Comparison of grey matter (brown) and white matter (yellow) in sex-matched subjects A (56 years, BMI 19.5) and B (50 years, BMI 43.4).Photograph: Lisa Ronan The brains of people who are obese or overweight appear to have aged an extra 10 years compared to their lean peers from middle age onwards,…

Lou Cabron writes, "Finally, after five years of work, Rhombus Tech has gone from a free/libre/open source "spec" to their first actual modular devices! The video is amazing. " You can literally plug in a new CPU -- or swap your CPU into a variety of devices. (Laptops, phones, tablets -- all powered…

Danophilia is alive and well in America. Bernie Sanders and other liberals have lauded Denmark’s social democratic dream state, with its free college tuition, nearly universal pre-K, and plentiful child care. While Republicans and Democrats both praise the virtues of what economists call…

An anti-poverty billboard is pictured on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters Laura Bliss Aug 4, 2016 A basic principle of finance could yield big wins for U.S. cities, according to a new policy agenda. Proportionally speaking, Americans living in poverty pay more for basic…

She was just staring at me. She had something to say, and I could tell she was curious about the Free Listening sign, but she didn’t seem to have to courage to speak to me. Yet. So, I waited. Nowhere to be, and all day to get there. It was so hot outside. Finally, she walked up, and like a young…

When Windows 10 was launched last year, rumors spread that the operating system was equipped with a built-in piracy kill switch. According to some reports, this would allow Microsoft to nuke all torrents downloaded from The Pirate Bay, and more. A scary outlook, but also a massive exaggeration, for…

My wife swears in front of our 12-year-old son. I swear occasionally, too, when I stub my toe or can’t find the cordless phone. This is involuntary swearing, a habit which always makes me feel a twinge of guilt afterwards. Not my wife though. She swears deliberately, outraging my sensibilities and…

Editor’s Note: This post has updated to clarify a sentence about the gender of the ancient writer. “It’s me!” they’d say, and they’d leave a sign. Leave it on the cave wall. Maybe as a prayer, maybe a graffito, we don’t know. This was 30,000 years ago. Writing hadn’t been invented, so they couldn’t…

Federal Taxes Individual and Consumption Taxes Income and Payroll Taxes Capital Gains and Dividends Taxes Tax Expenditures, Credits, and Deductions Estate and Gift Taxes Excise and Consumption Taxes Tax Compliance and Complexity Business Taxes Corporate Income Taxes Small Business, Pass-throughs,…

Activists protest against corruption in front of Olympic rings on July 21 on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach. Vanderlei Almeida/Getty Images Why are we here? The Summer Olympics are set to begin in Rio de Janeiro on Friday. Oh, that’s nice. How’s everything coming along? In the past couple of…

Spanish engineer Ramon Roca got tired of waiting for telecom companies to wire his town — so he did it himself. You can see the snow-capped Pyrenees mountains from Gurb, about 75 kilometers north of Barcelona. It’s a quiet farming community of 2,500, and in most ways there’s nothing special to set…

A Times/Herald-Tribune Investigation Insane. Invisible. In danger. Florida cut $100 million from its mental hospitals. Chaos quickly followed. Florida’s state-funded mental hospitals are supposed to be safe places to care for people who are a danger to themselves or others. But years of neglect and…

A woman on her phone in Istanbul, several weeks after the failed military coup. Security experts say the messaging app left information about its users unencrypted.Photograph: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images Turkish authorities were able to trace thousands of people they accuse of participating in an…

Enlarge / A demo planned for Wednesday will show how an ad hosted on nytimes.com could attack other HTTPS-protected sites. Vanhoef, Van Goethem The HTTPS cryptographic scheme protecting millions of websites is vulnerable to a newly revived attack that exposes encrypted e-mail addresses, social…

Omar Bustamante/FUSION We’re entering an age of sex apathy if not outright hostility, and I for one am ready for this revolution. You might find that second part hard to believe, and I understand why: I write about sex all the time. At first glance, my portfolio makes me look like one of those…

(Jeff Fusco/AP via Comcast) Did you know that in some parts of the country, Internet providers such as AT&T offer a special deal on broadband prices? The plans lower your monthly payments, but there's a catch: To qualify for them, you have to agree to let the carrier track your Web history, search…

A royal palace has been discovered in the area reputed to be the birthplace of King Arthur . The palace discovered at Tintagel in Cornwall is believed to date from the sixth century - around the time that the legendary king may have lived. Tintagel Castle archeology dig. Credit: Emily…

Humans might not be the only creatures that care about the welfare of other animals. Scientists are beginning to recognize a pattern in humpback whale behavior around the world, a seemingly intentional effort to rescue animals that are being hunted by killer whales. Marine ecologist Robert Pitman…

I ’ve never seen the computer you’re reading this story on, but I can tell you a lot about it. It runs on electricity. It uses binary logic to carry out programmed instructions. It shuttles information using materials known as semiconductors. Its brains are built on integrated circuit chips packed…

