In his new book " Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise ", psychologist Anders Ericsson and journalist Robert Pool distill an impressive body of research on "mastering almost any skill." Indeed, deliberate practice can help you master new skills. Deliberate practice involves a series of…

An employee working at LinkedIn Corp. Wall Street is paying more attention to the number of stock grants that the company pays workers. SAN FRANCISCO — For the last few years, LinkedIn, the professional social networking company, has doled out increasingly large amounts of stock to pay its workers.…

In early April, 2014, a spy from the Ecuador's intelligence agency sent a flurry of emails to the support team of Hacking Team , a company of Italian hackers-for-hire that works with government agencies around the world. The agent, Luis Solis, needed Hacking Team to plant its spyware in a series of…

SAN JOSE — Santa Clara County officials are poised to approve sweeping rules governing police use of cell phone trackers and other spying technology that advocates say will be a model for the nation but that cops worry could hamper investigations. “Santa Clara County is asking and answering the…

(Amy King/The Washington Post; Emily Keller/The Noun Project; iStock) Poverty has a way of rearing its ugly head, slipping into the cracks in people's lives when they're young and then re-emerging later in life. Sometimes it happens in ways that are easily observable—what poor babies are fed, for…

Illustration by Victor Habbick Visions W hen 12 men gathered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to discuss the art and science of alien hunting in 1961, the Order of the Dolphin was born. A number of the brightest minds from a range of scientific disciplines, including three Nobel…

he new Gilded Age: Close to half of all super-PAC money comes from 50 don

Dmitry Davydov Jan 24, 2016 I was born in Russia. Even though I’ve finished high school in US (fight, fight, fight for Del Oro High) and then graduated from UC Davis, after living six years in sunny California I had to return. I now live in Europe again, smack in between Poland and Lithuania (Berlin…

The FileFront logo, as it existed before the 2010 renaming to GameFront. One of the Web's oldest and largest repositories for classic and current PC gaming mods will be shutting down for good later this month. GameFront announced today that its servers will be going offline on April 30 and that "any…

STEVE MADDEN | Times At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction The restaurant’s chalkboard makes claims as you enter from the valet parking lot. At the hostess stand, a cheery board reads, “Welcome to local, farm-fresh Boca.” The rest of the series Part 2: Farmers markets.…

I t’s a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching: researchers at the School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. “I really did not believe there were structures in the body that we were…

Artur Korneyev, Deputy Director of Shelter Object, viewing the “elephants foot” lava flow at Chernobyl, 1996. (Photo: US Department of Energy) At first glance, it’s hard to know what’s happening in this picture. A giant mushroom seems to have sprouted in a factory floor, where ghostly men in…

Last Friday, a friend doing research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta sent me a photo of a display at the CDC’s in-house museum. She thought I’d be interested because it had to do with the cholera epidemic in Haiti, which I lived through at its beginning and have…

Highlights • High-level cortical regions and the thalamus show increased connectivity under LSD • The brain’s modular and rich-club organization is altered under LSD • Increased global connectivity under LSD correlates with ego dissolution scores Summary Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a…

Every single person is different. We all have different backgrounds, views, values and interests. And yet there is one universal feeling that we all experience at every single moment. Call it an “ego”, a “self” or just an “I” – it’s the idea that our thoughts and feelings are our own, and no one…

The profound impact of LSD on the brain has been laid bare by the first modern scans of people high on the drug. The images, taken from volunteers who agreed to take a trip in the name of science, have given researchers an unprecedented insight into the neural basis for effects produced by one of…

All Things D Remember Paul Ceglia ? He's the fellow in upstate New York who sued Mark Zuckerberg last July, claiming that, way back in 2003, Zuckerberg had agreed to give him a 50% ownership in the project that became Facebook. That claim seemed preposterous at the time, not least because Ceglia had…

(Reuters) - Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] on Tuesday released its first ever transparency report detailing the information requested by not only U.S. law enforcement agencies, but also by regulators. The ride-sharing company said that between July and December 2015, it had provided information on…

Ian Burkhart, who is paralyzed, playing a guitar video game as Nick Annetta, an electrical engineer at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, watches. Credit The Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and Battelle Five years ago, a college freshman named Ian Burkhart dived into a wave at a beach…

A Hacker’s Guide to Bending the Universe If you’re going to conquer the world, you can’t let a broken CRT monitor stand in your way Gif by Nihil Minus W hen it’s functioning properly, a cathode ray tube is an engineering marvel more impressive than the Golden Gate Bridge. You might have seen a tube…

