The man who calls himself Nicholas Trainer-bees is becoming something of a legend among both beekeepers and cannabis enthusiasts. He claims he has trained his bees to make honey from weed. That’s because he’s been able to do what many have talked about, but no one has been able to pull off. Nicholas…

The long and tangled history of Alfred E. Neuman. Postcard that later inspired Norman Mingo’s, Alfred E. Neuman. In a 1975 interview with the New York Times, MAD Magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman recalled an illustration of a grinning boy he’d spotted on a postcard in the early fifties: a “bumpkin…

Robert Hallock AMD hints that it's working on a new external graphics card solution that promises to be "the answer" to "ultrathin" laptop gaming, according to technical marketing head Robert Hallock. "Ultrathin notebooks are awesome to carry, but nobody in their right mind would confuse one for a…

Endnotes and citations are available in the PDF and Scribd versions. By all rights, Millennials—people born between 1981 and 1997—should be the highest-paid generation in American history. They are, after all, the most likely to hold a college degree and are working in a period of unsurpassed…

That any company can operate a store for PC Windows games and apps in UWP format – as Valve, Good Old Games, Epic Games, EA, and Ubi Soft do today with the win32 format, and that Windows will not impede or obstruct these apps stores, relegating them to second-class citizenship.

Here’s a ponderable. About 5 and a half years ago, I took delivery of a bunch of shirts from Randal Schwartz, he of Perl fame. The reason for this (as explained in that entry), was that he was doing a major cleanup of life and he wanted to donate them to charity, and I happened to see his “look at…

During the reign of the emperor Trajan (ca. 100 CE) an inscription was placed on a marble block for those visiting the public Library of Pantaenus to read. The library was itself built by the son of a diadochos (the name for the head of a philosophical school) called Titus Flavius Pantaenus, and…

Most of us have said “I love this book!” at one point or another. However, what we mean by it may differ a great deal. If you are like me, this statement has little to do with how enjoyable a given read is. Instead, it is literally: what a great object I’m holding! The other day I was in Leiden…

RSA 2016 The official RSA phone app exhibitors use to scan delegate badges contains a hardcoded password allowing the vendors to access the full features of the device, says Bluebox Security's Andrew Blaich. Vendors at the San Francisco mega-conference expo hall were handed Android Samsung Galaxy S4…

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Donald Trump , seemingly out of nowhere,…

Nature | Toolbox Sharing A peer-to-peer website aims to disrupt the author-services industry. Jeffrey M. Perkel Article tools PDF Rights & Permissions Illustration by The Project Twins As Sebastian Eggert prepared to submit a conference article, he realized he had a problem: neither he nor his…

Get ready for an onslaught of cooling tower stock art. (Shutterstock) There's a simple, compelling argument that the world ought to be building many more nuclear power plants. We'll need vast amounts of carbon-free energy to stave off global warming. It's not at all clear that renewables can do the…

L ev Landau, a Nobelist and one of the fathers of a great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking theorists, from 1 to 5. A physicist in the first class had ten times the impact of someone in the second class, and so on. He modestly ranked himself as 2.5 until late in life,…

His next "important research challenge" is to create some kind of "intention engine" for Erica, giving it the ability to recognise the conversational intentions of the humans that it observes and talks to. "Today's robots just memorise behaviours and repeat them—it's too simple," says Ishiguro. It's…

Silicon Valley Then and Now: To Invent the Future, You Must Understand the Past

Cameron Bowman / Rutgers University / CityLab The Joseph Kohn Training Center in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is a state-funded facility that teaches vocational skills to the blind and visually impaired. Old wooden maps help students navigate the halls: They are about two feet tall by three feet wide,…

Speer’s Cathedral of Light, Nuremberg, 1937 Features March 2016 Speer’s Cathedral of Light, Nuremberg, 1937 by Michael J. Lewis On the architectural horror of Albert Speer. Share Albert Speer photographed in his cell at Nuremberg, Germany, during the Nuremberg trials, 1945, Gelatin silver…

Why isn’t the popular grocery store Trader Joe’s on social media? TODAY’S consumerism is riddled with elaborate and often meaningless choices: Which brand of pasta should you buy? Would that be best with Ragu, Amy’s Organic, or Muir Glen marinara sauce? Should that be accompanied by Kraft or…

Iraqi engineers involved in building the Mosul dam 30 years ago have warned that the risk of its imminent collapse and the consequent death toll could be even worse than reported. They pointed out that pressure on the dam’s compromised structure was building up rapidly as winter snows melted and…

Eva Hoerth Mar 2, 2016 This article was originally published in March of 2016 So, I Tweeted this video a couple weeks ago: My coworker trying out Leap Motion’s newest software: Orion. Within 2 minutes I got 14 retweets. I was shocked. 14? Good golly; my record prior to that was something like 8. Now…

