By In March 2010, years before Ferguson, Missouri, became known for sparking the Black Lives Matter movement, the city’s Finance Director contacted the Chief of Police with a solution to the city’s budget problems. The Finance Director wanted the police to generate more revenues from fines — money…

Illustration by Erin Taj Retirement can lead to a steep decline in mental and physical well-being “I have no interest in retirement,” Leon Dash says from his office in Gregory Hall, on the University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign. At 72, Dash has, by all accounts, lived an exceptionally…

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - A court in Brazil on Thursday blocked 19.5 million reais ($6.07 million) in Facebook Inc funds after the U.S-based social networking company’s WhatsApp messaging service failed to turn over messages sought in a drugs case, the G1 news service said. Brazil’s federal police…

By: | A judge in Virginia rules that people should have no expectation of privacy on their home PCs because no connected computer "is immune from invasion." WEBINAR: On-Demand Desktop-as-a-Service Designed for Any Cloud ? Nutanix Frame Watch → A federal judge for the Eastern District of Virginia has…

In December, 1989, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was expelled from power by American forces. To escape capture, he took refuge in the Papal Nunciatura in Panama City. When an American general arrived to confer with the papal nuncio, the U.S. Army blared music from loudspeakers to prevent…

Getty Images Google just plugged itself straight into Japan. This week, a new undersea fiber-optic cable funded by Google and a consortium of Asian telecommunications companies went online. Dubbed Faster, the cable stretches about 5,600 miles from Oregon to two landing points in Japan. It’s the…

“Professional mad scientist” Drake Anthony (aka “ styropyro “) recently created an amazing 200-watt laser bazooka . Drake’s high-tech bazooka was “built from scrap metal, a pile of broken ‘hybrid’ DLP projectors, and runs on a stack of lithium polymer batteries.” He used his bazooka to shoots…

Darius Foroux Jun 27, 2016 Life in 2016 is pretty good. You’re always connected to the internet, inside your home, and outside of it. With your smartphone, you have the world at your fingertips. Sounds great, right? NOT. Most people don’t use technology but are rather used BY technology. Apps,…

Group chats are such an integral part of many organizations that sharing sensitive information is par for the course, but it's fair to say that the majority of users would prefer it if whatever was discussed in Slack stayed in Slack— forever. And it's not just mild embarrassment at stake. Think of…

The American Medical Association (AMA) has just adopted an official policy statement about street lighting: cool it and dim it. The statement, adopted unanimously at the AMA’s annual meeting in Chicago on June 14, comes in response to the rise of new LED street lighting sweeping the country. An AMA…

It’s not just your imagination. It is a lot harder to afford an apartment today than it was for your parents’ generation. Sharp increases in rents along with stagnant incomes over the past five years have helped create a dire situation for many of the country’s renters. A new report shows how those…

New York Times CEO Mark Thompson caused a minor stir a couple weeks ago when he gave a speech at an advertising conference declaring that “No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of high quality journalism has the right to consume it.” He went on to say that while the Times is “not there…

Advertisement Photo: Stephen Brashear Renal Utility Belt: Engineers have invented a kidney dialysis device that a patient can walk around in. Three research groups taking very different approaches to building an artificial kidney all have the same goal: giving people with kidney failure an escape…

There’s some closure (literally and figuratively) for Move Loot , the furniture resale marketplace that we wrote earlier this month was up for sale . The startup — backed by nearly $22 million in funding from a list of top investors that included Y Combinator, GV, Index, Metamorphic and Sherpa — has…

What to do when incremental change just won’t cut it Mikael Cho May 17, 2016 Your bad habit vs. ‘manageable change’ I suck at a lot of things: Trying to get too much done in a day. Working out regularly. Keeping my closet clean. I try to get better but change is hard no matter how much you want to.…

Photo: Manuel Litran/Paris Match/Getty Images The double-mirror solar furnace in Mont-Louis, France. Constructed in 1949 in the citadel of Mont-Louis in the French Pyrenees, this double-mirror solar furnace [PDF] concentrated the sun’s rays to melt just about anything that wandered into its 3,000 °C…

▸ News ▸ Features ▸ Videos ▸ Events ▸ Knowledge ▸ Network ▸ Experts ▸ Companies ▸ Print Edition ▸ Search News Features Videos Events Knowledge Network Experts Companies Print Edition ▸ Search The Stack Archive Security Muslim Match dating site hacked Thu 30 Jun 2016 Share 257 Share 6 320 Shares…

