We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and…

Pictures of President Xi Jinping at an exhibition for the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up, at the National Museum of China in Beijing last year. Credit Thomas Peter/Reuters BEIJING — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly summoned hundreds of officials to Beijing recently, forcing…

F ifteen years ago, cybersecurity could be boiled down to a simple strategy: Secure the perimeter. Experts fought against malware and other nefarious code by implementing firewalls and other point-of-entry defenses. Since then, however, companies have moved their operations online and allowed…

I’ve mentioned this in numerous places for the last few years, so I decided it was time to finally put it into a formal piece. It seems obvious at this point that China is building a massive database of information on American individuals and companies, which they can then use for various…

Mind time and clock time are two totally different things. They flow at varying rates. The chronological passage of the hours, days, and years on clocks and calendars is a steady, measurable phenomenon. Yet our perception of time shifts constantly, depending on the activities we’re engaged in, our…

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Commuters inching through rush-hour traffic in the Holland Tunnel between Lower Manhattan and New Jersey don’t know it, but a technology likely to be the future of communication is being tested right outside their car windows. Running through the tunnel is a fiber-optic…

On one of my more recent voyages down a YouTube wormhole , I was introduced to a suspiciously profitable practice called retail arbitrage. The concept is fairly simple: You purchase products from a retail store, like Walmart or Target, and then you sell them somewhere else, like Amazon, for a higher…

“Only 30 days,” I whispered to myself. “It’s only 30 days.” This spontaneous pep talk happened at my parents’ house on September 1, opening day of my monthlong plan to turn nutritional orthodoxy on its head. For the third time in barely an hour, I rushed with the urgency of an Olympic race walker to…

In 2012, Travis Kitchens, a young writer and filmmaker from Baltimore, made a pilgrimage to the far northeastern corner of Maryland. He had heard stories about an eccentric musician and artist named Zane Campbell from up that way. People talked about a “hillbilly madman,” a punk version of outlaw…

Credit: Getty Images For the 50 million individuals worldwide ailing from Alzheimer’s disease, the announcements by pharmaceutical giants earlier this year that they will end research on therapeutics were devastating. The news is even more devastating considering projections that 100 million more…

Sign Here to Lose Everything Part 1 “I Hereby Confess Judgment” Sign Here to Lose Everything Part 1 : “I Hereby Confess Judgment” Part 2 : The $1.7 Million Man Part 3 : Rubber-Stamp Justice Part 4 : Business-Loan Kingpin How an obscure legal document turned New York’s court system into a…

ike Zelkind stands at one end of what was once a shipping container and opens the door to the future. Thousands of young collard greens are growing vigorously under a glow of pink-purple lamps in a scene that seems to have come from a sci-fi movie, or at least a NASA experiment. But Zelkind is at…

The Weakest Link is Motherboard's third, annual theme week dedicated to the future of hacking and cybersecurity. Follow along here . At 3:15 a.m. local Italian time on July 5, 2015, the usually quiet Twitter account of the infamous spyware company Hacking Team posted a confusing message: “Since we…

As you travel this holiday season, bouncing from airport to airplane to hotel, you’ll likely find yourself facing a familiar quandary: Do I really trust this random public Wi-Fi network ? As recently as a couple of years ago, the answer was almost certainly a resounding no. But in the year of our…

Note. This post had a great response on Reddit with over 300 comments . I’ve added an update section to the end of this post to address some of the main criticisms. A visual programming language is one that allows the programmer to create programs by manipulating graphical elements rather than…

In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to protect children from failure in order to safeguard their fragile self-esteem. This seems logical – failure is unpleasant. It tends to make you look bad, you have negative feelings of disappointment and frustration, and you often have to start…

The first time I encountered Michael Laufer, he was throwing thousands of dollars worth of homemade medicine into a packed audience at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), a biennial conference in New York City. “Does anyone here suffer from anaphylactic shock and not have access to epinephrine?” Laufer…

Arizona skies: astronomy contributes $250 million annually to the state’s economy.Photograph: Bureau of Land Management T ake a nighttime drive into Arizona Sky Village, in a remote valley in south-east Arizona , and the only thing you can see clearly are the millions of stars twinkling overhead.…

On a warm Phoenix night five years ago, Aaron Cashatt walked down the red-carpeted hall of the second floor of a Marriott hotel, trying to move casually despite the adrenaline and methamphetamine surging through his bloodstream. Six feet tall with blond, close-cropped hair, he wore a black sports…

Paul Simon felt grateful. It was March 2001, and the occasion was the 16th-annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, held at the Waldorf Astoria in midtown Manhattan. Along with another honoree that night, Michael Jackson, Simon joined an elite group of artists that has been inducted…

What if you could lose weight and reduce your risk of life-threatening disease without any changes in what you eat — other than a five-day special diet once every few months? That’s what happened for 71 adults placed on three cycles of a low-calorie, “fasting-mimicking” diet. The phase II trial,…

Geoff Johnson for POLITICO Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with…

I’ve been going to the Waffle House since I was 15. I grew up in rural Virginia and we would all leave work and go to my house, which everyone called the Brock Hotel, to drink beer. We had this huge porch overlooking the police station and we had an old-school 1960s fridge with a Brock Trucking…

Bone broth has become so popular these days that the bones used to make it are getting harder — and more expensive — for broth retailers to source. Alex Reynolds/NPR Dear dogs of America — sorry about bone broth. Since this well-marketed take on an ancient beverage started sweeping hip enclaves like…