Throughout her career as a neurobiologist, Peggy Mason has been told over and over that the rats she experiment s on a r e not capable of empathy. Only humans and other primates can understand the emotions of another . Most other animals can't. And certainly not beady-eyed rats. But what she was…

Marissa Mayer, the president and C.E.O. of Yahoo, in November. Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty Soon after Marissa Mayer became the C.E.O. of Yahoo, in 2012, she looked up a list of the most popular activities that people did with their phones. Yahoo’s mobile business barely existed at the time,…

Dado Ruvic / Reuters There’s a battle raging over whether academic research should be free, and it’s overflowing into the dark web. Most modern scholarly work remains locked behind paywalls, and unless your computer is on the network of a university with an expensive subscription, you have to pay a…

We’ve all been there: Some jerk cuts you off on the highway. You lean on the horn, scream abuse. You want to get out the car and kick the @#$% out of the bozo’s SUV. Road rage is just one example of what neurobiologist Douglas Fields calls “snapping.” From domestic violence to mass shootings, the…

Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Hong Kong to celebrate the Chinese New Year with a dazzling fireworks display, undeterred by the biggest outbreak of violence in the city since the 2014 pro-democracy uprising. Police were out in force as an estimated 290,000 revelers lined both…

How to name your fictional characters. Characters in need of names. To me the most embarrassing part of writing fiction, aside from telling people about it, is naming your characters. Of course, even “real” names are made up, but in life our names are things we can alter only with a great deal of…

More than three-quarters of children aged 10 to 12 in the UK have social media accounts, even though they are below the age limit, a survey for CBBC Newsround suggests. The study, marking this year's Safer Internet Day, also suggests more than one in five has faced online bullying. The global event…

Americans are generally known for having a positive outlook on life, but with the countdown for November's presidential election now well under way, polls show voters are angry. This may explain the success of non-mainstream candidates such as Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Bernie Sanders. But…

WASHINGTON — SpaceX plans to ramp up the production and launch of its Falcon 9 rocket this year while introducing its Falcon Heavy rocket and completing a key test of its commercial crew vehicle, the company’s president said Feb. 3. “It’s a really interesting year for us,” Gwynne Shotwell said in a…

ON FEBRUARY 5th Twitter, the social network popular among chirping celebrities and journalists, saw the price of its shares fall to a record low. Part of that drop was caused by LinkedIn, a professional social network, which forecast lower growth. That prompted jittery investors to push down…

The history of artificial intelligence has been marked by seemingly revolutionary moments — breakthroughs that promised to bring what had until then been regarded as human-like capabilities to machines. The AI highlights reel includes the “expert systems” of the 1980s and Deep Blue, IBM’s world…

Over the past several years, there’s been a significant increase in the number of people using ad-blocking software in their web browser. We have certainly seen a growth in those numbers here at WIRED, where we do all we can to write vital stories for an audience that’s passionate about the ongoing…

An end-of-semester board-game party in Manhattan for students of the Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics program. BEAM teaches New York City kids from low-income communities to view math as exploration. Erin Patrice O'Brien O n a sultry evening last July, a tall, soft-spoken 17-year-old named David…

Frugal Traveler Cotopaxi Volcano, south of Quito. Credit Tony Cenicola/The New York Times I was not surprised when applause broke out as the pilot touched down at the Quito airport, high in the Ecuadorean Andes. In five and a half years as the Frugal Traveler columnist, I’ve learned that cheering a…

A medieval alchemical book reveals new secrets

While America was getting ready to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, a hacker promised he would dump online a list of more than 20,000 agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and 9,000 Department of Homeland Security officers. Right after the big game's kickoff, the cybercriminal carried out…

When developers at a top U.S. stock exchange needed help debugging a program that puts time stamps on quotes and trades in July, they could have hired a high-profile consulting firm. Instead, they called a customer who runs a company out of a small office in a Chicago suburb who had weeks earlier…

A wild hedgehog in Snettisham, England. Ian S/Flickr Gary Snyder has holes in his garden fence. That's not normally the kind of oversight you'd find in a well-kept British garden in a market town like Chipping Norton, 75 miles northwest of London. But the holes are there for a reason: hedgehogs.…

A new toilet design is being trialled in Ghana which uses no water or electricity and can also create energy.Photograph: Cranfield Water Science Institute Human excrement is rife with pathogens, “odorant volatiles” (the chemicals that make it smell) and parasites, but it has something going for it:…

