Witnesses said the pit in Montana looked like ‘700 acres of white birds’.Photograph: Keith Myers/AP Several thousand snow geese have died after a snowstorm forced large flocks to take refuge in the acidic, metal-laden waters of an old open pit mine in Montana . Mark Thompson, environmental affairs…

A US Border Patrol agent stands atop a dune along the US-Mexico border last month near Felicity, California.Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images The US Border Patrol agency has engineered the death and disappearance of tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants by using the desert wilderness as a…

By the first half of 2004, the National Security Agency was drowning in information. It had amassed 85 billion phone and online call records and cut the ribbon on a new hacking center in Hawaii — but it was woefully short on linguists who could make sense of captured communications and lacked enough…

Sometimes we say that so and so is a "mouthpiece" of some special interest, meaning that they're in cahoots, that they express their views. Or maybe we say someone's a "puppet" of industry. Most of the time these are metaphors. But sometimes they're literal. Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump's pick to head…

The Cassini spacecraft has sent back the first views from its new orbit around Saturn. Last month, the Nasa probe began a new phase of its mission - one that involves making a series of daredevil manoeuvres over the next nine months. The phase will end with Cassini being destroyed in the atmosphere…

Erin Morris keeps a document on her computer with a rundown of subjects she has advised on in recent years. Sexsomnia (sexual behavior during sleep), machete-chop wounds, canine-scent detection, rape-trauma syndrome (how rape can affect a victim’s personality and behavior), pathological gambling,…

Paying a restaurant or supermarket bill without a debit or credit card can often require a backpack full of cash.Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images Venezuela will introduce six new notes and three new coins from mid-December to help alleviate practical problems in doing business with the…

News accounts and analyses on other blogs have usefully described and critically assessed the “demonetization” shock that Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the Indian economy on November 8. Here we emphasize two features of Modi’s initiative that have been little noticed. First, the combination of…

NASA astronauts on board the International Space Station on Friday reaped the first harvest of red romaine lettuce leaves grown on the orbiting space lab last month. These vegetables were grown using the "Veggie" plant growth system on the ISS, and were harvested as part of a technique the space…

UP-TO-DATA Security specialist and Ph.D. candidate Max Bazaliy,at his home, in Kiev, Ukraine. Photograph by Joseph Sywenkyj. The night it happened, right after midnight on August 10, Bill Marczakand his girlfriend were staying up late to watch Star Trek reruns intheir spare one-bedroom apartment, in…

Virgin Galactic's new six-passenger SpaceShipTwo made its first glide test over Mojave, California on Saturday. The ship is the second in a series of commercial spaceships built for Richard Branson's space company, which is selling tickets to ride for $250,000. The first ship, manufactured and…

Keith Houston | The Book : A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time | W. W. Norton & Company | August 2016 | 18 minutes (4,720 words) Below is an excerpt from The Book , by Keith Houston . This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky . * * *…

Dubai, United Arab Emirates Google Earth First, there's practically nothing. And then there's practically everything, especially considering the cornucopia of development on the water. Dubai is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, and this timelapse shows off the unprecedented growth…

Enlarge / The Nikola One in December 2016. NMC Donald Trump's incoming administration might be going full steam ahead in returning to fossil fuels, but the clean energy sector might have other ideas. Nikola Motor Company has just unveiled a huge class 8 truck (as big as they get) that's powered by a…

The Woman the Mercury Astronauts Couldn’t Do Without

The Oceti Sakowin camp, where people have gathered to protest the Dakota Access oil pipeline, in Cannon Ball, North Dakota on 29 November 2016.Photograph: David Goldman/AP Donald Trump has said he supports a controversial oil pipeline that runs next to a Native American reservation in North Dakota –…

Activists celebrate at Oceti Sakowin Camp on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on December 4, 2016.Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images T he news that the US federal government has refused to issue the permit needed to run a pipeline under the Missouri river means many things –…

Fabric, in London, is to reopen, but under stringent new conditions.Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images “P eople have always consumed psychoactive substances, risking harm.” This is the opening sentence of a recent article by Fiona Godlee and Richard Hurley in the British Medical Journal , which…

Ethiopia is experiencing its worst drought in 30 years as the direct result of El Niño.Photograph: Jonathan Fontaine/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock Climate scientists have denounced the House committee on science, space and technology after the Republican-held panel promoted a misleading story expressing…

