So let’s get one thing out of the way: it’s probably safe to say that Marvel and Netflix’s Daredevil is the finest piece of television ever made in the superhero genre. With its stellar cast and consistently tight writing and direction, the show can easily go toe-to-toe with any other major…

Photo: Mike Kemp The exposure of one of the biggest scientific frauds in recent memory didn’t start with concerns about normally distributed data, or the test-retest reliability of feelings thermometers, or anonymous Stata output on shady message boards, or any of the other statistically complex…

(Photo: Photick/shutterstock.com ) In 1961, when a KGB counterintelligence officer showed up at a CIA station in Helsinki, Jeanne Vertefeuille held the keys to the office safe. "Responsibility for office funds was part of my normal administrative duties," the former CIA officer writes in Circle of…

Illustrations by Joel Benjamin Does the truth really set you free, or does itonly fuck you up? This is what I'm wondering as my psychiatrist and I continueto adjust my meds, looking for the right combination to keep an existentialdoom from eclipsing me. Simultaneously, I'm working with a…

‘The only possible explanation for her loss of sight was functional blindness, caused by stress.’ Photographs: Liz McBurney I was a junior doctor when I encountered Yvonne. She was 40 and worked in a supermarket. One Tuesday she was reorganising produce in a refrigerated unit while a colleague…

Illustration by Daniel Fishel for BuzzFeed News “Success in sight: The eyes have it!” Thus the scientific journal Gene Therapy greeted the news, in 2008, that an experimental treatment was restoring vision to 12 people born with a congenital disorder that slowly left them blind. Healthy genes were…

Some of the following people are well worth remembering for their great achievements, and the way they did them; others are not. But all were well known in their time and exercised undue influence. I have already described the parallel cases of Ernst Mayr and Huey Newton, while Bill Drury was the…

Photo by Vecchio/Getty A man and a woman walk into a doctor's office. All things equal —symptoms and tests included—the female patient is twice as likely as her male counterpart to walk out with a diagnosis of depression . She's also more than twice as likely to be prescribed a drug and, if that…

Hersey Lelaind knew he was in trouble — just not how much trouble. He and a housemate had been on a drive, and Lelaind had been smoking pot. When they returned to their home in Vacaville, California, the sheriff’s department was waiting. “We pull into the driveway. They draw down guns on us and tell…

Apr 24, 2015 · 159,136 views Color photo of the emir of Bukhara; Sergey Prokudin Gorsky, 1911 At a very, very basic level, this is how common photographic film works: film is thin plastic covered in a layer or layers of photosensitive chemicals. When exposed to a very small amount of light — like…

Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond. But…

Magnum Photos Newcastle Beach, New South Wales, Australia, 2000; photograph by Trent Parke 1. Nothing is more crucial to the survival and independence of organisms—be they elephants or protozoa—than the maintenance of a constant internal environment. Claude Bernard, the great French physiologist,…

Learning My Lesson Marina Warner on the disfiguring of higher education The first time I suggested an exercise to a roomful of creative writing students, something on the lines of ‘We’ve been reading Elizabeth Bowen, now think of a house where you were happy, but you no longer live there. Write…

Holm, a parish on Mainland, Orkney. seligr / Via Flickr: seligr Legend has it that, in 1588, a Spanish galleon sank off the coast of Westray, one of Scotland’s Orkney islands, and that the sailors who weren’t dashed on the rocky spires were welcomed by the locals. Today Westrayans with dark hair or…

Allen Brenzel, a child psychiatrist in Lexington, Ky., can point to the moment he knew his state had a drug problem. A few years ago, Brenzel was working as a consultant for a residential treatment facility for kids under state custody. During his time there, he became acutely aware that many of the…

I am an engineer, and I am a writer. As an engineer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how text is stored, but relatively little about what information the text actually represents. To the computer, text is an abstract entity – a stream of 0s and 1s, and any semantic meaning is in the eye of the…

When Jen Lacey gets her toes done, she does both feet, even though one of them is made of rubber. “I always paint my toenails,” she says, “because it’s cute, and I want to be as regular as possible.” But for a long time, even with the painted toes, her prosthetic foot looked ridiculous. The rubber…