Psilocybe cubensis ‘Magic Mushrooms’Photograph: Farmer Images/Getty Images/Moment Open Baltimore is known to many as the heroin capital of the US . If William Richards has anything to do with it, it may also become the nation’s most psychedelic city. For the past 15 years, a Johns Hopkins University…

To the computer scientist Leslie Valiant , “machine learning” is redundant. In his opinion, a toddler fumbling with a rubber ball and a deep-learning network classifying cat photos are both learning; calling the latter system a “machine” is a distinction without a difference. Quanta Magazine About…

Files released following the hacking of the country’s biggest police union show guarantees of secrecy over disciplinary records, a Guardian analysis finds.Photograph: Alamy Contracts between police and city authorities, leaked after hackers breached the website of the country’s biggest law…

Banks are watching wealthy clients flirt with robo-advisers, and that’s one reason the lenders are racing to release their own versions of the automated investing technology this year, according to a consultant. Millennials and small investors aren’t the only ones using robo-advisers, a group that…

As the use of drones increasingly worries everyone from firefighters and air traffic control to law enforcement, Netherlands’ national police have aligned themselves with a group that hates flying robots on principle: the bald eagle. Dutch police have joined forces with Guard From Above, a…

Ben Lecomte has swum across the Atlantic Ocean, and now he aims to traverse the Pacific, which will take him five or six months. Bongani Mlambo/The Longest Swim Any day now, Ben Lecomte will plunge into the Pacific Ocean off a Tokyo beach toward San Francisco. He wants to become the first person to…

Huddled in a coffee shop one drizzly Seattle morning six years ago, the astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman stared blankly at his laptop screen, paralyzed. He had been running a simulation of an evolving planet, when suddenly oxygen started accumulating in the virtual planet’s atmosphere. Up the…

Asa Mathat | D: All Things Digital Tesla CEO Elon Musk is toying with the idea of building an electric jet. During the award ceremony of Musk's Hyperloop Contest last week, he said he is tempted to build one. "I have been thinking about the vertical take off and landing electric jet a bit more,"…

Spotify is up against myriad challenges: widespread complaints about unfair artist payouts, accusations of higher payouts for major labels who cut special deals, two class action lawsuits around copyright infringement, plus the small detail of failing to turn a profit . Now it has another problem to…

CRAIG & KARL Yesterday, the 46-year-old Google veteran who oversees the company’s search engine, Amit Singhal, announced his retirement. And in short order, Google revealed that Singhal’s rather enormous shoes would be filled by a man named John Giannandrea. On one level, these are just two guys…

France to pave 1,000km of road with solar panels 26 January 2016 | By David Rogers Ségolène Royal, France’s minister of ecology and energy, has said that the government intends to pave 1,000km of road with photovoltaic panels in the next five years, supplying power to millions of people. The…

Witch Marks, Curses, and Magic in the Neglected History of Medieval Graffiti

Share We explore the world of game development in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ruan Gates, a third-year game design student at Witwatersrand University, is lost in the dirt roads of Johannesburg. He’s trying to make it back to campus, where Wits is hosting a presentation on mobile game design. His…

If there was a way to hack love, would you try it? The New York Times published an article titled “No. 37: Big Wedding Or Small?” The article presented a quiz comprised of 36 questions that supposedly lead to love–or, at least, an accelerated feeling of intimacy between strangers. The idea was that…

Laura Poitras has a talent for disappearing. In her early documentaries like My Country, My Country and The Oath , her camera seems to float invisibly in rooms where subjects carry on intimate conversations as if they’re not being observed. Even in Citizenfour , the Oscar-winning film that tracks…

Nafkot Nega thinks journalists are terrorists. When I visited him and his mother, Serkalem Fassil, at their tiny apartment in the outskirts of Washington, DC, in early January, 9-year-old Nafkot intermittently murmured and jabbed his hands, pretending to be a superhero fighting criminals. Perhaps…

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Could we soon be carrying all of our medical and financial information on a tattoo? Software company Chaotic Moon has developed a “tech tattoo” that gets embedded into a person’s arm and can track a person’s financial and medical information. Eric Schneider, the company’s…

Say you’re the newly elected president of the United States, and you want to make prosecuting corporate crime a top priority. Where do you start? Here would be good. A new group called Bank Whistleblowers United have just pushed out a comprehensive plan they think would put the executive branch back…

With election fever sweeping the U.S., the issue of campaign donations is as contentious as ever. One thing is always true in U.S. politics: “no money, no campaign,” so the search for new and bigger sources of income is hugely important for all candidates. One relatively neglected angle in the…