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This Japanese Palm Surgery Story Better Have a Short Lifeline
Photo via Wikimedia Commons Even in the world of palm reading, going under the knife to change your fate seems extreme. The Daily Beast reported that some 37 people have gone to one clinic to have the...
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For Better or Worse, the Internet Is Making Adoptions Less Secret
Image via Wikimedia Commons The collision between adoption and the Internet is complex. While adoption as an institution has been historically shrouded in secrecy, the Internet is all about openness...
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When Gadgets Were Huge: The Great 80s Computers of "Computer Chess"
The good old days—when the fantasy of a computer passing even the most basic Turing Test kept a generation of nerds up late at night, when a machine could only calculate, say, 16,000 chess positions...
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Over One-Sixth of America's Coastline Is Under High Threat of Washing Out
Photo via Flickr / CC. There's the US Coast Guard, with its cutter boats and maritime aircraft maintaning law and order along America's coasts. And then there's the US coast guard, with its wetland...
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What a Man vs. Machine Olympics Would Look Like
Let the games begin. Image For some reason, humans are hell-bent on developing robots that can take us down in athletic competition. The dream of a machine competitor formidable enough to take on...
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Government Bounties for All: White Hat Hacking Is Big Business
Military cybersecurity forces, like the Navy's Cyber Forces, have expanded, but the US government still relies on private contractors and hackers to suss out security flaws. Via the US Navy In today's...
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Nuclear Power Remains Safe, But Aging Plants Pose a Problem
The Isar plant in Bavaria, Germany, which was commissioned in 1979. Via Wikipedia The world's nuclear reactors are getting old, which poses some big problems: How do we keep aging designs running...
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Bit Rot Is the Bane of Post-Analog Libraries
The Levinski Library in Tel Aviv. Image via Architizer The prevailing wisdom is that libraries are in a tough spot. Last year, e-books sales surpassed print. Nearly 80 percent of Americans have...
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Anti-Whaling Activist Paul Watson Marks a Year of Fleeing on the Sea
Paul Watson in 2008, in front of the ship, MY Steve Irwin, via guano/Flickr Just as Edward Snowden is caught in the in-between-nation zone of a Moscow airport, the anti-whaling activist Paul Watson is...
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Three 'Radical' Graphs Tell the Story of the Planet's Current and Future...
Images: Radical Cartography, via Quora Most of the world's population of seven billion people—88 percent of it—is clustered around a lattitude just north of the equator. About 27 degrees north. That's...
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Texas' 500 Executions, Visualized
Via. By our last count, about two weeks ago, the state of Texas had just executed its 499th death-row inmate since 1982, when the state reinstated capitol punishment. It was for some an occassion to...
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The World's Loneliest Whale Is Getting Its Own Movie
A lone fin whale, via tomp77/Flickr After 24 years of hearing his solitary song, filmmakers will try to meet the so-called "world’s loneliest whale." Since the 1980s, scientists have heard a single...
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The Beautiful Encryptor: Peter Sunde On His Spy-Proof Chat App Heml.is
Photo via Flickr / CC. A lopsided chunk of the talk pinging back and forth around the interwebs in the ongoing Snowden coverage has been largely focused on the spy-drama of the man himself, rather...
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The Next Frontier of GMOs Is Crops That Can Genetically Modify Insects...
A bollworm, which is the target of current research into giving crops genetic defenses against pests. Image: Wikimedia I regularly use an organic pesticide that's made up of ground fossils. It...
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A Week-Old Cryptocurrency Wants to Capture the Wasted Energy of Bitcoin's...
Image via Flickr Some of us are taken with bitcoin. We have learned its basics, and are more or less versed with its socioeconomic implications. We get it. But when an acquaintance of mine told me...
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How Google Could Free TV from the Cable Industry's Stranglehold
Google is picking up the pace in the race for your living room. The company has been courting media companies, hoping to license its content for a internet television service, the Washington Post...
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Lebanon's Forgotten Space Race: In 1961, Manoug Manougian Aimed the Middle...
Photos from Manoug Manougian's collection. In the 1960s, as the US and the USSR began a decades-long war of nerve-wracking almosts on the edge of space, a group of Lebanese scientists and engineers...
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American Dogs May Have Come from Asia After All
A Carolina dog, also known as the American dingo. Via Wikipedia You’d think that with an animal as common and as beloved as the dog, we might know a little more about its history than we do. But dogs,...
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To Talk About Drones, We Need to Know About Drones: A Chat With Drone Wars UK
A British Reaper drone, part of 39 Squadron Royal Air Force. (Photo via) LONDON — In the last year, drone strikes in Afghanistan have reportedly killed ten times as many civilians as manned fighter...
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Without Def Con, the Feds Have a Hacker Recruitment Problem
NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander speaks at Def Con 20 in 2012. In addition to unveiling wholesale data collection systems, it appears that Edward Snowden's revelations may now be getting in the way...
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