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The NSA Reportedly Tested Its Top Spyware on New Zealand
NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo via The United States' war on its citizens' privacy has been so successful in the last decade that now even well-respected judges are stating that...
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Ecuador's Only Satellite Was Pummeled By Space Debris
Image via EXA website The poor bastard didn't even last a month. BBC News reported yesterday that Pegasus, the first and only Ecuadorian satellite sent into orbit, collided with "a cloud of particles"...
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Why You Should Never Wish Anyone a 'Happy Memorial Day'
Marines observing Memorial Day. Image: Flickr, CC Until today, I wasn't exactly clear on the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Now, thanks to one marine, and the internet's most...
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Here's Who's Making a Buck Off Citi Bike
Freak out. New York City bike share program, Citi Bike, has arrived at last, to much ado. It's being lauded as eco-friendly, good for personal health, the next advance in the country's most robust...
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Bio-Hacking Startup Cambrian Genomics Wants to Laser Print DNA
What if humans could make skin glow, enhance eyesight to super-human levels, render Mars habitable for colonization, or dramatically increase the mind's ability to tap its full potential? It would be...
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The Average Knee Operation Produces Thirty Pounds of Garbage
Photo via Like Macklemore, I’m all for buying secondhand. Clothing, plates, furniture–I even get my dogs from the pound. But like anyone raised with a healthy fear of unhealthy bodily fluids, I want...
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Walmart Left Explosive Fertilizer and Toxic Pesticides in Its Parking Lots...
Image: Flickr, CC It's common knowledge that Walmart is a terrible place to work. But it's a pretty terrible place to shop, too. And not just because the bargain-priced goods that line its shelves...
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The "Secrets" War
On March 10th, 2011, Julian Assange received an email from the filmmaker Alex Gibney. The WikiLeaks founder (he prefers "editor in chief") had been living in asylum in a manor outside London, to evade...
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Bitcoin Grows Up
Avalon founder Yifu Guo shows off his ASIC bitcoin miner to a large crowd of enthusiasts. Photo: Derek Mead On a recent balmy Friday in beautiful San Jose, an anonymous crypto currency was invading an...
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Surgeries on Friday Are More Frequently Fatal, Finds Study
An X-Ray slide via the Public Domain Review Friday is great for all sorts of thing—high school football, a block of family-oriented ABC shows and binge drinking come readily to mind—but it’s a pretty...
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This Is Probably Going to be the First Cloned Wolly Mammoth
Images: Semyon Grigoriev, Institute of Applied Ecology, Yakutsk Who wants to see a 10,000 year-old Woolly Mammoth stomping around the modern world? Everyone, right? A team of Russian paleontologists...
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Biodiversity Loss Is Threatening Our Food Supply
Holstein cows make up the vast majority of the US dairy herd. Image via F.d.W./Flickr We're in the middle of a mass extinction worldwide, which will make the world's ecosystems more susceptible to...
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Spotify Needs to Nail Music Discovery
When Spotify first launched, it followed the startup golden rule to great success: do one thing extremely well. That thing was streaming. Only now, a whole bunch of music services do that one thing...
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Americans Don't Know What the Frack 'Fracking' Is
Nobody even knows what you're protesting, fellas. Image: Flickr This is surprising: I know we Americans have garnered ourselves a reputation for being ignorant of many things occurring in the wide...
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Almost a Lightsaber, Nearly a Tricorder: 'Star Wars' and 'Star Trek' Are Sort...
Not long ago getting caught with a lightsaber on Youtube could ruin your life, but this self-proclaimed “DIY Laser Guy” has no reason to be embarrassed. He has brought the lightsaber to life, sort of....
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In a First, a Highly Energetic Neutron Star Was Observed Suddenly Slowing Down
Artist's rendering of an x-ray outburst from a magnetar, via NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Cosmically speaking, neutron stars are truly gnarly—the remnants of massive stars gone supernova, they...
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Igor Stravinksy's Riot-Inducing Ballet and the Rite of Data Viz
It's hard to imagine a ballet and orchestral work eliciting any more than polite applause or a nap today, but even from the dubstep-laden 21st century, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a...
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Apple Is Still Trying to Prove It's Super Green
Image: Wikimedia Apple just announced that it has hired former EPA chief Lisa Jackson as its top environmental advisor. Jackson, a bona fide green champion, spearheaded Obama's now-stalled effort to...
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Was Jeremy Hammond's Stratfor Hack an Act of Civil Disobedience?
Anonymous member Jeremy Hammond (aka Anarchaos) pleaded guilty this week to one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) for his role in the hacking of private intelligence firm...
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Pigeons Can Use Touchscreens to Solve Puzzles
Pigeons are perpetually crumbling under the weight of their disease-filled diets of trash and sadness, but it turns out they're also pretty darn smart. In fact, they can even learn to play simple...
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