Around 11,500 years ago, at a place that is now called the Upward Sun River, in the region that has since been named Alaska, two girls died. One was a late-term fetus; the other, probably her cousin, was six weeks old. They were both covered in red ochre and buried in a circular pit, along with…

On the 15th of May 1951 the BBC broadcast a short lecture by the mathematician Alan Turing under the title Can Computers Think? This was a part of a series of lectures on the emerging science of computing which featured other pioneers of the time, including Douglas Hartree, Max Newman, Freddie…

heic1620 — Science Release 13 October 2016 Astronomers using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescopes and other telescopes have performed an accurate census of the number of galaxies in the Universe. The group came to the surprising conclusion that there are at least 10 times as many galaxies…

The woman in the photo seems familiar. She looks like Jennifer Aniston, the “Friends” actress, or Selena Gomez, the child star turned pop singer. But not exactly. She appears to be a celebrity, one of the beautiful people photographed outside a movie premiere or an awards show. And yet, you cannot…

C harlemagne, Carolingian King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, the great European conciliator; your ancestor. I am making an assumption that you are broadly of European descent, which is not statistically unreasonable but certainly not definitive. If you’re not, be patient, and we’ll come to your…

A video shows an encounter between a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet and an unknown object. It was released by the Defense Department's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Credit U.S. Department of Defense 阅读简体中文版 閱讀繁體中文版 Leer en español WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense…

An employee uses a keyboard while playing computer games in a gaming room at Jagex Ltd. Games Studio's offices in Cambridge, U.K., on Monday, March 20, 2017. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg Vietnam is deploying a 10,000-member military cyber warfare…

A single pound of honey is the lifetime work for about 768 bees, made up of visits to two million flowers. USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab/Public Domain You’re a honeybee. Despite being around 700,000 times smaller than the average human, you’ve got more of almost everything. Instead of four…

After a wait of nearly ten months, MuckRock has finally received documents from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department regarding their response to the protests surrounding President Donald Trump’s inauguration early this year. Surprisingly, while we didn’t receive any records related to the J20…

. While those differences might be driven by neurological factors, the person experiencing these unusual perceptions looks to develop an explanation. Maher emphasized that despite the ske

American homesteads like this one, in an 1869 lithograph by Currier & Ives, might be many miles away from their nearest neighbors. Library of Congress/ LC-DIG-pga-05780 American patent clerks in the 1870s could scarcely have imagined how two inventions, filed two years apart, would together change…

The river Waveney that supplies the Norfolk Broads had chronic neonicotinoid pollution levels recorded.Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian Rivers in England are contaminated with powerful insecticides, new testing has revealed, increasing concerns over the impact of the toxic chemicals on…

WHOA! Show me the (slightly less cool) Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression. By Michael Hobbes Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the future and angry about the past. I am 35…

Sam Altman wants to shift the U.S. economy to universal basic income. There’s one problem. Giving away free money is more complicated than anyone thought. “We all have quite limited time on this earth,” Sam Altman says, “I hate seeing it wasted.” We’re sitting with Altman in Spectacle HQ where he’s…

NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn may have came to a fiery end in September, but observations made by the spacecraft in its final months still have plenty to teach us about the mysteries of the ringed planet. Case in point: A new study finds that the electrically charged region of Saturn’s…

A long conversation with a veteran data scientist on AI, deep learning, FinTech, and the future. We’re constantly inundated with stories about how data science, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing everything. But what do these terms even mean? And are…

Hidden software that can record every letter typed on a computer keyboard has been discovered pre-installed on hundreds of HP laptop models. Security researcher Michael Myng found the keylogging code in software drivers preinstalled on HP laptops to make the keyboard work. HP said more than 460…

Most people eat far too much meat, damaging health and the environment.Photograph: John Giles/PA “Sin taxes” on meat to reduce its huge impact on climate change and human health look inevitable, according to analysts for investors managing more than $4tn of assets. The global livestock industry…

HELLO. MY NAME is Michael Hsu. I’m an adult. And I ride a kick scooter. Yes, I’m aware how ridiculous I look when scooting around the city. Baffled toddlers point and stare. Dork-averse teens snicker. Haughty cyclists guffaw when they pass me in the bike lane. Although it’s well known that motorists…

Bookkeepers prepare for a gas attack in Odessa, Russia, 1935. Stanley B. Burns, MD & The Burns Archive In 1940, British Pathé issued a newsreel titled “ Do You Carry Your Gas Mask? ” In it, an unidentified employee from the Ministry of Home Security gently, in clipped tones, lectures an audience on…

