When the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) announced the upcoming launch of their NROL-39 mission back in December 2013, they didn’t get quite the response they had hoped. Ready for launch? An Atlas 5 will blast off at just past 11PM, PST carrying an classified NRO payload (also cubesats)…

Is France's unloved AZERTY keyboard heading for the scrapheap? France's 100 year-old AZERTY keyboard - the equivalent of the English-language QWERTY - is to be reconfigured after the government ruled that it encourages bad writing. The AZERTY set-up has infuriated generations of writers, because of…

(Amy King/The Washington Post; iStock) Years ago, my mother complained about a terrible earache. The pain was unbearable. And it wouldn't go away — for a week, she walked around with a debilitating ringing in her head. Eventually, she recalled to me the other day, the discomfort led her to a doctor,…

Microchip Technology agreed to acquire a fellow chipmaker, the Atmel Corporation, for about $3.6 billion, part of a wave of mergers and acquisitions within the semiconductor industry. Chip makers have been combining to cut costs and build scale for their customers. Microchip agreed to acquire the…

Advertisement Photo: EXA Ronnie Nader is practically a one-man space program. Nader, a systems engineer and Ecuador’s only astronaut candidate, completed four years of cosmonaut training in Moscow in 2007, subsequently helped establish Ecuador’s own “vomit comet” zero-gravity training program , and…

(Story originally created Nov. 10, 2014) NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- A traffic stop along Interstate 40 is raising new questions about your constitutional rights. Among the questions: what happens to your right to say "no" to a search when police are looking for cash? The traffic stop occurred west of…

SWITZERLAND: Testing of freight rolling stock in the 57 km Gotthard Base Tunnel began on January 16, when project promoter AlpTransit Gotthard and SBB Cargo undertook trials with a variety of wagon types including two rolling motorway lorry-carrying vehicles. Further tests over the coming weeks will…

From the February 2016 issue of Inc. magazine

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does…

Wartime pressure on the Islamic State is forcing it to slash its fighters' salaries by half, according to documents leaked from inside ISIS territory. ISIS might seem like a ragtag group of terrorists, but in reality, it operates as a government over parts of Iraq and Syria. And it hands out…

Mummies Around the World—Dried, Smoked, or Thrown in a Bog

Economic Scene Mary Tyler Moore in “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Though the Internet and video games were not yet invented, life over all in the 1960s did not look that different. Credit The Hudson River Museum Take a look back at some of the most popular TV programs of the mid-1960s — “The Dick Van…

Plantain sellers, fruit vendors and market stalls line the road as taxis and local tro tro buses dart through the busy high street. The lively centre of Koforidua, hemmed in by lush green mountains, appears to be the typical Ghanaian city. A short drive outside town, atop the roof of the All Nations…

The National Measurement Institute, the agency tasked with monitoring lamb chop portions, has applied to the attorney general, George Brandis, seeking access to Australians’ telecommunications metadata.Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP If you are in the business of selling lamb chops, make sure you are…

I am standing a few feet away from a conference table, about to test something called a “Holojam.” It is made of head-mounted displays, motion capture cameras and many lines of code. Affixed to the edges of the table, as well as to my hands and ankles, are little plastic balls, which are used to…

Adblock Plus, an adblocker with some 400 million downloads and counting, has been blocked from attending the Interactive Advertising Bureau's big annual conference. The IAB is the online advertising industry's main business organisation, and the conference is where all of the top dogs go to talk…

Launching an Apple TV App: What we’ve Learned so Far ByDavid Mytton, CEO & Founder of Server Density . Published on the 7th January, 2016. Share on Twitter Share on Reddit Share on Reddit Think the Apple TV belongs in the living room? Think again. Since 2007, when it launched alongside the first…

In this file photograph, Sacks of cobalt are washed at a mine near Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Photographer: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images Photographer: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images Chinese companies that buy cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo and supply…

Eric Thayer / Reuters For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.* Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and…

The most important thing for humanity to do right now is to invent true artificial intelligence (AI): machines or software that can think and act independently in a wide variety of situations. Once we have artificial intelligence, it can help us solve all manner of other problems. Luckily, thousands…

Did the European Court of Human Rights Just Outlaw “Massive Monitoring of Communications” in Europe? European Union Internet Architecture Security & Surveillance Written by Sarah St.Vincent Over the past two years, a trio of high-profile cases before the European Court of Human Rights that concern…

No, this isn't a make-believe place. It's real. They call it "Ball's Pyramid." It's what's left of an old volcano that emerged from the sea about 7 million years ago. A British naval officer named Ball was the first European to see it in 1788. It sits off Australia, in the South Pacific. It is…

Top 30 books ranked by total number of links to Amazon in Hacker News comments Click on a thumbnail image or bar to show the book details. Amazon product links were extracted and counted from 8.3M comments posted on Hacker News from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015. Data: Hacker News API via Google BigQuery…

A boy fishes in polluted Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro in August 2015. The bay will be the sailing venue for the Olympic Games this summer. Brazil is facing concerns over polluted water, mass transportation and budget issues as it prepares for the games. Mario Tama/Getty Images Instead of the…

Emma Hutchings In Brief Starman gets his own constellation: Seven stars, in the vicinity of Mars DDB Brussels has detailed a fitting tribute by the Belgian music station Studio Brussels and MIRA Public Observatory for the late rock star David Bowie. As the music legend responsible for popular hits…

IBM engineer Joshua Carr and his BB-8. Screenshot/IBM Joshua Carr, a lead engineer at IBM, decided to take Sphero's excellent "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" BB-8 app-powered droid and take it a step further with the ability to control it with his mind. It's just as Jedi as it sounds. To make it…

Update, January 15: Our configuration has been updated; the walkthrough now notes that you can use Unix sockets for HiddenServicePort . There’s a new way to browse our website more securely and anonymously. To do it, you’ll need a bit of software called the Tor Browser . Once you’ve got it…

Photo: Adam Voorhes; Prop Stylist: Robin Finlay Hugh Herr is a living exemplar of the maxim that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. At the age of 17, Herr was already an accomplished mountaineer, but during an ice-climbing expedition he lost his way in a blizzard and was stranded on…

By the mid-1950s the years of Orson Welles scrambling this way and that for some money to finance his cinematic and theatrical efforts were well underway. He hadn’t yet descended to the level of semi-literate frozen pea voiceovers , but he had begun his years defined by the endless process of trying…

Microsoft has long said it would match AWS’s prices for compute, storage and bandwidth. Earlier this month, Amazon dropped the price of some of its general purpose, compute- and memory-optimized EC2 machines. It doesn’t come as a major surprise then that Microsoft is now also dropping the prices for…

Credit Photo illustration by Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times. Lettering: Luke Lucas. Prop stylist: Maeve Sheridan. Feature A new approach to self-improvement is taking off in Silicon Valley: cold, hard rationality. Credit Photo illustration by Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times.…

W e recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David , Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks we can. And should. In his new book A Beautiful Question:…

There’s a pony in there somewhere, and its name is Tumblr Mark Coatney Jan 13, 2016 T he short answer is, no, of course, nothing can save Yahoo. A year from now things will certainly look very different in Sunnyvale. The longer answer is, there’s a good media company here, with a lot of great assets…