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One Look Out the Window of the ISS Puts Every Sci-Fi Film to Shame
I’ve been on a minor space kick lately. Aside from reading lots about the universe and planets in recent weeks, I’ve also watched both Gravity and Europa Report. Whatever you might say about those...
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The One Thing China Can Do to Clean Its Air
Beijing gripped in smog, by Michael Davis-Burchat/Flickr China is bracing for the winter by firing up coal-powered heating systems, so, naturally, the country's air quality has been shockingly bad....
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Curiosity's Latest Find: An Ancient Martian Lake 'Well Suited' for Life
These are some of the sedimentary rocks found by Curiosity. Photo: NASA The Curiosity rover has discovered a Martian site that researchers believe was once home to an ancient, freshwater lake that may...
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This Chinese Amputee Builds DIY Prosthetics to Give People Back Their Hands
A fishing-related explosion has left Chinese inventor Sun Jifa without arms for nigh on a decade. Sun couldn't afford prosthetics, so he took matters into his own hands and built a pair of incredible...
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Taking Photos Makes Your Memory Worse
Someone not remembering something at MoMA via Wikimedia Commons If you want to make a memory, start by forgetting your camera. Two new studies published in Psychological Science found that people who...
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NSA Spies Went on a Quest for Gamers' Data in World of Warcraft
Image: Dan Stuckey On top of scooping up torrents of private real-world data from citizens worldwide, it turns out that government spies also planted undercover agents inside the fantasy world of...
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Three Things Humanity Needs to Do to Survive the Apocalypse
Annalee Newitz has a succinct, bittersweet message for the human race: Mass extinction is coming, and we're probably going to survive it. Whether it's manmade (a nuclear holocaust, anthropogenic...
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Canada Wants to Own the North Pole
US Coast Guard icebreaker Healy and the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent during joint Arctic exercises, via the USGS Looks like Santa's going to owe some property taxes. Canada, as...
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Inside Wisconsin's Bipartisan Effort to End Warrantless Cellphone Tracking
Photo via Wikimedia Commons. While tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook called for surveillance reform on Capitol Hill today, Wisconsin legislators are addressing the issue head-on. On...
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Facebook Is Finally Realizing That People Don't Like Death
Image: Sam Michel/Flickr If anything's been "disrupted" by Silicon Valley, it's grief. As an emotional process, it's always been split into two parts: the private grieving we do to work through our...
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The Artificial Intelligence Arms Race in Silicon Valley Is On
Deep learning makes self-driving cars like this one possible. Image: Flickr Today, Facebook announced it hired NYU professor and machine learning pioneer Yann LeCun to run its newly created artificial...
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Women Scientists Get Less Funding Than Men
Image via Flickr/IRRI It shouldn’t be news to anyone that women are underrepresented in STEM fields. You might think, however, that when women do make it past the societal prejudices, through the...
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Don't Blame Killer Cats for the Decline in Birds
Image via Flickr/Herbie Robinson This year’s RSPB report on the State of the UK’s Birds (a kind of State of the Union address for the winged community) gave a pretty grim assessment of the country’s...
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Ranking the Arts By How Much They Contribute to America’s GDP
via Wikimedia Commons Now, obviously the value of an art form isn’t best described by its contribution to the nation’s gross domestic product. But if we wanted to compare them based off of that—for...
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The NYPD Won't Tell You Where Traffic Kills
All this crime and no traffic-related deaths. Photo: NYPD The brand new New York City crime map is a wonderful repository of assaults, murders, rapes, and nearly everything else you could possibly want...
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Digitizing the Morbid Saga of Human Bones
Screenshot from the Digitised Diseases viewer showing the right foot of a Chinese woman whose foot had been bound likely from the age of two onwards. Bones tell stories, but not ones we often get to...
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Congress's Plastic Gun Ban Left a 3D-Printed Loophole
Defense Distributed's Liberator pistol, via Defcad From the moment we first saw 3D-printed guns, one question has remained: How will legislators respond? Yesterday saw the conclusion of the first...
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How to Get Paid to Design Money
via the US Mint If you wanna make money, become a doctor or something—but you if you want to design money, then here’s your chance: You’ve got a month to apply for the US Mint and the National...
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Watch the Trailer for 'Jupiter Ascending,' an Intergalactic Cyberpunk Epic
After co-directing the cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic threads of the Cloud Atlas adaptation, the Wachowskis are back with Jupiter Ascending, their first original science fiction epic since The Matrix....
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China Is Siccing a Record-Setting Supercomputer on Its Smog Problem
Image: Flickr For the last week, swaths of northern China have been blanketed in exceptionally filthy clouds of smog, landing the question of how to clean up China's toxic air back in headlines. For...
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