Leer en español A huge government apartment complex in Tokiwadaira, Japan, has become known for lonely deaths. Credit Ko Sasaki for The New York Times TOKIWADAIRA, Japan — Cicadas, every Japanese schoolchild knows, lie underground for years before rising to the earth’s surface in summer. They climb…

1.3K 74 1.4K Shares We loved what Apple used to do about security. During the past years, the company managed to build a complete, multi-layer system to secure its hardware and software ecosystem and protect its customers against common threats. Granted, the system was not without its flaws (most…

Draughts is a funky little café tucked into a railway arch in Islington, in north London. It has exposed brick walls, a bar stocked with trendy craft beers and a selection of comfy chairs. The toast is artisanal and the avocados are smashed. But the most striking thing is the shelves arrayed at the…

If you’re the maker of a popular, zero access encrypted webmail product and suddenly discover your product is no longer featuring in Google search results for queries such as “secure email” and “encrypted email,” what do you conclude? That something is amiss, for sure. But the rather more pertinent…

I know it is a contentious position these days, but I have always been in favor of public schools. I went to a public school. I enjoyed myself there. I believe it taught me some things. I’ve also always been suspicious of privatization schemes. That’s because I tend to think that when a service is…

Seventy-eight-year-old Mauro Morandi often walks along the rocky shores of Budelli Island and looks out over the disconsolate sea, feeling dwarfed by the phantom forces that tug and twist the tides. “We think we are giants that can dominate the Earth, but we’re just mosquitos,” Morandi says. In 1989…

Yarek Waszul for POLITICO The United States pays more than twice as much per person for health care as other wealthy countries. We tend to blame the high prices on things like drugs and medical equipment, in part because the price tag for many life-saving drugs is less than half the U.S. price in…

H ere’s something you probably didn’t do this morning: Look in the mirror and ask, am I a jerk? It seems like a reasonable question. There are, presumably, genuine jerks in the world. And many of those jerks, presumably, have a pretty high moral opinion of themselves, or at least a moderate opinion…

Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands The revelations in the Paradise Papers followed quickly on the release of the Panama Papers (English majors please note the allusion to the Pentagon Papers). Both of these Papers were revealed by an organization with the cumbersome name of The International Consortium of…

If you were one of the more than 10 million Americans receiving Parade magazine on October 30, 1983, you would have been confronted with a harrowing scenario. The Sunday news supplement’s front cover featured an image of the world half-covered in gray shadows, dotted with white snow. Alongside this…

On May 23, an email landed in the sales inbox of a San Francisco startup called HiQ Labs, politely asking the company to go out of business. HiQ is a “people analytics” firm that creates software tools for corporate human resources departments. Its Skill Mapper graphically represents the credentials…

Photo: Douglas Fairbairn/CHM Doug Brotz does a live demonstration on the restored Xerox Alto. Advertisement The Xerox Alto, widely recognized as the first modern personal computer, pioneered just about every basic concept we are familiar with in computers today. These include windows, bit-mapped…

Aaron Gilbreath | Longreads | November 2017 | 26 minutes (6,465 words) On a sunny day in 1989 when I was just 14, I heard Jane’s Addiction for the first time. I was at my friend Nate’s house. As I sat on his bedroom’s itchy tan carpet, near the waterbed with the imitation leather rim, we watched…

Op-Ed Contributor Hey, Mark Zuckerberg: My Democracy Isn’t Your Laboratory Credit Dale Edwin Murray BELGRADE, Serbia — My country, Serbia, has become an unwilling laboratory for Facebook’s experiments on user behavior — and the independent, nonprofit investigative journalism organization where I am…

Byzantine military inventors perfected Greek Fire, a combustible liquid like napalm that could be hurled at enemy ships (or lobbed against land armies as hand grenades). Madrid Skylitzes (12th century) / Wikicommons B yzantine civilization, the eastern Roman empire whose capital was at…

The “PreCheck” program is billed as a convenient service to allow U.S. travelers to “ speed through security ” at airports. However, the latest proposal released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reveals the Department of Homeland Security’s greater underlying plan to collect face…

After running Daniel Miller's long , excellent features about the many ways in which Disney has manipulated the local politics of Anaheim (home of Disneyland) to extract huge subsidies from the cash-strapped city, the company retaliated by barring its film critic from future press screenings of its…

Photofest In 1992, Marvel wasn't exactly a powerhouse in Hollywood. Thirty years after writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby had revolutionized comics by creating a universe of characters with human foibles and colorful costumes, Marvel had failed to find steady success on the big screen or on…