Illustrator: Jay Keeree Illustrator: Jay Keeree An Amazon warehouse is a flurry of activity. Workers jog around a manmade cavern plopping items into yellow and black crates. Towering hydraulic arms lift heavy boxes toward the rafters. And an army of stubby orange robots slide along the floor like…

"One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts." —Albert Einstein While Einstein was not a neuroscientist, he sure knew what he was talking about in regards to the human capacity to achieve. He…

Latest news View all This story originally appeared in October 2013. This reprint is David Axe’s final story for War Is Boring. Sprinting... China’s New Submarine Nuke Could Hit America The Chinese navy has tested a new submarine-launched ballistic missile, one that could eventually allow Chinese…

There Is No Handbook for Being a Writer

What do you do if you get busted for pirating a terrible Adam Sandler movie? Deny it. That seems to be the lesson of a recently dismissed federal case, which raises the burden of proof that copyright owner must meet in order to hold you accountable for infringement. TorrentFreak reports that Oregon…

Brian Connolly, an engineer, was laid off from a Massachusetts start-up when the financial crisis hit. A noncompete agreement he had signed prohibited him from doing similar work for a year. Credit Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times In today’s on-your-own economy, workers are urged to be…

F ederal regulators earlier this month unveiled new rules aimed at reining in payday lenders and the exorbitant fees they charge. Now expect to hear a lot of what one payday lender named Phil Locke calls “the lies we would tell whenever we were under attack.” The new rules announced by the Consumer…

Free service DoNotPay helps appeal over $4m in parking fines in just 21 months, but is just the tip of the legal AI iceberg for its 19-year-old creator

Massive fortifications and sunken ship-sheds thousands of years old have been found in Piraeus, the harbor city of Athens. The discoveries are part of the partially sunken port that played a pivotal role in the famous Battle of Salamis , against the Persian Empire, the naval conflict that saved…

Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks…

T he message arrived at night and consisted of three words: “Good evening sir!” The sender was a hacker who had written a series of provocative memos at the National Security Agency. His secret memos had explained — with an earthy use of slang and emojis that was unusual for an operative of the…

Emerging Markets Account for 90% of the Global Population Aged Under 30

Website: Iris Automation RFS: Robotics Founders: Alexander Harmsen James Howard Funding: As of 6/27, Iris Automation has raised $250k from Bee Partners, Chris Nelson, and Panda Angel Partners Iris Automation is building a collision avoidance system for drones. They are using 3D environmental…

Big-box stores promise convenience and jobs for suburbs and small towns, but have a mixed reputation with designers and citizens. Many see big boxes as icons of unsustainable sprawl, reinforcing car culture with highway-oriented access and expansive parking lots. These boxy buildings not only take…

An artificially intelligent fighter pilot system has defeated two attacking jets in a combat simulation. The AI, known as Alpha, used four virtual jets to successfully defend a coastline against two attacking aircraft - and did not suffer any losses. Alpha, which was developed by a US team, also…

There are now more Americans working for online publishers and broadcasters than for newspapers, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics . Employment at online outlets first eclipsed newspapers in October 2015. As of March, there were 197,800 Americans working in the “ internet…

I, SNOWBOT For a man accused of espionage and effectively exiled in Russia, Edward Snowden is also, strangely, free. Photograph by Bret Hartman/TED Snowden attending a TED conference in Vancouver in 2014. Edward Snowden lay on his back in the rear of a Ford Escape, hidden from view and momentarily…

Dear Landlord: Don’t Rip Me Off When it Comes To Internet Access

Erendira Mancias/FUSION Update (June 28) : After twice confirming it used location to suggest new friends, Facebook now says it doesn't currently use "location data, such as device location and location information you add to your profile, to suggest people you may know." The company says it ran a…

How I welcomed an immigrant family with a Linux laptop

Bluetooth is so ubiquitous, it's easy to forget it's still an evolving technology. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) defines the standard, and late last year teased what's coming in the next major version change since 2009 . Today, the body shared a bit more about what we can expect from…

R. DeLuca/ESA European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts have a unique training system. Not only do they train hundreds of miles above the surface of the earth, they also travel hundreds of miles down into the deep, dark recesses of our wonderfully exotic planet. This latter training is part of a caving…