With koanic brilliance, Robin Sloan recently summarized the difference between last century’s old command-and-control journalism and today’s. It was, of course, a tweet: “The way to cover big news in […]
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I paid more taxes on my blogging income than General Electric paid last year. That’s not because I make so much money blogging, but because GE literally paid no taxes […]
How does the oil industry transform America’s landscape? This was partly the topic of Edward Burtynsky’s book “Oil.” Here, he discusses his stunning photograph of the Kern Oil Field in […]
Florida’s Republican governor has a creative way to demoralize and demonize public sector workers: mandatory drug testing for all state employees who answer to the governor and all prospective hires […]
Governor Rick Scott has done the Madness in Madison one better—instead of wasting time paying off political supporters and other intermediaries, Scott has decided to institute “RickyCare” in the state […]
Perhaps it was unintended, but two or three weeks ago, at the height of the protests that was gripping the great cities of Egypt, the Director General of the BBC, […]
Using data from the Large Hadron Collider experiment, a team of scientists has observed new behaviour of an exotic “B meson” particle that should shed light on a new physics.
No single analysis can discern which nuclear power plants in the U.S. are most at risk for a disaster, but the probabilities of an accident damaging a reactor core have been roughly penciled out.
After taking a vow of silence for 17 years and refusing any transportation, save his own feet, for 22, John Francis is speaking out about the lessons of conservation and planetary harmony.
While early searches at the Large Hadron Collider did not turn up long-sought-after particles, there is good reason to believe that supersymmetry will be discovered, says Dr. David Toback.
A new generation of climate models and the visionaries who wield them show that our carbon legacy will last far longer than most of us realize, long enough to interfere with future ice ages.
The innocuous white vapour trails that criss-cross the sky might have contributed to more global warming so far than all aircraft greenhouse gas emissions put together.
An artificial silicon-based “leaf” that collects energy in much the same way as a natural one could provide a day’s worth of power for homes without access to an electricity grid.
N.A.S.A.’s Messenger spacecraft, which entered orbit around Mercury on March 17, sent its first images of the hot planet’s surface, including its previously unseen southern pole, back to Earth.
British research aimed at helping farmers cut their contribution to climate change shows how to reduce the amount of methane produced by cows and sheep belching and breaking wind.
Mental health remains a huge concern for the space industry, whether considering humanity’s eventual colonization of other worlds or merely the price of a space tourism weekend.
Hertzberg wrote one of the simplest, and most elegant, blog posts (this form truly needs a new descriptive terminology) in response to President Obama’s speech on Libya. It was concise. […]
Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember well the phenomenon of the Members Only jacket. Whether you’ve found one in the back of your closet or not, you […]
What are fractals? The man who invented the term—and the geometry to go along with it—explains how complex natural shapes such as mountains and coastlines can be represented mathematically.
The co-founder of Field String Theory explains why the universe has 11 dimensions rather than any other number.
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. So wrote Jane Austen in the opening […]
After yesterday’s monster post about the prospects of drilling into the mantle (sorry, the petrologist side of me overpowered the volcanologist), today we catch up on some of the news: […]
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and thus making video calls via services like Skype or Google Talk are already a well established standard in the tech community. According to a […]
Amazon getting the jump on Google and Apple with the launch of its digital music locker service has prompted closer looks at legality and whether licenses should be paid for streaming.
The human heartbeat could be used to power an ipod after scientists developed a tiny chip which uses the body’s own movement to generate power, the Telegraph reports.
Should more be done to limit companies like Apple from staking claims to generic words and phrases? What’s the harm in this kind of appropriation of language?
Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. Charles Arthur looks at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology and users reveal how their work lives changed.
What if the most innovative kids’ property today was not a TV show, but a website? For Aardman Animations’ head of broadcast, Moshi Monsters leads the way.
Why and how online ad sites need to catch up in terms of aesthetics and usability. They should integrate social recommendations and filter the chaos, for starters.
The other day I asked for examples of practical post-rationality—changes in law or policy that happened because institutions have stopped assuming that people behave rationally. A number of people wrote […]