LEONARD COHEN MAKES IT DARKER

T he reason we are showing you this,” the grave news anchor says, “is to bring you the reality of Islamic terrorism and to label it as such.” The anchor is Fox News’s murine-faced Bret Baier. “We feel you need to see it, so we will put up one of the images on your screen right now.” It’s February…

Credit: Sébastien Thibault It was a faustian bargain—and it certainly made editors at National Public Radio squirm. The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone…

Something weird is going on with a virus called WO. (Flickr user BrunoSchalch /Creative Commons) There once was a virus that swallowed a spider. Or a few spider genes, anyway. Researchers studying WO, a virus that infects a bacteria found in most spiders and insects, found a surprising collection of…

When royalty pays a visit, you can bet television cameras will be involved—especially on the moon. The Kaguya (Selene) lunar orbiter , a Japanese spacecraft nicknamed after a legendary moon princess, launched in 2007 carrying two high-definition TV cameras, which it used to capture stunning video…

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Three newly elected Hong Kong lawmakers were barred from the legislature on Wednesday after using a swearing-in ceremony to raise the contentious issues of independence and more democracy, highlighting growing defiance of Beijing. The three are among a new generation in the…

World health officials want super-size tax on soda and sugary drinks, but are countries ready to swallow that?

Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have revoked access to their data to an analytics firm accused of selling information that allowed US police to track activists and protesters. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said Chicago-based Geofeedia had allowed police to "sneak in through a side door"…

As Saudi Arabia prepares to meet investors Wednesday with a view to selling its first international bonds, the country has disclosed little-known information about its economy. Here are four statistics that catch the eye. 1) Oil Income Plunged About 70% in 5 Years Saudi Arabia relies on oil for…

Police arrest more people for marijuana use than for all violent crimes — combined

Nadia Murad, a former prisoner of the Islamic State, spoke after being awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize at the Council of Europe on Monday in Strasbourg, France. Credit Patrick Seeger/European Pressphoto Agency Fighters for the Islamic State abducted a young Yazidi woman named Nadia Murad…

Jozef Jason, 7, reads a book to Ryan Griffin at the Fuller Cut in Ypsilanti, Mich., as part of the barbershop's literacy program. Keith Jason/Courtesy of Keith Jason You know, maybe someday some kid will grow up and be a journalist, be a writer, and he'll say, 'You know what, when I was young, my…

WASHINGTON -- Militant groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ( ISIS ) have learned how to weaponize surveillance drones and use them against each other and foreign forces, adding a new twist to Syria’s civil war, a U.S. military official and others say. A video belonging to…

A secret FBI study found that anger over U.S. military operations abroad was the most commonly cited motivation for individuals involved in cases of “homegrown” terrorism. The report also identified no coherent pattern to “radicalization,” concluding that it remained near impossible to predict…

Kites are no longer just kids' toys gliding in the wind. By 2025, they will provide power to an entire region of Scotland. A 500-kilowatt system of kite-supported power stations is soon to be installed at the Ministry of Defense's West Freugh Range, near the town of Stranraer. Even Bill Gates,…

Welcome to Mossberg, a weekly commentary and reviews column on The Verge and Recode by veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg, executive editor at The Verge and editor at large of Recode . I’ve been familiar with Siri longer than most people. Way back in 2009 — two years before Apple incorporated the…

Green’s peculiar style arose from a keen sense of human unknowability. Credit Photograph by Cecil Beaton / Condé Nast One night in the spring of 1955, the actress Elaine Dundy was leaving a party in New York when a sharp-nosed, floppy-haired young man came toward her and, without context or…

Entering a destination in most built-in navigation systems is frustrating enough that most drivers just use their phone, instead. Many new cars today come with built-in navigation systems, but a lot of frustrated new car owners just use their phones for directions, according to a new survey. The…

An artist's conception of the view from the dwarf planet Sedna. David Gerdes of the University of Michigan says the surface of 2014 UZ224 would look much the same. NASA, ESA and Adolf Schaller Scientists in Michigan have found a new dwarf planet in our solar system. It's about 330 miles across and…

First published in 2013; updated April, 2017. 200 years ago there were less than one billion humans living on earth. Today, according to UN calculations there are over 7 billion of us. 1 Recent estimates suggest that today's population size is roughly equivalent to 6.9% of the total number of people…

