Story highlights Modern slavery is driving huge deforestation, writes Kevin Bales Criminals make slaves cut forests to support commodities such as gold, minerals for cell phones and laptops, and shrimp and fish Slavery is a major contributor to climate change, he says Kevin Bales is Professor of…

When Berta Doff met Ben Cohn, in 1936, she was twenty-one years old, tall and confident, with the diction of an elocution instructor, which in fact she was. Having attended college in Boston, she also worked as the host of radio programs, in New Haven, Connecticut, where she had grown up. On one…

A nna has made the trip to Rikers hundreds of times in the nearly six years her son has been awaiting trial. Each time, a friend picks her up early in the morning near her apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and drives her out through the city, past the brick houses and manicured lawns of…

Last week, Warner Bros. issued a DMCA takedown notice to the video streaming website Vimeo. The notice concerned a pretty standard list of illegally uploaded files from media properties Warner owns the copyright to — including episodes of Friends and Pretty Little Liars , as well as two uploads…

Business THE NEW SPACE RACE The vehicles that will take you to space By and Christian Davenport June 1, 2016 [ Related: How the next astronauts (and tourists) will get to space ] Commercial companies like SpaceX are starting to gain traction in the space industry. There are currently more than a…

Some of your most intimate conversations might be sitting in a Google data centre somewhere Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Google could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself. The company quietly records many of the conversations that people…

Most people can only dream of a good night’s sleep.Photograph: AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo S leep deprivation used to be a badge of honor: a sign you were busy and important and very much in demand. Snoozing was losing and sleep was for wimps. Now, however, Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution…

The Lost Secret Sign Language of Sawmill Workers

Home → MercuryNews.com: Silicon Valley news, sports, business Story Font Resize By Michael Liedtke AP Technology Writer Posted: 06/01/2016 07:05:23 AM PDT | Updated: about 8 hours ago Click photo to enlarge This image provided by Google shows a demonstration of Google's "My Account" mobile…

The valuation gap. Photographer: Matthew Busch/Bloomberg Photographer: Matthew Busch/Bloomberg If you own a stock that you think is worth $10 a share, and I also own that stock and I think it's worth $20 a share, I can try to convince you that I'm right. I can make predictions about the company's…

America’s workforce runs on amphetamines. More specifically, it runs on Adderall (dextroamphetamine), Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine), Focalin (dexmethylphenidate), and Concerta (methylphenidate), all commonly used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Over the past five years, reports of a…

Published on May 27, 2016 For months, a small team of U.S. Navy investigators and federal prosecutors secretly devised options for a high-stakes international manhunt. Could the target be snatched from his home base in Asia and rendered to the United States? Or held captive aboard an American…

There's strength -- and intelligence -- in numbers. Unanimous A.I., a Silicon Valley startup, has built a platform that taps into the collective knowledge of a group of people to form its own opinions, preferences and surprisingly accurate predictions. The software, dubbed UNU , successfully guessed…

Stars like Pharrell Williams have signed letters asking for changes to copyright laws. A few years ago, the biggest enemy of the music industry was Pandora Media. Then Spotify became the target. Now it is YouTube’s turn. In recent months, the music world has been united to a rare degree in a public…

Having already upset the traditional automobile industry with his electric cars and the space exploration business with his reusable Space X rockets, Tesla Motors Chief Executive Elon Musk will now set about trying to revolutionize the American factory. In a freewheeling talk before shareholders…

You don't hear "Intel Inside" too often these days. Instead, the legend adorning the Taipei International Convention Center stage today ahead of Intel's Computex keynote was "Experience what's inside." The newer slogan has been kicking around for a while, but its deployment betrays a shift in…

Oculus Rift vs HTC Vive

Nvidia’s CEO reckons the challenges holding VR back aren’t going to be solved for 20 years, delivering a surprising dose of realism to a VR industry creaking under the weight of hype. Speaking at Nvidia’s press conference on the eve of Computex , Jen-Hsun Huang made a depressing list of shortcomings…

NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As they struggle to deal with more extreme weather, a range of food crops are generating more of chemical compounds that can cause health problems for people and livestock who eat them, scientists have warned. A new report by the United Nations Environment…

