The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold by Tim Wu Atlantic, 416 pp, £20.00, January 2017, ISBN 978 1 78239 482 2 Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine by Antonio García Martínez Ebury, 528 pp, £8.99, June…

The Cassini probe has begun the final phase of its mission to Saturn. The satellite has executed the first of five ultra-close passes of the giant world, dipping down far enough to brush through the top of the atmosphere. It promises unprecedented data on the chemical composition of Saturn. It also…

The war between Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. Will Chang Jul 31, 2017 Dear amazing friends, thank you for your overwhelming support! If you enjoyed this email, please forward over to friends that will find it interesting as well. Most of the content of this email is sourced or inspired by a…

“I’ll just open the hatch…” says Richard Smith, who is stooped over in the ticket office at the Monument. He’s examining the oak-panelled floor as though it’s hiding a secret chamber, as in an Indiana Jones movie. Above him, a desk is piled high with leaflets “ This is to certify that ________ has…

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we…

REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein When the Federal Communications Commission went looking this year for experts to sit on an advisory committee regarding deployment of high-speed internet, Gary Carter thought he would be a logical choice. Carter works for the city of Santa Monica, California, where he…

This story is featured in BBC Future’s “Best of 2017” collection. Discover more of our picks . In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines…

W ith his marriage to Norma Levor over, Claude Shannon was a bachelor again, with no attachments, a small Greenwich Village apartment, and a demanding job. His evenings were mostly his own, and if there’s a moment in Shannon’s life when he was at his most freewheeling, this was it. He kept odd…

In a mind-boggling world first, a team of biologists and security researchers have successfully infected a computer with a malicious program coded into a strand of DNA. It sounds like science fiction, but I assure you it’s quite real — although you probably don’t have to worry about this particular…

You’ve probably seen the Watson commercials, where what looks like a sentient box interacts with celebrities like Bob Dylan , Carrie Fisher , and Serena Williams ; or doctors ; or a young cancer survivor. Maybe you caught the IBM artificial intelligence technology’s appearance in H&R Block’s Super…

H igh up in Washington’s Cascade Range, snow feeds the creeks that descend toward the coast, flowing intermittently in summer and gaining strength again the following spring as they coalesce into the Cedar, Snohomish, and Stillaguamish rivers that dump into Puget Sound. These mountainous creeks have…

Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart Income Growth Over previous 34 years But now, the very affluent (the 99.999th percentile) see the largest income growth. +6% 5% The poor and middle class used to see the largest income growth. 99.99th percentile 4% 3% In 1980 99th percentile 2% In 2014 1% 99th…

Why are C.E.O.s and military leaders paying novelists to imagine the future for them? Illustration by Mark Pernice About five years ago, Ari Popper enrolled in a course on science-fictionwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles, hoping to distracthimself from the boredom of his day job…

In a surreal landscape of colours, dominated by luminescent ponds of yellows and greens, boiling hot water bubbles up like a cauldron, whilst poisonous chlorine and sulphur gases choke the air. Known as the “gateway to hell”, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is scorchingly hot and one of the most…

Max Hawkins' randomizer app sent him to the Czech Point Restaurant and Pub in Clutier, Iowa, among the many places he may never have found on his own. Courtesy of Max Hawkins This week, the podcast and show Invisibilia examines the nature of reality, with a Silicon Valley techie who created apps to…

Reputation: Dung beetles roll across the African savannah with big balls of, well, dung. The ancient Egyptians were really into them, for some reason. Reality: From South America to South Africa, the UK to the USA, they will be there. Not only are dung beetles a diverse and multifaceted group of…

Four plainclothes officials from China’s Market Supervision Bureau emerged from a van and headed toward an unmarked concrete building in an industrial park in Changzhou, a hundred miles northeast of Shanghai. Azim Uribe, a 30-year-old solidly built American, strolled behind them, wearing dark…

Perspective from the inside Bill Binney Playlists:'SHA2017' videos starting here/audio/related events 59 min 2017-08-04 2017-08-05 16975 c3voc.de Bill Binney will talk about his experiences as Technical Director at the NSA where he had a 34 yr career. #Society #Privacy #SurveillanceState Download…

Parker Brothers/Marvel The limits of technology in the early days of gaming meant that many were downright abstract in their visuals and story. The player’s imagination was left filling in the gaps, whether it was seeing a blocky duck as a fearsome dragon or believing that you were tasked with…

