The primary version of identity online is a radical departure from what we expect in real life Should you have to use your real name online? It's an issue that's long simmered among social media critics and supporters alike. On one end of the spectrum, there's 4chan, where everything is anonymous.…

The fire that crippled a sewage treatment plant broke out in the blower and pump engine room melting some controls. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times All around Stephen Askew was raw sewage, eight feet deep, flooding a crippled waste-treatment plant in Harlem. But Mr. Askew never had a choice; he…

News For a hormone, oxytocin is pretty famous. It’s the “cuddle chemical”—the hormone that helps mothers bond with their babies. Salespeople can buy oxytocin spray on the internet, to make their clients trust them. It’s known for promoting positive feelings, but more recent research has found that…

Lady Susan Greenfield's suggestion that the rise in autism may be linked to increased internet use has sparked controversy. Photograph: Marco Secchi/Getty Images Controversy has erupted over comments made by the leading neuroscientist Lady Susan Greenfield suggesting links between the increase in…

Norwegian v American justice COMMENTING on a shared link to a Time slideshow offering a tour of Norway's Halden prison, the "world's most human prison", one of my Facebook friends says, "If you prefer comfort to liberty, go to Norway and commit murder. You could get 21 years in what looks like a…

"A Twee Grows In Brooklyn." @adrjeffries @NewYorkObserver on borough's Portlandification v @brooklynpeach

Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong. In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s , during the early days of computing, when men…

It appears to be Pick On News Web Designers Day today. This comic — poking at news sites’ unwillingness to link, misuse of thumbnails, and addictions to share buttons, among other things — made the rounds of Twitter, to the point of crashing cartoonist Brad Colbow’s site. But even more talked about,…

Andy Rutledge published a fascinating blog post last week looking at the design of digital news , and to illustrate his points he did a redux of the New York Times design. This post isn’t going to make much sense unless you’ve read that - so go and do that first . You back? Excellent, then I’ll…

By Michael Brooks An ambitious experiment to make a glass sphere exist in two places at once could provide the most sensitive test of quantum theory yet. The experiment will place a sphere containing millions of atoms – making it larger than many viruses – into a superposition of states in different…

How does someone become a technologist? In my case, it happened in college. I was an undergraduate at Columbia University, reading and discussing what were once unrepentantly called "the classics." I really wanted to understand what the great thinkers thought about the great questions of life, the…

Jessica Helfand Graphic Designer / United States / Winterhouse Profile Books By Book List Et Al. Jessica Helfand’s Book List I mostly read non-fiction, only a fraction of which is design-related. I tend to get more out of reading non-design-related things (as this list will reveal), I think, because…

'Dogs are specialists in love' ... a boxer at Crufts dog show, 2011. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images I f you were a dog just over 100 years ago, life would have been simple. You would likely have been gainfully employed – perhaps hunting, herding or guarding – and provided you did your job, your…

Earlier tonight I was informed of an article written by Dylan Lathrop for GOOD magazine which was essentially accusing the design community of being sexist against women . This has to be the most asinine thing I’ve read in very long time. First off, the whole article is based around attacking three…

Back in 2009, Chris Anderson posted this chart, showing how Netflix’s consumers were embracing the long tail of its offerings. As the number of movies in Netflix’s library grew from 4,500 to 18,000, the top 500 movies in the library went from constituting more than 70% of demand to less than 50% of…

PROVIDENCE, R.I. IN terms of perception, these are hard times for antidepressants . A number of articles have suggested that the drugs are no more effective than placebos. Last month brought an especially high-profile debunking. In an essay in The New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell, former…

Kris Chau T he men in my family love drugs. They love their meths and their cocaines (both cracked and uncracked), they love their pots and their heroins. They have deep and committed relationships with their drugs. I have always had a deep, committed, and loving relationship with my teeth, so I…

The UX field is booming. It seems like the number of user experience practitioners has doubled in the last year — from newbies who’ve just entered the workforce, to mid-career changes, to folks who’ve been doing this all along but finally found out what to call themselves. It’s incredibly reassuring…

Readings is a super slick site that lets you follow news from any publisher or author and read it in style. At first glance, it’s sort of like Facebook meets Google Reader, but it looks much better than either one. The basic concept is that you can choose to follow a publisher, like The Next Web ,…

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