Ev ery cook knows the way that fresh herbs can lift the flavor of a dish. But have you ever thought about why herbs have the flavors they do—why they don’t just taste like any other green leaf? Or, for that matter, why green leaves taste the way they do? The answers can help you understand how to…

A warning has been issued by police after the discovery of an iPod skimming device fitted to a cash machine. Police in Radcliffe, Bury , are urging the public to remain vigilant when using ATMs and report any suspicions about possible scam devices. The device found is understood to be a converted…

MAYFIELD VILLAGE, Ohio—In a lab at Progressive Corp.’s suburban headquarters, managers and technicians at the auto-insurance giant watch a colleague drive from his home outside Cleveland to the city zoo. A dot on a computer screen moves along a map overlaid with speed limits, turning red when the…

SilverPush is an Indian startup that's trying to figure out all the different computing devices you own. It embeds inaudible sounds into the webpages you read and the television commercials you watch. Software secretly embedded in your computers, tablets, and smartphones pick up the signals, and…

The familiar aroma of tempered spices and caramelised onions begins to emerge at noon from the Spice Rouge curry house on Stevenage high street, a full six to seven hours before the evening rush begins. The white-tiled kitchen, with food hygiene edicts taped to the walls, is cosy: barely big enough…

Much to the disappointment of space nerds everywhere, man has not stepped foot on the Moon in more than 40 years. Governments have sent expensive robots and satellites to our nearest celestial neighbor, but the Moon remains woefully under-explored. That's why Google and the X Prize foundation teamed…

As the 2016 election starts for real next month, one complaint that unites Americans left and right—and helps to explain the rise of outsiders like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—is that our political process has become shallow and scripted, manipulated at every turn. We gripe about the suffocating…

A critical bug on eBay's website opened the door for malicious hackers to create fake login pages to steal passwords and harvest credentials. An independent security researcher found the flaw in early December, and reported it to eBay on December 11. After an initial response asking for more…

What is the “Real Face of the Yakuza” Seen after Spending Half a year with Them?

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has advised clients to brace for a "cataclysmic year" and a global deflationary crisis, warning that the major stock markets could fall by a fifth and oil may reach $US16 a barrel. The bank's credit team said markets are flashing the same stress alerts as they did…

Dan Dzula first heard Connie Converse’s music on NPR in 2004. It was an amateur recording, taken in someone’s kitchen, but he felt an intense emotional connection to the woman behind the song. It was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before. “I had a very instant read on it,” Dzula remembers.…

India continues to invest in mining despite a coal surplus. Credit Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg Chile is expanding its largest open-pit copper mine below the northern desert to dig up 1.7 billion additional tons of minerals, even as metal prices plummet around the globe. India is building railroad lines…

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Opinion The Joy of Psyching Myself Out­ Credit Guillaume Chauchat IS it possible to think scientifically and creatively at once? Can you be both a psychologist and a writer? When you look at the world as a psychologist, you see it as a set of phenomena that can be subjected to scientific inquiry:…

Fresno Chief of Police Jerry Dyer inside the Fresno Police Department's crime center. (Nick Otto/For The Washington Post) FRESNO, Calif. — While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the…

Like what? Signal and Mumble . So I'm getting set up with all these new tools because the way that the community talks to itself is through private channels. I think it's a good thing for me to get up to speed, though I'm not so sure that in my non-Tor life I will use private communications. But I'm…

Imagine getting a call from your company's IT department telling you your workstation has been compromised and you should stop what you're doing immediately. You're stumped: You went through the company's security training and you're sure you didn't open any suspicious email attachments or click on…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Students at the University of California at Berkeley. Jim Wilson/The New York Times The history of Western philosophy can be presented in a number of ways. It can be told in terms of periods —…

REUTERS/Keith Bedford The Latest Battle Over When and Where Kids Can Walk to School Aarian Marshall Jan 8, 2016 A new amendment tackles the muddled question of kids traveling by themselves. A provision tucked deep within a gargantuan education bill passed in December clarifies the murky legal…

Economist Joe Stiglitz warned back in 2010 that the world risked sliding into a "Great Malaise." This week, he followed up on that grim prediction, saying, "We didn't do what was needed, and we have ended up precisely where I feared we would." The problems we face now, Stiglitz points out, include…

It's been called "toilet-to-tap" – much to the chagrin of water experts and managers. In some parts of the world, the wastewater that flows down the drain – yes, including toilet flushes – is now being filtered and treated until it's as pure as spring water, if not more so. It might not sound…

The most fascinating images from the New York Public Library’s release of 180,000 copyright-free materials

Shutterstock / Fotolia / Paul Spella / The Atlantic It would probably be fair to call Henry “aimless.” After he graduated from Harvard, he moved back in with his parents, a boomerang kid straight out of a trend piece about the travails of young adults. Despite graduating into a recession, Henry…

Say That Again from the you're-not-helping dept I kinda feel bad for the PR people at T-Mobile. This morning, CEO John Legere put out a completely bullshit statement pretending to respond to the accusations that its BingeOn program is throttling online video. It didn't address the actual issues,…

(Photo: European Pressphoto Agency) For years, insurance companies have used estimates of your annual mileage to determine your car insurance rates. But with recent changes in technology, insurers now have an unprecedented ability to judge your actual driving habits. Armed with detailed data on how…

52 Places to Go in 2016

It's a boss's worst nightmare. You return from a trip to find that hundreds of thousands of dollars has been transferred out of company accounts - apparently at your instruction. But you have no idea what your accountant is talking about - you didn't give any instructions. This is what happened to…

Nature | News Sharing Densely packed stars might allow civilizations to survive for many billions of years. Alexandra Witze Kissimmee, Florida Article tools Rights & Permissions Judy Schmidt/ESA/NASA Globular clusters such as Terzan 1 (shown here) contain some of the oldest known stars. Astronomers…

Encrypting all HTTP traffic has long been considered a key security goal, but there have been two key obstacles to this. First, certificates are not free and many owners are unwilling to pay; secondly the certificates themselves are not always something that could be set up by a site owner. The…

Scientists from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment in Tübingen and from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt examined the demise of the giant ape Gigantopithecus . In their study, published recently in the scientific journal "Quaternary International," they…

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BOOKS THAT DO NOT EXIST

“WHO could possibly be against this?”, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, asked in an editorial in the Times of India on December 28th. The “this” in question is “Free Basics”, a programme that gives its users free access to Facebook and a handful of other online services on their smartphones in 36…

FBI Turns 18-Year-Old With An IQ Of 51 Into A Terrorist; Dumps Case Into Laps Of Local Prosecutors

Dead Men’s Eyes: A History of Optography

According to the plan we published earlier for deprecating SHA-1 , on January 1, 2016, Firefox 43 began rejecting new certificates signed with the SHA-1 digest algorithm. For Firefox users with unfiltered access to the Internet, this change probably went unnoticed, since there simply aren’t that…

Getty Images New-generation alarm systems that send real-time text alerts and other digital notifications if an intruder tries to breach a property offer homeowners a great sense of security. Except when thieves can easily undermine the system to trick homeowners into thinking they’re protected when…