In 2013, Peter Hollens was an aspiring a cappella singer surviving, in his words, by living on ramen in someone else’s house. Hollens was hardly new to the music business; he’d been a record producer and cruise singer before striking out on his own, and his wife Evynne co-founded the college a…

This blog has moved! This post and other mistakes are now at https://mango.pdf.zone Hello and welcome to a blog post. I am writing it and you are reading it. It’s amazing what we can do with computers these days. Several months ago I’m at a ramen place with my friend Diana. Diana isn’t her real…

Two German researchers say they have exposed the porn-browsing habits of a judge, a cyber-crime investigation and the drug preferences of a politician. The pair obtained huge amounts of information about the browsing habits of three million German citizens from companies that gather "clickstreams".…

A video shows gene-editing chemicals being injected into a human egg at the moment of fertilization. Scientists used the technique to correct DNA errors present in the father’s sperm. The first known attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos in the United States has been carried out by…

Sarah Laskow | Topic | July 2017 | 14 minutes (3,700 words) This story is co-funded by Longreads Members and published in collaboration with Topic, which publishes an original story, every other week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now. Sarah Laskow’s story is part of Topic’s State of the Union…

In June 2016, Antoine Balaresque, the cofounder and CEO of the hot new startup Lily Robotics, stood before a room of business students at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, ready to reveal the PowerPoint slides that had made him an instant startup celebrity. Wearing the ubiquitous Silicon Valley…

Even though there’s no air blowing around in the vacuum of space, the cosmos can be a pretty windy place. Winds made of gas particles whip around galaxies at high speeds, ranging from hundreds to thousands of kilometers per second. Astronomers suspect they’re created when nearby stars explode and…

Microsoft announced something very impressive last week: revenue for the company’s 2017 fiscal year (which ended June 30) increased 5% year-over-year. That may not seem particularly meaningful until you realize 2016 was only the second year in the company’s history that revenue declined; the first…

origins of life First Support for a Physics Theory of Life By Natalie Wolchover July 26, 2017 Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing. Shayla Fish for Quanta…

The story of how one metric has changed the way you see the world Tobias Rose-Stockwell Jul 14, 2017 The world feels more dangerous. Our streets seem less safe. The assault on our values is constant. The threats feel real. The enemy is out there — just check your feed. O ne evening in late October…

Posted on July 25th, 2017 by Caption: Child watches video while researchers track his eye movements. Credit: Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis From the time we are born, most of us humans closely watch the world around us, paying special attention to people’s faces and expressions.…

Teenagers caught carrying out hacking and cyber-attacks could soon be attending a rehab camp that aims to divert them away from a life of crime. The first weekend camp for offenders was held in Bristol this month as part of the National Crime Agency's (NCA) work with young computer criminals.…

Agents that imagine and plan Imagining the consequences of your actions before you take them is a powerful tool of human cognition. When placing a glass on the edge of a table, for example, we will likely pause to consider how stable it is and whether it might fall. On the basis of that imagined…

In 2005, British student Alex Tew had a million-dollar idea. He launched www.MillionDollarHomepage.com , a website that presented initial visitors with nothing but a 1000×1000 canvas of blank pixels. At the cost of $1/pixel, visitors could permanently claim 10×10 blocks of pixels and populate them…

I realized that my sixth sense was failing when I stopped noticing the magnetic fields of my laptop. In fall 2012, I implanted a rare earth magnet in my right ring finger. Magnets were one of the most accessible forms of DIY biohacking, a niche subculture riding the start of a massive mainstream…

"The goats are kind of cool," says former inmate Chad Redding. "The females are like dogs — they just want your attention." Dan Charles/NPR Jim Schott had one goal when he abandoned academic life to start the company called Haystack Mountain : He wanted to make some of the finest goat cheese in the…

The Elements of Spy-le: Lessons from the CIA’s classified guide to good writing

By Brendan Borrell Photographs by Anand Varma This story appears in the July 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine. In pursuit of the world’s smallest bird , we’ve come to the backyard of a flamingo pink house in Palpite, Cuba. Ornithologist Christopher Clark has a car full of gear to unload:…

Stonehenge is one the UK’s most visited tourist attractions – and one of the world’s most enigmatic ancient monuments. People come from all over the world to stare at the iconic stone pillars and wonder how, and why, they were put in place. The site may be instantly recognisable, but there is far…