The Iraqi army, backed by US-led airstrikes, is trying to capture east Mosul at the same time as the Syrian army and its Shia paramilitary allies are fighting their way into east Aleppo. An estimated 300 civilians have been killed in Aleppo by government artillery and bombing in the last fortnight,…

President-elect Donald Trump’s energy and environmental priorities can be summed up as staunchly pro-fossil fuels. He doubled down on these positions Thursday, explicitly backing the Dakota Access pipeline, a $3.6-billion project that he has personal financial ties to. The controversial project has…

Credit: CL.Baker Flickr ( CC BY-ND 2.0 ) Seven years ago, the U.S. exported its crude oil to just one country—Canada. This year, 22 countries received American crude oil, marking a more than 1,000 percent increase in U.S. oil exports since 2009, according to U.S. Department of Energy data released…

Investigators told Congress on Wednesday that agency paid out almost a quarter of a billion dollars over five years, but can't say exactly what it got back or how many people had their privacy breached. Joe Skipper / Reuters WASHINGTON — Americans may have faced widespread privacy violations as…

A decade ago , the FBI sent Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, a now-infamous type of subpoena known as a National Security Letter, demanding the name, address and activity record of a registered Internet Archive user. The letter came with an everlasting gag order, barring Kahle from…

President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to invest about $550 billion in new infrastructure projects across the country was a central theme in his campaign. “We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we…

U.S. Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning ordered a review after an NPR investigation found thousands of soldiers diagnosed with mental health problems or brain injuries were dismissed for misconduct. But the new Army report concluded that it treated the soldiers fairly. Alex Wong/Getty Images An Army…

Behold! The European Space Agency's new Mars orbiter just sent back its first high-resolution images of the Red Planet, and the view is amazing. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) arrived at Mars on Oct. 19, when its companion spacecraft Schiaparelli crash-landed on the planet's surface. Since…

Howard Schultz is stepping down as chief executive of Starbucks Corp. to lead an effort at the company to build high-end coffee shops that will charge as much as $12 a cup, his next attempt to revolutionize the way Americans consume coffee. Mr. Schultz, 63 years old, is handing over the CEO role to…

Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Reuters has developed a tool capable of automatically detecting and verifying breaking news on Twitter, in an attempt to report on events more rapidly and accurately. The tool, known as Reuters News Tracer, has been developed over the past two years, but…

Canada prepares for surge of Mexican immigrants after visa lift and Trump win

CANNON BALL/WEST FARGO, N.D. (Reuters) - U.S. military veterans were arriving on Thursday at a camp to join thousands of activists braving snow and freezing temperatures to protest a pipeline project near a Native American reservation in North Dakota. However, other veterans in the state took…

A Christmas song generated and sung by a computer program after analysis of the visual components in an uploaded image. Credit: University of Toronto Computer Science department. It will not, if there is any certainty left in the world, top the charts this Christmas. But what it lacks in party hit…

Joanna Andreasson Four years ago, Alberto's career prospects were bleak. The 23-year-old Venezuelan had just graduated from college with a degree in computer science, but his nation's economy was already shredded by 13 years of socialism. "There were job opportunities, but they paid like $20 a…

Deforestation Of The Amazon Up 29 Percent From Last Year, Study Finds

Photojournalist Ed Ou (Photo by Kitra Cahana) The recent abusive border search of a Canadian photojournalist should serve as a warning to everyone concerned about press freedom these days. Ed Ou is a renowned photographer and TED senior fellow who has traveled to the United States many times to do…

0 Shares Media Options Download Video Download Audio Get DVD Other Formats This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate 0 Shares This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today. Donate “American Elections Will Be Hacked.’” That’s the title of a recent article in The New…

Fifteen staff members who worked on a well-known bipartisan intelligence watchdog committee wrote to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Monday requesting the administration negotiate a plea agreement with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. “There is no question that…

Donald Trump is assembling the richest administration in modern American history

A federal court on Wednesday ruled that the Internal Revenue Service can serve digital-currency-services company Coinbase with a “John Doe summons” that seeks detailed information on its customers’ transactions from 2013 to 2015. The IRS and the Justice Department are looking for information about…