The metal fence was what she noticed first, miles of tall barrier topped by barbed wire strung across the south Texas pastures — just like the internment camp nearby where she had been held as an infant. And on the other side of the fence, again, 71-year-old Satsuki Ina saw mothers and children:…

C omments allow readers to respond to an article instantly, asking questions, pointing out errors, giving new leads. At their best, comment threads are thoughtful, enlightening, funny: online communities where readers interact with journalists and others in ways that enrich the Guardian’s…

Twitter and Medium founder Ev WilliamsPhotograph: Tim Knox Ev Williams is not a fan of the increasingly homogenised media he currently sees, with its emphasis on feeding the great, gaping maw of platforms like Twitter and Facebook too often producing what he describes as tantamount to junk food.…

The Y chromosome is a hindrance Will Oliver/PA By Vijay Shankar Modern humans diverged from Neanderthals some 600,000 years ago – and a new study shows the Y chromosome might be what kept the two species separate. It seems we were genetically incompatible with our ancient relatives – and male…

The nuclear reactors in Fukushima, the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.Photograph: Air Photo Service/AFP/Getty Images T his year marks the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, and the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl incident. Together, these constitute the two greatest…

Ford CEO Mark Fields on electric cars, self-driving, and the weird future of his rapidly changing industry For a guy running a car business, Mark Fields sure doesn’t mind talking about putting fewer cars on the road. Fields is the charismatic CEO of Ford Motor Company, an honest-to-goodness slice of…

A team of scientists unveiled a new tree of life on Monday, a diagram outlining the evolution of all living things. The researchers found that bacteria make up most of life’s branches. And they found that much of that diversity has been waiting in plain sight to be discovered, dwelling in river mud…

Photograph by Elizabethsalleebauer / Getty Images G regor Hintler had what seemed like a simple question: How many trees are there? As part of Plant for the Planet, a youth initiative that aimed to plant one billion trees in every country by 2020, he needed a way to figure out how many trees the…

Nature | News: Q&A Sharing Drug researcher David Nutt discusses brain-imaging studies with hallucinogens. Zoe Cormier Article tools Rights & Permissions Imperial College London Under the influence of LSD, the brain's visual cortex has increased connectivity with other brain regions (right) than when…

Why didn't police include relevant information about Tor, a network that uses randomized encryption, in their request to search a local home? Mclek/Shutterstock One week after Seattle police searched the home of two well-known privacy activists for child porn and found nothing, critics are…

America is being watched from above. Government surveillance planes routinely circle over most major cities — but usually take the weekends off. Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department…

A woman sells some of her goods to make ends meet, Milwaukee.Photograph: Matthieu Paley/Corbis W hat if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong? What if the problem isn’t that poor people have bad morals – that they’re lazy and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that…

A New York City swindler tries to cheat a man from the country, 1868. New York Public Library These days we are constantly warned of scams and schemes designed to hoodwink us. The FBI sends out scam alerts from its Internet Crime Center . The Federal Trade Commission cautions against all kinds of…

This article was written by Alex Mayyasi , a Priceonomics staff writer When was the last time you met a couple where one person was attractive and the other was not? There’s no reason couples like that should stand out—except for the fact that they are so rare. Seeing it can set off an uncharitable…

‘I was struck with multiple blows with open and closed fist by two officers ... I felt my face start to swell and deform instantly.’Illustration: Jan Diehm for the Guardian Internal documents from the Chicago police department show that officers used physical force on at least 14 men already in…

In the late ’90s, Tomi Poutanen, a precocious computer whiz from Finland, hoped to do his dissertation on neural networks, a scientific method aimed at teaching computers to act and think like humans. As a student at the University of Toronto, it was a logical choice. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather…

(Mis)Uses of Technology from the you-have-32-registry-errors dept We had just discussed a couple of websites, Forbes amongst them, joining the ranks of sites that were attempting to hold their content hostage over people's use of adblockers. The general point of that post was that the reason people…

Photographer: Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images Photographer: Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images Has the music stopped for the financial industry? Just as record companies in the early 2000s had to deal painfully with the digitization of music courtesy of Napster and Apple Inc.'s iTunes, many asset managers are…

A massive data breach appears to have left 55 million Philippine voters at much greater risk of identity fraud and more. Security researchers warn that the entire database of the Philippines’ Commission on Elections ( COMELEC ) has been exposed in what appears to be the biggest government related…

Bryan Martin Contributor Bryan Martin is chairman and CTO of 8x8 . Romania has long been a hotbed for tech companies outsourcing contact centers, software development and even research and development. Now, Romania is growing its own entrepreneurial culture. The online database Romanian Startups…

A look at the exterior of a Kasita. (Image courtesy of Kasita) Professor Dumpster is in a helluva good mood. He's got his shoes kicked off, and he's working with his team in the wide-open space they're renting in a renovated warehouse in East Austin that's more art collective than tech hub. The…

People are silhouetted as they pose with laptops in front of a screen projected with binary code and a Central Inteligence Agency (CIA) emblem, in this picture illustration taken in Zenica October 29, 2014. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A link to a website which publishes photos without…

R obert Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specialises in the treatment of childhood obesity. A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009, titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than six million times on YouTube. In it, Lustig argues forcefully that…

The huge gap between current CMS offerings and what the world needed occurred to me during my time as CTO of The Huffington Post . When we were acquired by AOL in 2011, I inherited 53 properties built on dozens of different content management systems. It wasn't long after that I soon realized they…

Essentially, addiction occurs when you fall in love with a drug rather than a person.Photograph: Craig Dingle/Getty Images S ince entering recovery 28 years ago, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the conundrum of addiction. The most commonly accepted definition – the one used in…

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A favorite parlour game among the D.C. media is to ponderwhy Americans seem so angry this election season. Reporters drop themselves intoprimary states like Marlin Perkins in a Mutualof Omaha’s Wild Kingdom episode, trying to decipher these strange creatureswho are so frustrated with the U.S.…

Reporter Hilde Kate Lysiak got the tip early Saturday afternoon that there was heavy police activity on Ninth Street. She hustled over with her pen and camera, as any good reporter would, and soon she posted something short online, beating all her competitors. Then, working the neighbors and the…

A federal district court in Pennsylvania recently issued a terrible joint decision in Fields v. City of Philadelphia and Geraci v. City of Philadelphia , holding for the first time that "observing and recording" police activities is not protected by the First Amendment unless an observer visibly…

Wind and Solar Are Crushing Fossil Fuels

In the future, we could all be wearing smart contact lenses, like the ones secret agents use in movies. Samsung has been granted a patent in South Korea for contact lenses with a display that projects images directly into wearer's eyes, according to the Samsung-focused blog A built-in camera and…

Money for Nothing: The Lucrative World of Club Appearances

T he location is wrong. The white Bronco is clearly weaving through traffic on the 710 South as it approaches its intersection with the 10, on the eastern border of El Sereno, just by the Cal State LA campus. In June 1994, O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings would have had no reason to venture that far…

One day during his presidential re-election campaign in September 1996, Bill Clinton walked into a room in Westin Crown Center hotel in Kansas City, Mo. At stake was a quarter-million dollars in campaign fundraising. Clinton turned to his generous host, Farhad Azima, and led the guests in song.…

Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices—customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of…

As our relationship with photography shifts, will desktop-based photo-editing programs like the Google Nik Collection go the way of the film camera? Photograph by Jordan Strauss / Invision / AP “Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1977 book “On…

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