The software platform could be great for medicine, but it has some growing up to do Apple's ResearchKit sounds promising, in theory: the software platform is designed to let medical researchers create iPhone apps for their studies that will help them recruit participants — without said participants…

Hearing “medical model” being used used pejoratively is quite tiresome. I have heard it used that way for the past thirty years, usually to take a shot at psychiatrists. I thought I would illustrate how this goes and what I disagree with by responding to a recent article authored the British…

M y mental health file whirs to life in 1969 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’d recently left Opus Dei, the Catholic religious order to which I’d committed my young soul, and a major depression had followed. The records printed below are out of the mouths of my many caretakers; they chronicle my…

The Austerity Con Simon Wren-Lewis ‘The government cannot go on living beyond its means.’ This seems common sense, so when someone puts forward the view that just now austerity is harmful, and should wait until times are better, it appears fanciful and too good to be true. Why would the government…

A MERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National…

The first time I saw my wife walking around the Georgetown campus I shouted out “” like a buffoon. She was Italian, radiant, way out of my league, but I was fearless and almost immediately in love. We lived in the same freshman dorm. She had a smile — I learned some Italian immediately to impress…

Language-based snobbery litters the software industry. As far back as 1991, the derisive term “ toy language ” was being applied to the Pascal language despite its substantial industrial use. We’ve heard computer science PhDs explain they were embarrassed to know Python “because it’s a language for…

Trigger warning for sexual abuse, stalking, rape, domestic violence and large-scale attacks by hate groups. Last Thursday, I criticized the Linux community for continuing to support and center a leader with a years-long, documented history of unrepentant abusive behavior, someone who has actively…

Home CBR News ERASING WOMEN: The Importance of "Agent Carter" to Comic Culture ERASING WOMEN: The Importance of "Agent Carter" to Comic Culture Tue, January 13th, 2015 at 9:58am PST | Updated: January 13th, 2015 at 10:17am Comic Books Josie Campbell, Staff Writer Print On Jan. 6, approximately 6.7…

In the first chapter of his book, After Photography , digital photography theorist Fred Ritchin explains the central selling point of digital over analog: Digital is based on an architecture of infinitely repeatable abstractions in which the original and its copy are the same; analog ages and rots,…

I. Ruby lost her virginity in July of this year, not long after she turned 28. Five days later, she knew, with deep certainty and not a little dread, that she was pregnant. Her nipples grew and darkened, she says; her abdomen tingled. The man she'd slept with refused to see her, and when he finally…

Most health-conscious people are familiar with the concept of risk factors for disease. We’re too familiar, in fact. A risk factor is like the guest that nobody invited to the party, a spoiler. Though we might feel fine now, our individual risk for (fill in the blank) tells us that our wellbeing…

Sonia Cotelle (left) and Marguerite Perey (second from left) at the Curie laboratory in 1930. Each died from radiation exposure. Musée Curie/ACJC Collection Just after Christmas of 1938, a young woman named Marguerite Perey — then 29, with a plain, open face, her eyes intent upon her work — sat at a…

Photo: INRIA Only Connect: Researcher Hubert Zimmermann [left] explains computer networking to French officials at a meeting in 1974. Zimmermann would later play a key role in the development of the Open Systems Interconnection standards. If everything had gone according to plan, the Internet as we…

Pavlov (operating on a dog in 1902) ran his lab like a factory; dogs were his machines. Credit Courtesy Wellcome Library, London As a college student, B. F. Skinner gave little thought to psychology. He had hoped to become a novelist, and majored in English. Then, in 1927, when he was twenty-three,…

G eoffrey Ondrich and Waylon Cude are both 16 years old. Both boys have autism, and both would rather use their computers than do almost anything else in the world. But that’s just about all they have in common. Waylon is serious and intense, and so is the way he uses his computer: He spends hours…

In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, "UnusedStk" and "AllocMem." Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics…

A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” Down a path and across a grassy square, 5-year-old Dylan can hear them through the window of his nana’s front room. He tries to figure out what half an hour…