Derailing development: A Zika virus infection (right) destroyed the layers (left) of a cultured ‘mini-brain’. Hongjun Song ignored the first email from Christopher Hadiono, a high school student hoping to spend the summer of 2013 in Song’s lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The payoff…

By Stephen Kalin and Ahmed Rasheed BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Hundreds of supporters of Shi'ite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr stormed parliament inside Baghdad's Green Zone on Saturday and camped out nearby after Sadr denounced politicians' failure to reform a political quota system blamed for rampant…

Every year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes its Special 301 Report highlighting countries that aren’t doing enough to protect U.S. intellectual property rights. In 2016 the report sticks to a tried and tested format, with countries such as China, Russia, India…

Microsoft is forcing people to use its Bing search engine with the Cortana digital assistant in Windows 10. Every search done this way will also be piped only through its recently released Edge browser. In a blogpost , Microsoft said it was making people use Bing so they could get the most out of…

W hen I first adopted Lucas nine years ago from a cat rescue organization in Washington, D.C., his name was Puck. “Because he’s mischievous,” his foster mother said. Although we changed the name, her analysis proved correct. Unlike his brother Tip, whom I also adopted, a gray cat with white paws and…

There are a lot of things you have to do to be a Miamian . But simply getting towed in South Beach or having excessive flood damage doesn’t capture the full experience. In a city that’s as full of transplants as it is of people getting the hell out , our residents suffer much that makes them go from…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Thursday approved a rule change that would let U.S. judges issue search warrants for access to computers located in any jurisdiction despite opposition from civil liberties groups who say it will greatly expand the FBI’s hacking authority. U.S. Chief…

ConnectivityATLAS How Hyperconnected Cities Are Taking Over the World Tanvi Misra Apr 28, 2016 “Political geography is not determinant anymore, because cities are more important.” In the medieval period, empires battled and colluded with each other in the quest for land. The resulting system, in…

New EFF Report Maps Legal Threats to Free Expression in the Arab World Freedom of expression is a universal right, but the specific threats to it vary widely from country to country and region to region. As activists fighting for free speech worldwide, it is essential that we better understand the…

IN AMERICA in 1970 one child in 14,000 was reckoned to be autistic. The current estimate is one in 68—or one in 42 among boys. Similarly high numbers can be found in other rich countries: a study in South Korea found that one in 38 children was affected. Autism is a brain condition associated with…

Just as spring arrived last month in Iran, Meysam Rahimi sat down at his university computer and immediately ran into a problem: how to get the scientific papers he needed. He had to write up a research proposal for his engineering Ph.D. at Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran. His project…

Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club, 1999. Source: 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection Source: 20th Century Fox Film Corp./Everett Collection Colin Lokey, also known as "Tyler Durden," is breaking the first rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. He’s also breaking the…

This is the Capitoline Venus, the Roman copy of a second-century BC Greek original which ordinarily graces the hall of the Capitoline Museums in Rome. She’s in the so-called ‘modest’ position as per the canon of the Venus pudica , the left hand covering the groin, the right hand doing a rather poor…

Nolan Bushnell, the reluctant godfather of video gamesPhotograph: Jennifer Pitts/AP T he video game arcade is the cathedral of the games industry. Veteran players see these increasingly endangered places as shrines to design purity, difficulty and player skill, bathed in the glow of flickering…

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman explains why human perceptions of an independent reality are all illusions. David McNew / Quanta As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously on Wednesday to require law enforcement authorities to get a search warrant before asking technology companies to hand over old emails. The bill’s prospects in the Senate remain unclear, though the 419-0 vote in the House was…

Share 6 Email Share 6 Shares BT ArtBox – Money Box / Dave Catchpole This article is from the Nonprofit Quarterly ’s spring 2016 edition, “Strategic Nonprofit Management: Frameworks and Scaffolding.” Once upon a time, the superwealthy endowed their tax-exempt charitable foundations and then turned…

Since October 2014, SolarCity Corp. has tried to lure individual investors to the solar-power business by pitching $214 million of what it calls “solar bonds” through the company’s website. The biggest buyer by far, though, was rocket maker Space Exploration Technologies Inc., including $90 million…