PAMPAS DE LA JOYA, Peru—As humans prepare to blast off to Mars, there is still the question of what they’ll eat once they colonize the red planet. Scientists who have traveled here to the Peruvian desert say they have the answer. Potatoes. Researchers at the Lima-based International Potato Center…

(iStock) It was one of the largest, most rigorous experiments ever conducted on an important diet question: How do fatty foods affect our health? Yet it took more than 40 years — that is, until today — for a clear picture of the results to reach the public. The fuller results appeared Tuesday in…

For a long time, it was thought that people with autism spectrum disorder lacked emotion, that even the higher-functioning among them navigated the world like logical robots oblivious to “real” feelings. More recently, research has shown their social issues are more likely to stem from difficulty…

I needed a simple set of good outdoor surveillance cameras for a friends home. Like everything else I buy, I turned to Amazon. I found (what seemed like) a great deal for a set of 6 poe cameras and the necessary recording equipment. Here is the link:…

Researchers are hoping to “assist” evolution in order to produce hardier corals and tougher trees. Credit Illustration by Harry Campbell Ruth Gates fell in love with the ocean while watching TV. When she was in elementary school, she would sit in front of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,”…

Stephanie Rieger Oct 20, 2015 Photo: Moving Day by Nicolas Huk Between 2000 and 2010, Bryan and I lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle. We moved more than fifteen times, including stays of varying lengths in three continents, six countries, three Canadian provinces, and four cities in the UK. After…

It's a common scene, you're sitting in a meeting and the speaker has been going on for hours, then your phone starts vibrating in your pocket; do you take the call? You look at your phone but the number is not in your contact list. So is it important enough to run out of the room with your phone…

Animations by Lisa Larson-Walker. Images via Flickr CC. One day in May 2015, Eric Nuzum stood before a gathering of influential NPR trustees and board members, and showed them a photograph of a young woman with shoulder-length brown hair. “This is Lara,” Nuzum’s slide read. “Lara is the future of…

THE DEMOCRACY SPRING , a protest movement calling on Congress to “end the corruption of big money in our politics” and “ensure free and fair elections,” converged on Capitol Hill on Monday, staging a nonviolent sit-in that resulted in over 400 arrests — a massive number by Washington sit-in…

O N A CRISP SATURDAY in November 2014, a black Mercedes SUV pulled onto the tarmac of an Austrian specialty aviation company 30 miles south of Vienna. Employees of the firm, Airborne Technologies, which specialized in designing and equipping small aircraft with wireless surveillance platforms, had…

David Byttow Apr 11, 2016 Vanity Fair and TechCrunch recently reported that Yik Yak is in trouble, a company that raised over $70 million dollars and valued at around $400 million. At the time it last raised, Yik Yak had exploded across thousands of campuses in the US, propelling it to the top ranks…

Feature Why it’s getting harder to stop multinational corporations. April 11, 2016 CHISUMBANJE, Zimbabwe — Joyce Chachengwa woke up one morning to find her crops — her only source of food and income — ground into the dirt. Chisumbanje is a small village in eastern Zimbabwe, right on the border with…

Home values and rents have grown more quickly in the parts of the country that historically have provided the most upward socio-economic mobility for children from low-income families. Although buying a U.S. home in general is roughly as affordable as ever thanks to low mortgage interest rates,…

[Update: Google published this news today on its corporate blog , but this was previously announced earlier this year. We’ve asked Google to clarify why it was republished, if that was in error, or if it represents any changes since the first announcement.] Google says it’s expanding its efforts at…

The cosmologist Stephen Hawking and the entrepreneur Yuri Milner released a simulation that shows how a project called Breakthrough Starshot aims to send small robots to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. Credit European Southern Observatory Can you fly an iPhone to the stars? In an attempt to…

I studied literature at Bennington College . There, I wrote my thesis on the past, present, and future of the book object. Five years later, I’m still fascinated by the subject. The role that bound paper has played not just in my life, but in the history of humankind, is staggering. Men and women…

Dave Temkin Apr 10, 2016 For only being 90 miles away, it feels like a completely different world- almost like stepping into a time capsule. one of these things is not like the other The things I thought I knew about the island nation were mostly wrong: what we were taught by social studies and hear…

Classic rocker Steve Miller was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame on Friday, but he didn’t seem terribly jazzed about it, probably because the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame sucks. (More like Rock And Roll Hall Of Lame , am I right?) Miller criticized the Rock Hall during his acceptance…

Chile’s Communist Party Rejects Intervention in Venezuela Nigeria: Early Tally Shows Buhari in Lead, Opposition Rejects 86% Votes For New Constitution in Cuba US VP Pence Leads Lima Group, Pushes for More Severe Blockade Venezuela: EU Spurns Violent Intervention for Peaceful Solution Campaign…