Skip to content Sign up for our free newsletters The Cipher Daily Brief Open Source Collection Under Cover SIGN UP FOR A CIPHER BRIEF MEMBERSHIP PLAN TO ACCESS EXCLUSIVE CONTENT JOIN NOW Tuesday February 26, 2019 Member Login Become a member Menu Briefs Africa Asia Europe Latin America Middle East…

TROUBLE AHEAD Inside the automated cockpit of an Airbus A330—like the one belonging to Air France that crashed into the equatorial Atlantic in 2009., Photo Illustration by Sean McCabe I. Into the Night On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216…

The artificial intelligence we see in daily life is just a fraction of its vast potential. Already it's making strides in cancer care 2016 Oct 07 Facebook Twitter Reddit Flipboard Preview: Artificial Intelligence It helps us drive our cars, use our cell phones and socialize online, but artificial…

A project of The Nation Institute TomDispatch.com Archive Authors Books Press About Contact Support Us Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Unipolar No More EmailPrint Last week in Afghanistan, the Taliban, once almost lacking a presence in the northern part of the country, attacked Kunduz , a northern provincial…

Will astronauts traveling to Mars remember much of it? That's the question concerning University of California, Irvine scientists probing a phenomenon called "space brain." advertisement UCI's Charles Limoli and colleagues found that exposure to highly energetic charged particles -- much like those…

FERMAT'S LIBRARY Fermat’s Library We develop software to help illuminate academic papers. Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional scientists, academics and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures, ideas and write in the margins. Our Products…

What happens when Charlie Rose attempts to interview a robot named "Sophia" for his 60 Minutes report on artificial intelligence 2017 Jun 25 By Brit McCandless Facebook Twitter Reddit Flipboard This video is available on CBS All Access Watch Now 60 Minutes All Access subscribers, Click here "I've…

President Obama signed a major NASA act today (Oct. 11) that turns his vision for U.S. space exploration of asteroids and Mars into law. The signing makes official a NASA authorization act that scraps the space agency's previous moon-oriented goal and paves the way for a manned mission to an…

Дима Котик ⋅ 1 октября 2016 ⋅ 5552 просмотры Dwarf Fortress is a popular complicated video game with a primitive graphical engine. It simulates complex behaviors to create a story, in which the player helps a group of dwarfs survive in an increasingly hostile world. Each dwarf has a mind of his own.…

For decades, neuroscientists and physicians have tried to get to the bottom of the age-old mystery of post-traumatic stress disorder, to explain why only some people are vulnerable and why they experience so many symptoms and so much disability. All experts in the field now agree that PTSD indeed…

Eric Thayer / Reuters A report published earlier this year confirms, in tremendous detail, a very basic fact of transportation that’s widely disbelieved: Drivers don’t come close to paying for the costs of the roads they use. Published jointly by the Frontier Group and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund,…

Ready for descent — deploy thrusters! The Schiaparelli spacecraft, part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars mission to Mars, has received its landing commands for its expected Oct. 19 touchdown on the Red Planet, and a new video shows how the spacecraft will descend. Launched on March 14 ,…

A new film showing Red Army soldiers outnumbered by invading Germans but battling on heroically has become part of the Kremlin's campaign to restore Russian pride. State television showed Russian President Vladimir Putin watching the film last week, alongside Kazakhstan President Nursultan…

Exoplanets are the talk of the solar system this year, but as exciting as they are, their existence (as is often the case in astronomy) is more inference than direct observation. A new private effort known as Project Blue hopes to change that with a satellite built for a single purpose: to directly…

Enlarge Jorge Láscar Researchers have devised a way to place undetectable backdoors in the cryptographic keys that protect websites, virtual private networks, and Internet servers. The feat allows hackers to passively decrypt hundreds of millions of encrypted communications as well as…

Story highlights Barack Obama: Space program shows America's boundary-pushing curiosity. We do what's possible before anyone else He says next step is to reach for Mars: learn to build new habitats that can sustain astronauts on long missions Barack Obama is President of the United States. (CNN) One…

Over the last few weeks we've seen DDoS attacks hitting our systems that show that attackers have switched to new, large methods of bringing down web applications. They appear to come from an IoT botnet (like Mirai and relations) which were responsible for the large attacks against Brian Krebs . Our…

A Mexica ceremonial mask made from a human skull | The British Museum I f they’re honest and humble enough, people who study societies that existed in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans will admit that they don’t really understand those societies. They’ll know the facts about pre-Hispanic…