Some of Europe's earliest inhabitants mysteriously vanished toward the end of the last ice age and were largely replaced by others, a new genetic analysis finds. The finds come from an analysis of dozens of ancient fossil remains collected across Europe. The genetic turnover was likely the result of…

Day laborers waiting for employers at 69th Street and Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. Credit Danny Ghitis for The New York Times Just past sunrise on 69th Street, near a No. 7 subway stop in Queens, men in backpacks and work boots gather in groups, many on their cellphones. They are workers at one of…

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Wednesday invited outside hackers who have been vetted to test the cyber security of some public U.S. Defense Department websites as part of a pilot project next month, the first such program ever by the federal government. “Hack the Pentagon” is modeled…

BSides SF A cheap smart watch often peddled on eBay uses a pairing app for Android or iOS that contains a backdoor that quietly connects to an unknown Chinese IP address. The U8 watch sells for just US$17 and offers a 1.48" touch screen, Bluetooth to connect to either Android or IoS phones and the…

Artist’s impression of a possible ‘quiet supersonic transport’ (Quesst) plane.Photograph: Lockheed Martin Nasa has given the go-ahead for preliminary design of a “low-boom” supersonic passenger plane that could one day fill the gap left by the retirement of the Concorde jet. Nasa’s Commercial…

The ad-subsidized Web is at a crossroads: faced with pressure from social media platform, publishers are accepting ever-more-intrusive ads, which combine with the mounting public concern over privacy and tracking to encourage ad-blocking, which, in turn, makes publishers more desperate and more…

W elcome to robot nursery school,” Pieter Abbeel says as he opens the door to the Robot Learning Lab on the seventh floor of a sleek new building on the northern edge of the UC-Berkeley campus. The lab is chaotic: bikes leaning against the wall, a dozen or so grad students in disorganized cubicles,…

Adnan Sarwar , a former MBA student and current Economist intern, gives prospective MBAs five things to consider Don’t fund yourself In my case it was £24,000 ($33,800), distance learning, over three years. You get books and some tuition, but mostly you are on your own. Students get together to form…

Hint: it’s a glitch. ***** On February 26, The Global Forecast System model recorded an (unconfirmed) intense and wide-ranging carbon monoxide (CO) spike over the US West Coast . A region stretching from British Columbia, through Washington and Oregon, and on over most of California experienced CO…

DEMOCRACY STUDY | 29 de Febrero de 2016 Twitter Menéame Ampliar People during a march organised by the Committee for the Defence of Democracy (KOD), in Warsaw, Poland, 27 February 2016. EFE Berlin, Feb 29 (EFE).- A study by the Germany-based Bertelsmann Foundation notes a global decline in democracy…

Imagine a world without toothbrushes, mouthwash and dental floss. That’s an easy one, right? There would be rotten teeth in every mouth, and rich dentists in every town. The earliest prehistoric human ever found in Africa seemed to confirm as much. In 1921, miners working at Kabwe, or Broken Hill,…

Japanese animated films and anime series are weird. But the release of the classic Ghost in the Shell over 20 years ago drove the genre both upwards by reaching adults, and outwards, reaching the West’s mainstream unlike other previous efforts. It did this while blending sci-fi elements, cyberpunk…

For its most ardent champions, enthusiasm for coding comes close to evangelism. From Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt—“Let’s get the whole world coding!”—and the actor Ashton Kutcher, to the NBA player Chris Bosh and the rap royalty Snoop Dogg —“support tha american dream n make coding…

The Lost Tombs of Oman

Two new scientific papers outlining different approaches to artificial intelligence (AI) have both concluded that reading books is the best way to learn human behavior. “Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents,” from a team at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute…

As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” If a machine is doing its job, reliably and without error, then common sense dictates that you just shouldn’t mess with it. This is doubly true for computers and quadruply true for government computers. This lends itself to an obvious question:…

When Sir Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctica on his ship Endurance, he made sure he had plenty of reading material. But details of precisely what books he took have remained hidden in this photograph - until now. The image from the ill-fated South Pole expedition - taken in early March 1915 by…

A new study published in Nature suggests that the stem cells that allow our organs to grow “know” their own sexual identity, and this influences how they function. These findings could explain why the prevalence of some diseases, such as certain cancers, differs between the sexes. Beyond the obvious…

Song of the jungle Bernd Rohrschneider/FLPA By Brian Owens Gorillas sing and hum when eating, a discovery that could help shed light on how language evolved in early humans. Singing seems to be a way for gorillas to express contentment with their meal, as well as for the head of the family to…