via Getty; Shannon Stapleton / Reuters / Corbis; Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty; Brendan…

We already know that if you use an online social network, you give up a serious slice of your privacy thanks to the omnivorous way companies like Google and Facebook gather your personal data. But new academic research offers a glimpse of what these companies may be learning about people who don't…

Giulietta Carrelli outside the Trouble Coffee & Coconut Club. (Photo: Jeff Singer) All the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them. But what made me stare—blinking to attention in the middle of a workday morning as I waited in line…

Jump to navigationJump to search Heathkit Oscilloscope OL-1, 1960s Heathkit is the brand name of kits and other electronic products produced and marketed by the Heath Company. The products over the decades have included electronic test equipment, high fidelity home audio equipment, television…

Shortcuts While being overworked can be overwhelming, research increasingly shows that being underworked can be just as challenging. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times MANY workers now feel as if they’re doing the job of three people. They are on call 24 hours a day. They rush their children…

In Allende’s Chile, a futuristic op room was to bring socialism into the computer age. Illustration by Mattias Adolfsson In June, 1972, Ángel Parra, Chile’s leading folksinger, wrote a song titled “Litany for a Computer and a Baby About to Be Born.” Computers are like children, he sang, and Chilean…

Jean Jennings (left) and Frances Bilas set up the ENIAC in 1946. Bilas is arranging the program settings on the Master Programmer. Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there's a good reason: It's true. Recently, many big tech companies…

Blessed with a mind-blowingly fertile ecosystem—3,000 varieties of potatoes is just the half of it—Lima is emerging as a new global culinary epicenter. Kevin West meets the ingenious chefs who aren’t just inventing new ways of eating but are using food to forge a national identity. Fresh-caught…

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Before and after ... Monrovia, Liberia now has a free digital map to help the fight against Ebola, thanks to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team I n 2010, an earthquake struck Haiti. Hundreds of thousands were killed. Then things got really bad. Cholera broke out, and Ivan Gayton of Médecins Sans…

Beacons can push you ads — and help track your every move. Update: Hours after BuzzFeed News exposed the devices, the city ordered the removal of the devices. Photographs by Jon Premosch for BuzzFeed News Oct. 06, 2014, at 17:21 PM Hours after BuzzFeed News published this report, City Hall asked…

H ome is more than a place on a map. It evokes a particular set of feelings, and a sense of safety and belonging. Location, memories, and emotions are intertwined within those walls. Over the past few decades, this sentiment has gained solid scientific grounding. And earlier this year, researchers…

Recent news headlines have made a big deal of Apple encrypting more of the storage on their handsets, and claiming to not have a key. Depending on who you ask this is either a huge win for privacy, or a massive blow to intelligence collection and law enforcement capabilities. I'm going to try…

This exchange is from a conversation in Paris between David Graeber and Thomas Piketty, discoursing on the deep shit we’re all in and what we might do about climbing out. It was held at the École Normale Supérieure; moderated by Joseph Confavreux and Jade Lindgaard; edited by Edwy Plenel; first…

Giraffes are the “forgotten megafauna,” said the executive director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. Credit Julian Fennessy OKAVANGO DELTA, BOTSWANA — For the tallest animals on earth, giraffes can be awfully easy to overlook. Their ochered flagstone fur and arboreal proportions blend in…

Anne-Laure Sellier is an Associate Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris. Her research interests are in the area of time perception, creativity, self-regulation and generally how emotions and cognitions interact in judgment and decision-making. In 2013 she received the Teaching Innovation Award of the…

Kurt Vonnegut, ca. 1972. Photograph by PBS This interview with Kurt Vonnegut was originally a composite of four interviews done with the author over the past decade. The composite has gone through an extensive working over by the subject himself, who looks upon his own spoken words on the page with…

There is no Moore’s law for batteries. That is, while the computing power of microchips doubles every 18 months, the capacity of the batteries on which ever more of our gadgets depend exhibits no such exponential growth. In a good year, the capacity of the best batteries in our mobile phones,…

Share 5K Share 360 8K Shares Adobe has just given us a graphic demonstration of how not to handle security and privacy issues. A hacker acquaintance of mine has tipped me to a huge security and privacy violation on the part of Adobe. That anonymous acquaintance was examining Adobe's DRM for…

This piece originally appeared on PandoQuarterly, issue three . Silicon Valley has an asshole problem, and it’s high time we owned up to it. Let me be clear what I’m not talking about. I’m not talking about “brogrammers.” I’m not talking about Google buses, or the evils of libertarianism. I’m not…

The makeshift village housing the homeless of Silicon Valley View gallery The millionaire geeks in smart Silicon Valley know this squalid dump as the Jungle – because everyone who lives here one day disappears. This foul and primitive wasteland sprawls a short distance from the shiny headquarters of…

Emmanuel Dyan / Flickr Two weeks ago, Kakao Talk users in South Korea users got an unpleasant surprise. After months of enduring public criticism, President Park Geun-Hye announced a crackdown on any messages deemed as insulting to her or generally rumor-mongering — including private messages sent…

Here’s an excerpt from our fresh-of-the-presses eBook, What You Don’t Know About Management: How to Take Back Your Work Day. If you like what you read, download the 50+ page eBook for free! While teamwork is exciting and camaraderie a wonderful source of intrinsic motivation and purpose, getting…

ORLANDO - Gartner sees things like robots and drones replacing a third of all workers by 2025, and whether you want to believe it or not, is entirely your business. This is Gartner being provocative, as it typically is, at the start of its major U.S. conference, the Symposium/ITxpo. Take drones, for…