Joonas Kiminki Aug 1, 2016 Two weeks ago, I was on holiday in Turin, Italy and made a boo boo. I forgot my phone in our rental car for a two hour visit to a local outdoors spa ( Acquajoy , great fun especially for the kids!). The end result was unfortunate: when we returned to the car, a window was…

by So, just how tracked are you? Plenty, according to the largest, most detailed measurement of online tracking ever performed: Princeton University’s automated review of the world’s top 1,000,000 sites , as listed by Alexa. But you probably knew there’s a whole lotta trackin’ goin’ on. What’s…

Yahoo is investigating claims the hacker linked to "mega-breaches" at MySpace and LinkedIn has posted details of 200 million Yahoo accounts to a marketplace on the dark web. Usernames, passwords and dates of birth are being offered for sale for three bitcoins (£1,360). Using the name Peace, the…

The release of iOS 10, the newest version of Apple’s mobile operating system ( coming this Fall ), will bring an array of new features and upgrades, and a change to the functionality of the “Limit Ad Tracking” privacy setting. The iPhone operating system allows app developers to target…

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Iranian hackers have compromised more than a dozen accounts on the Telegram instant messaging service and identified the phone numbers of 15 million Iranian users, the largest known breach of the encrypted communications system, cyber researchers told Reuters.…

How to Write a Novel Essays July 28, 2016 | 8 books mentioned 7 min read Related Books: 1. There is a long-standing debate about a critical aspect of the novel-writing process. Currently and colloquially in some annexes of the writing community it’s been playfully termed the “pantsing vs.…

Running low on power? Now people can track you with that.Photograph: Martin Abegglen/Flickr A little-known web standard that lets site owners tell how much battery life a mobile device has left has been found to enable tracking online, a year after privacy researchers warned that it had the…

After rumours that Apple was going to get rid of the headphone jack in its imminent iPhone 7, more than 200,000 people have signed a petition asking them to reconsider. This humble plug is a rare example of technology that has stood the test of time, writes Chris Stokel-Walker. For what remains an…

The Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine USS Annapolis (SSN 760). (U.S. Navy) When Donald Trump effectively called for Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton's emails Wednesday, the GOP nominee's remarks touched off a (predictable) media firestorm. Here was a presidential candidate from a major U.S.…

Enlarge / President Barack Obama reportedly called Russian President Vladimir Putin in October 2016 on the "cyber hotline" to warn about the ongoing hacking of US election officials' systems. Presidential Press and Information Office Russia's intelligence agency the FSB, successor to the KGB, has…

More than anything, Peter Thiel, the billionaire technology investor and Donald Trump supporter , wants to find a way to escape death . He's channeled millions of dollars into startups working on anti-aging medicine, spends considerable time and money researching therapies for his personal use, and…

At least 80 skeletons lie in a mass grave in an ancient Greek cemetery, their wrists clamped by iron shackles. They are the victims, say archaeologists, of a mass execution. But who they were, how they got there and why they appear to have been buried with a measure of respect - that all remains a…

Evolution The Octopus Genome: Not “Alien” but Still a Big Problem for Darwinism August 24, 2015, 3:39 AM These days, new genomes of different types of organisms are being sequenced and published on a regular basis. When some new genome is sequenced, evolutionary biologists expect that it will be…

Filmmaker David Darg climbs a mountain of life vests discarded by refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos. Guy Martin / Panos Crisis and Opportunity How One VR Startup Is Capturing the 360-Degree Reality of the World’s Most Vulnerable People F our boats approach the small harbor of Skala on the Greek…

Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. July 29, 2016, 4:48 PM GMT / Updated July 29, 2016, 5:04 PM GMT By Blake McCoy and Tracy Connor Six Charged in Flint, Mich. Water Crisis July 29, 2016 03:34 Six more…

Eric Snowden (AP Photo/The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, File) Two of the biggest names in government data leaks clashed over how to responsibly release information on Twitter on Thursday. It started when Edward Snowden tweeted that WikiLeaks' "hostility to even modest curation" was a…

Illustration: Ellie Foreman-Peck D oes money matter? Does wealth make us rich any more? These might seem like odd questions for a physicist to try to answer, but Britain’s referendum decision is a reminder that everything is connected and that if we wish to understand the fundamental nature of the…

No war in recent memory can compare to the meat grinder of World War I. Europe still bears the scars of the war, even almost a century later. The gruesome and terrifying type of warfare typical of the Great War had a lasting impact on those who witnessed and experienced it. It also created such…

The streets of Edinburgh and Hong Kong are overflowing with books. Istanbul and Singapore, less so. Every year the World Cities Culture Forum collects information on how people consume culture around the world. The organization looks at factors like how many video game arcades a city has, or how…

Climate News Network Jul. 25, 2016 08:04AM EST By Alex Kirby Humans' appetite for gnawing away at the fabric of the Earth itself is growing prodigiously. According to a new UN report, the amount of the planet's natural resources extracted for human use has tripled in 40 years. A report produced by…