Rats can smell tuberculosis. Dogs can smell cancer. Now they’re being trained to save your life. Emma Young reports. In a small, hot room in a compound located in Tanzania’s lush southern highlands are three white-clad technicians, a glass-and-metal chamber and a large brown rat named Charles. After…

On Friday, January 22, as the first snowflakes of a historic blizzard began piling atop America’s east coast, a team of more than twenty engineers and scientists hauled food, clothes, cots, and mattresses into a building at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The team would…

The largest and most perfectly preserved bronze age wheel ever discovered in the UK, made of oak planks almost 3,000 years ago, has emerged from a site in Cambridgeshire dubbed a Fenland Pompeii. “This site is one continuing surprise, but if you had asked me, a perfectly preserved wheel is the last…

A portrait of Rumphius from his book. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons ) Somewhere in the great southern ocean that stretches south from Java there is a tree that grows straight out of the ocean floor. Its name is Pausengi, and it sits in the axis of the world. A terrible whirlpool surrounds the…

A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders With a Ph.D

NIcolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi «A 22 October meeting attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Italian Prime Minister (PM) Silvio Berlusconi was later described by the Italian's personal adviser on international relations, Valentino…

This piece is part of our series on high impact entrepreneurship. Sign up to our newsletter and we’ll email you with the rest of the series. Summary Until recently, academics lumped ‘entrepreneurs’ together with all the ‘self-employed’. A new paper, however, split the self-employed into those who…

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How you see it sober ~How you see it on ~100µg of LSD About 18 months ago I had a really cool idea: What if we could communicate with people who are high on LSD in such a way that sober people can’t understand?* I call this idea psychedelic cryptography (PsyCrypto for short). The GIFs above do just…

The row between Apple and the FBI over access to a dead murderer's phone should start a debate about government requests for data, says Bill Gates. The FBI wants Apple to unlock an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who killed 14 people in December last year. Apple has resisted the demand saying the…

Intelligence agencies in Germany can now use malware to track computers of people under suspicion. The Trojan will be able to track user chats and conversations on smartphones and PCs. A spokesman for the German interior ministry announced on Monday that the government had approved the usage of…

Update February 29, 2016: EFF has received confirmation that Chelsea Manning received the print-outs we sent directly. However, the U.S. Army has not responded to our correspondence. Update April 13, 2016: The U.S. Army has confirmed in writing to Chelsea Manning that the packets were withheld due…

A lone hacker who duped hundreds of users into downloading a version of Linux with a backdoor installed has revealed how it was done. (Image: file photo) News broke on Saturday that the website of Linux Mint, said to be the third most-popular Linux operating system distribution , had been hacked,…

Published on February 19, 2016 She relaxed in the recliner, her eyes closed, her hands resting lightly in her lap. The psychiatrist’s assistant made small talk while pushing the woman’s hair this way and that, dabbing her head with spots of paste before attaching the 19 electrodes to her scalp. The…

“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War Anyone with experience in extended, unconventional conflict should be able to recognize current patterns in the Bitcoin and digital currency space that resemble subversive activity. Is a game of…

Chris Dixon Feb 21, 2016 The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. There has been a lot of handwringing lately about where we are in the financial cycle. Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and…

Media playback is unsupported on your device The worlds of art and finance seem poles apart, but a new art show is trying to bring them together. The Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London is showcasing the work of three artists who draw their inspiration from the world of big business. Video artist…

An assortment of organic vegetables are seen on display. A growing body of evidence documents how farming methods can influence the nutritional content of foods. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images It's often a split-second decision. You're in the produce aisle, and those organic apples on display look…

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass These, as successive generations bloom New powers acquire and larger limbs assume Whence countless groups of vegetation spring…

A group of Facebook engineers has spent the last two years building satellites, drones, and lasers that can bring Internet access to all those people on Earth who don’t already have it. But none of this will work unless the company can first figure out where those people are . And that requires a…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. I. It was on an all-night Capitol Air flight to Brussels, sitting in the back smoking rows with Leon Festinger, playing endless backgammon and consuming Scotch at an alarming rate, that I…

One of the world's most powerful supercomputers is now being used to forecast weather. Located in Reston, Va. The computer can process quadrillions of calculations per second that all feed into the nation's weather forecasts and predictions. (Photo11: Jasper Colt, USAT) RESTON, Va. — In a…

Nasa For all its real-life benefits and future potential for saving our entire civilisation, space travel is still a long-term effort. Current estimates from Nasa put travel time to Mars for humans at five months, at the absolute best. Slowing down once you're there in order to actually land is even…

Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg The annual battle of tax preparers is nasty, brutish, and short. TurboTax, which dominates online filing, and H&R Block Inc., with 10,000 U.S. locations, have three months to win over taxpayers before this year's April 18…

Georgia Tech researchers have built a robotic arm that attaches to a drummer’s shoulder and plays along. This allows drummers — now equipped with three arms — to play sequences that two-armed humans can’t even attempt. “It’s a richer and more sophisticated rhythm because you can hit one more thing,”…

Saudi men leaving a mosque in Riyadh last year. For decades, the royal family has used the kingdom’s immense oil wealth to lavish benefits on its people, including free education and medical care, generous energy subsidies and well-paid government jobs. Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times…

Stealing the oil from a ship is no mean feat. Oil tankers are enormous, and ships that carry expensive cargo are designed to be difficult to board. Stealing can mean hijacking the original tanker , disabling its tracking devices, taking it to a location where it can’t be spotted, and transferring…

The iCloud account connected to Syed Rizwan Farook’s Apple iPhone 5C was reset in the days following the Dec. 2 terrorist attack in San Bernardino , according to a motion filed Friday by federal prosecutors in U.S. District Court in Riverside and a statement issued by the FBI late Saturday night.…

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Late last night a Twitter account associated with San Bernardino County said that it worked under the direction of the FBI to reset Syed Farook’s iCloud password . Why does that matter? Because it would make the FBI liars. [ Update, February 21st, 12:19pm: The FBI has now released a statement which…

HANDOUT IMAGE: "You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia" by Jack Lynch (credit: Bloomsbury) ***ONE TIME USE ONLY. NOT FOR RESALE (Bloomsbury/Bloomsbury) You might guess that the revered 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the multi-volume Oxford…

From left, Dabney Coleman, Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy in “WarGames” (1983). The film led to the nation’s first directive about computer security. Credit MGM Movies rarely influence public policy, but Washington’s policies on cyberattacks, computer surveillance and the possibility of…

Fertility experts are warning man that using a mobile for as little as an hour a day is "cooking sperm" and lowering level significantly. The new study shows that having a mobile phone close to the testicles - or within a foot or two of the body - can lower sperm levels so much that conceiving could…

There comes a point at which the helpfulness of technology becomes a form of oppression: walled gardens, predictive services making the wrong predictions, and every social platform forcing us to use our real names. It's cute when it's small, but what happens when self-driving cars can collude with…

The video game of Steven Spielberg's ET is considered to be one of the worst of all time and has even been blamed for triggering the collapse of Atari. Howard Scott Warshaw, the gifted programmer who made it, explains how it was rushed out in a matter of weeks - and how he feels about those events…

When Pizza reached 100,000 followers on Tumblr, she posted apicture of a pizza box, takeout chicken wings, and an orange soda spread out onher bed: “ pizza and chicken wings 2 celebrate .” One fan replied,“CONGRATULATIONS GIRL! YOU DESERVE IT!” Another: “MOTHER OF GOD 100K?!?!” Ananonymous user was…