Last summer, F-35 program officer Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan said the F-35's logistics system was "the brains and blood of operating this weapons system." Despite many fixes, the aircraft's Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is so flawed that government auditors believe the computer…

Qatar National Bank (QNB) said on Tuesday that it was investigating an alleged hack that potentially exposed the names and passwords of a large number of customers. Media reports claimed that a 1.4-gigabyte trove of documents had been leaked online anonymously and divulged information on more than…

USB cables? What a pain. You can never find the right type of connector when you need one, or you can’t figure out which way is up when you plug the cable in. These problems could be a thing of the past, though, with the latest version of the venerable USB connection: USB Type C. This new standard…

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Colt McAnlis Apr 26, 2016 The JPG file format was one of the most technologically impressive advancements to image compression to come on the scene in 1992. Since then, it’s been a dominant force in representation of photo quality images on the internet. And for good reason. Much of the technology…

Photos used in Dvach's doxing campaign. Tjournal.ru This story originally appeared on Global Voices Advocacy . The developers behind “ FindFace ,” which uses facial recognition software to match random photographs to people’s social media pages on Vkontakte, say the service is designed to facilitate…

The Washington Post reported that flawed forensic hair matches might have led to possibly hundreds of wrongful convictions for rape, murder, and other violent crimes. Photo by Victorburnside/Thinkstock The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath:…

Nature | News Sharing Scientists race to determine origin of Bangladesh outbreak, which they warn could spread farther afield. Ewen Callaway Updated: 27 April 2016 Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Ruth Fremson/NYT/eyevine Wheat in northern India could be threatened by an outbreak of fungal…

It is early morning on Brighton beach, and we are sitting on a slope of pebbles, looking out to sea. With us we have a laptop, several metres of cabling, and an antenna taller than a small child. In between waving off the attentions of men wielding metal detectors and some extremely large seagulls,…

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A nuclear power plant in Germany has been found to be infected with computer viruses, but they appear not to have posed a threat to the facility’s operations because it is isolated from the Internet, the station’s operator said on Tuesday. The Gundremmingen plant, located about…

Why do we live in systems where a single person or a small group of people make decisions on behalf of other people? A 3,000-year-old archaeological site in the Andes of Peru may hold the answer to this question, said John Rick , an associate professor of anthropology at Stanford. Rick has studied…

M orale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with…

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Beginning in March 2016, we began hearing reports of a gang of cybercriminals once again calling themselves the Armada Collective. The calling card of the gang was an extortion email sent to a wide variety of online businesses threatening to launch DDoS attacks if they weren't paid in Bitcoin. From…

Step right up! Amazon’s Alexa is a stupendous novelty act that can play thousands of songs, guess your weight, and conjure a pizza from thin air! Illustration by Benze In the entryway to Hollywood’s Magic Castle, if you speak a secret password into a small sculpture of an owl, a bookcase will…

A demonstrator, dressed as a prisoner, protests against the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, outside the Ministry of Defence in London on February 6, 2010. (Reuters / Luke Macgregor) The allegations against the man were serious indeed. Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to…

Many Canadians are enraged by Netflix's declared war on cross-border watchers, who skirt the company's rules by sneaking across virtual borders to stream Netflix shows and movies restricted to other countries. Sometimes it's hard to be satisfied with Netflix Canada's library when our American…

Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent of that cost. But those labor savings aren’t the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks. Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day…

SINGAPORE—This wealthy financial center is known world-wide for its tidy streets and tight controls on personal behavior, including famous restrictions on the sale of chewing gum to keep the city clean. Now Singapore may soon be known for something else: the most extensive effort to collect data on…

It’s impossible to discuss new developments in money without thinking for a moment about what money is. The best place to start thinking about that is with money itself. Consider the UK’s most common paper money, the English five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person:…

Decades into the war on drugs , the world doesn't have much to show for it. The US is now in the middle of an opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic that has killed tens of thousands each year, despite tough-on-crime policies enforced under the drug war. Mexico has suffered from tens of thousands of…

Fair Game Major public companies are reporting results that are not based on generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. Companies, if granted the leeway, will surely present their financial results in the best possible light. And of course they will try to persuade investors that the…