Immigrants from El Salvador, including one who says she is seven months pregnant, stand next to a U.S. Border Patrol truck after they turned themselves in to border agents on Dec. 7, 2015, near Rio Grande City, Texas. John Moore/Getty Images Immigrants fleeing gang violence in Central America are…

You've probably heard of science fiction's Golden Age, that incredible period in the 1940s and '50s when masters of the genre like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, and Jack Vance were in their primes. But the early 20th century was an even weirder and more fantastic time for science…

Julian Carvajal A full panel of judges at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has now overturned last summer’s notable decision by the standard trio of appellate judges, which had found that police needed a warrant to obtain more than 200 days' worth of cell-site location information (CSLI) for…

Mafia expert Roberto Saviano was right this week when he said that it’s Britain, rather than Afghanistan, the South of Italy or Nigeria, which is the most corrupt country in the world. The fact of the matter is that the British public think they are detached from the mafia problem and corruption ,…

Opinion Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person Leer en español Credit Marion Fayolle IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person. Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems…

A group of bonded Indian child labourers wait at the Nizamuddin police station following a raid and rescue operation conducted by Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement) in New Delhi on June 22, 2009. PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images Of the nearly 46 million people living as slaves…

O nstage, they were the personification of unity – even family. The four men dressed the same –in leather motorcycle jackets, weathered jeans, sneakers – had the same dark hair color, shared the same last name. They seemed to think the same thoughts and breathe the same energy. They often didn’t…

Bill Marczak, a senior fellow at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, has been tracking the spread of spyware around the globe. Credit Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — In the last five years, Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in…

Today, we have a guest blog post by C. Pierce Salguero , author of Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China , published by Penn Press in 2014, who teaches Asian History and Religious Studies at Penn State University’s Abington College. Photo selection and captions have been done by Stephen…

Every three years, the Royal Institute of Navigation organizes a conference focussed solely on animals. This April, the event was held southwest of London, at Royal Holloway College, whose ornate Victorian-era campus has appeared in “Downton Abbey.” For several days, the world’s foremost…

T he Northwestern University economist Charles Manksi calls it the “reflection problem”: How can we know if person A is affecting person B, or the reverse? Without being in each person’s head or observing every subtle non-verbal cue in their interactions, it’s impossible to know what’s causing what,…

An Interview With Compaq Co-Founder and CEO Rod Canion This Sunday, AMC is premiering a new original series called Halt And Catch Fire . Set in the early 1980s, it tells the story of a band of cowboy entrepreneurs and engineers who join the PC Wars by cloning an IBM machine and taking on Big Blue…

Some real journalism at NYCC. Help us make these videos: https://www.patreon.com/patrickhwillems MY VIDEO GEAR http://tinyurl.com/z9kb5ow written by Matt Torpey https://twitter.com/MatthewTorpey starring Michael Curran https://twitter.com/Mikel_Curran voiceover by Jacob Torpey…

All rights reserved. "Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride" is a 2006 personal, intimate look at Hunter S. Thompson with a special emphasis on his Hollywood relationships. It captures the legacy and "gonzo" spirit of one of this century's most notorious figures - a man whose life and work regularly…

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not…

The ground beneath us is alive, very alive. A single gram of soil (about a fifth of a teaspoon) can contain thousands of species of bacteria, and millions of individual cells. It might also be packed with fungi, microscopic worms, and other strange creatures like tardigrades and rotifers. A new…

Bright spots on the dwarf planet Ceres continue to puzzle researchers. When recently a team of astronomers led by Paolo Molaro of the Trieste Astronomical Observatory in Italy, conducted observations of these features, they found out something unexpected. The scientists were surprised to detect that…

The Ex-Anarchist Construction Worker Who Became a World-Renowned Scientist

F or Ryan Sherman*, a 34-year-old lawyer, something changed eight years ago when he moved from Texas to Europe and then to Boston and New York City: The shorter winter days of the more northern latitudes were like a dead weight on his emotions. “I’d get these depressions,” he says. His sleep…