T he size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10 -19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the cosmic horizon 10 26 meters away. In these 45 possible orders of magnitude, life, as far as we know it, is confined to a relatively tiny bracket of just over nine…

Researchers have found evidence of a genetic variation in populations with a history of a plant-based diet. This variation, or allele, appears to have developed over hundreds of generations, allowing vegetarian populations to more efficiently process omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids and convert them…

A massive leak of confidential documents has for the first time exposed the true extent of corruption within the oil industry, implicating dozens of leading companies, bureaucrats and politicians in a sophisticated global web of bribery and graft. After a six-month investigation across two…

Ronald Rivest, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement channels…

Stanford Report, March 29, 2016 A case study of a small Wyoming town reveals that practices common in the fracking industry may have widespread impacts on drinking water resources. Only one industry is allowed to inject toxic chemicals into underground sources of drinking water – hydraulic…

On 11 March, panic struck engineers at a giant power station on the banks of the Ganges river in West Bengal state. Readings showed that the water level in the canal connecting the river to the plant was going down rapidly. Water is used to produce steam to run the turbines and for cooling vital…

On-demand streaming music is inevitable, so Spotify is taking whatever fuel it can get to win the race against Apple. Whoever can sign up customers faster to consume their data and network effect could earn money off them for a long, long time. So it makes sense that Spotify would be willing to…

The Tor Project makes a browser that allows anyone to surf the Internet anonymously. Tor stands for "the onion router" and that describes how the service works. Traffic is routed through a number of relays run across the Internet where each relay only knows the next hop (because each hop is enclosed…

I know what you're probably thinking. One of the reasons you use Windows is so you don't have to use the command line. But sometimes it's unavoidable—maybe you need to do some advanced git-wrangling, or you're developing in an environment with CLI-based tools that are far more mature than their GUI…

PRINCETON, N.J. — A well-known computer hacker who goes by the name of “Weev” said he was behind a wave of anti-Semitic, racist fliers that appeared on printers at more than a dozen college campuses last week. Covered in swastikas, the fliers, which seemed to appear spontaneously on printers,…

Pause Current Time 0:27 / Duration Time 0:39 Remaining Time -0:11 Stream Type LIVE Loaded : 0% Progress : 0% 0:27 Fullscreen 00:00 Mute Playback Rate 1 Subtitles subtitles off Captions captions off Chapters Chapters Episode 3: How did a Usenet troll and encryption genius become a criminal…

Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and…

Connor Krukosky is an 18-year-old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe...an IBM z890. This is his story. Connor's presentation "I just Bought an IBM z890 - Now What?" was featured at SHARE in San Antonio in March 2016. For more…

Few days ago I had a small talk (on our local Defcon group meeting - DC#7812) regarding CAN ( Controller Area Network ) and ECU analysis with help of CANToolz framework. Therefore, here I would like to repeat some of the ideas from that talk, give some explanations about "Why I have created Yet…

It is very common when I first encounter a client struggling with mental health issues that they report their problem is that they feel anxious or depressed. Here is a typical exchange: Me: So, can you share with me what brings you in? Client: Well, I have not been feeling good. I have these low…

Recently, I landed the tech-journalism equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon interview: I got someone from Twitter to answer my call. Notorious for keeping its communications department locked up tight, Twitter is not only the psychic bellwether and newswire for the media industry, but also a stingy…

(Damian Dovarganes/AP) A new study shows that knowledge of government surveillance causes people to self-censor their dissenting opinions online. The research offers a sobering look at the oft-touted "democratizing" effect of social media and Internet access that bolsters minority opinion. The study…

One of Isaac Newton's 17th-century alchemy manuscripts, buried in a private collection for decades, reveals his recipe for a material thought to be a step toward concocting the magical philosopher's stone. The "philosopher's stone" was a mythical substance that alchemists believed had magical…

By Erica E. Phillips Updated March 27, 2016 2:56 p.m. ET At one of the busiest shipping terminals in the U.S., more than two dozen giant red robots wheeled cargo containers along the docks on a recent morning, handing the boxes off to another set of androids gliding along long rows of stacked…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Investigators are broadening their DNA searches beyond government databases and demanding genetic information from companies that do ancestry research for their customers. Two major companies that research family lineage for fees around $200 say that over the last two years,…

The 4 Rituals That Will Make You An Expert At Anything We hear a lot about “10,000 hours” being what it takes to become an expert. But the majority of people totally misunderstand the idea. So I decided to go to the source and talk to the guy who actually created the theory. Anders Ericsson is a…

Larry Downing / Reuters I am so excited for this severe threat looming on the horizon. I just can’t wait to learn how I will fail to live up to my own expectations. I lie awake, tight-chested, at 3 a.m., just really looking forward to what fresh hell that meeting will be about. Don’t mind me, I’m…

No shortage of critics At the same time, Wheeler has drawn the ire of conservative advocates. "Wheeler is not shy about going into areas (privacy, antitrust) that are addressed by other agencies armed with expert staff and decades of precedent,” economist Hal Singer of the Progressive Policy…

D ozens of car models, including BMW, Audi and Range Rover can be remotely unlocked and started using a simple hack, research reveals. The hack allows malicious actors to unlock and drive away 24 different car models from 19 manufacturers using a cheap and easily constructed radio amplifier. Called…

Buyers from China comprised about one-third of purchases of Vancouver’s hot housing market in 2015, according to "back of the envelope calculations" by National Bank of Canada. Chinese investors spent about C$12.7 billion ($9.6 billion) on real estate in the western Canadian city in 2015, or 33…

O n 4 March, on what would have been his 30th birthday, Alejandro Nieto’s parents left a packed courtroom in San Francisco , shortly before pictures from their son’s autopsy were shown to a jury. The photographs showed what happens when 14 bullets rip through a person’s head and body. Refugio and…

AP Photo A secret Moscow meeting, a disappeared general and the start of modern cyber-war. Fred Kaplan is “War Stories” columnist at Slate , and author of , from which this is excerpted. Haver recalled that, during the Cold War, the KGB or GRU, the Soviet military’s spy agency, often dispatched…

VolteFace invited David Cameron’s former Director of Policy, Paul Kirby, to submit a piece on the subject of prison reform. What follows is a magnum opus… There’s no shortage of people worrying about the world running out of things. Oil, water, food, antibiotics, polar ice – they all have people…

Ruth Gates saw it time and time again. While surveying coral reefs of Caribbean in the late 1980s, she noticed that many corals were clearly stressed, sapped of their colour. Some faded to skeletal white. The trigger was always a sudden surge in ocean temperature. Some corals reacted by ejecting the…

Though adults tend to look back on youth as a time of innocence, childhood is actually terrifying. Kids are always privy to more of the world’s horrors than we realize, and those glimpses of war on the evening news or the mutilation on display in anti-drunk-driving films leave permanent scars on…

 Universities Are Becoming Billion-Dollar Hedge Funds With Schools Attached

Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. March 21, 2016, 1:43 PM GMT / Updated March 21, 2016, 1:48 PM GMT By Pete Williams The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to take up a lawsuit filed by two of…

The U.S. is not likely to ever again see economic growth like that of the 20th century, says economist Robert Gordon. (photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images) Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Yes, the American Economy Is in a Funk — but not for the Reasons You Think .” (You can…

The tomb of King Tut in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. Researchers are investigating whether the tomb contains hidden chambers. Amr Nabil/AP Where is Queen Nefertiti buried? It's one of the biggest mysteries in Egyptology, and today, archaeologists might be one step closer to an answer.…

Hank Asher -- high school dropout, cyber pioneer, friend to law enforcers, enemy to child predators, nemesis of privacy advocates, ex-cocaine smuggler -- is back in the business of finding almost everything that’s known about anyone in the U.S. Law enforcement applauds Asher for his help in catching…

Image: ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories Advertisement A few years ago, the curious folks at the Radiolab show/podcast asked some kids to hold a Barbie doll, a live hamster, and a Furby robot upside down . Not surprisingly, the children were unfazed by the Barbie, holding it on…

Jars of marijuana for sale sit on a counter at a Denver cannabis dispensary. (Photo11: Trevor Hughes/USA TODAY) DENVER — Marijuana is rapidly becoming a big, semi-legal business across the country, with $5.7 billion in sales last year and tens of thousands of people working and paying taxes as they…