Culture & Religion

The Bay Area town of Piedmont is considering installing automatic license plate readers that will capture data on every car and transmit it to an intelligence database.

Those who use smartphones and tablets are still expected to pay the tax — which is mandatory for all TV owners — if they’re accessing content normally found on TV.

The tongue-in-cheek phrase “There’s an app for that” is symptomatic of a more worrying social trend, says author and critic of philanthropic technology, Evgeny Morozov.

Peter Gabriel and Vint Cerf are two of the people behind the proposed Interspecies Internet, a platform that is exactly what it sounds like.

One reason, says the founder of the Inspiration Mars Foundation, is that participants are “going to need someone [they] can hug” given the length of the mission.

A team of American and Italian scientists have found the biology of the human brain to be distinct from that of rhesus monkeys, thought to be our closest evolutionary ancestor.

The human race became a little humbler recently when it was discovered that dolphins, much like people, have unique signatures they use to identify themselves and each other.

“Hell, darling. That is what is going on in Hollywood right now,” says stylist Cheryl Konteh, referring to the film industry’s preparations for this weekend’s Oscars ceremony.

Their YouTube channel is within a few million views of one billion, a first for any nonprofit organization. It also makes a point about the evolution of children’s media. 

Despite never being keen on French wine in the past, Chinese consumers — and investors — are helping to grow sales in the region.

A new law instituted last fall mandates that students at state-subsidized public universities must work two years in-country for every year of study.

A new book on the human proclivity to compete called Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing examines factors that influence our tendency to try and outdo our friends and colleagues.

Deep mathematical patterns that are commonly found in nature may lie behind what we experience as beauty, which may explain why we have trouble putting beauty into words. 

Thanks to a government lawsuit, a digital rights group has released what they claim is a partial list of organizations across the country that have applied for permission to fly drones.

Rather than admiring from afar the protesters in India, and congratulating the national leaders who have begun to address sexual violence in the U.S. military, we need to confront the broader problem of misogyny in American legal culture.

For the first time, and only until February 25, the public is invited to submit and vote on names for the objects currently known as P4 and P5. 

On Tuesday night at 9:00 EST, President Obama will deliver his fifth State of the Union address, the first of his second term. Coming just a few weeks on the […]

A new National Intelligence Estimate report says that China is the primary culprit behind “massive, sustained” hacking into systems affecting a wide range of industries.

The country’s projected to become the largest film market by 2020, and the effects are already being seen in various aspects of the industry, including investor funding and story choices.

Several high-profile projects that aim to replicate the processes of the human brain have recently received enormous grants. Still, completing the projects is not the ultimate goal, say researchers.

If you run into violinist Joshua Bell at a cocktail party, don’t tell him you find classical music ‘relaxing.’ “Beethoven’s symphonies are not relaxing,” says Bell, who at 45 is […]

When it comes to online security and personal data, that is: A report released this week by security firm McAfee provides some interesting information about what it means to overshare.

A study shows that explicit content is disturbingly easy for young people to access via the site’s Recommended Videos panel.

At least 20 cities have canceled festivities in the wake of last month’s deadly nightclub fire, but most others are expected to continue with the celebrations despite the country’s ongoing self-reflection about the tragedy.

The state-owned railway company overrode the wishes of its all-male engine drivers’ union in order to grow the numbers.

Chronically nice people run the risk of burning themselves out and isolating the group of people they seek to help in the first place. Learning to say “no” is an important skill, say sociologists. 

We often find ourselves working against our own best wishes, but why? It’s not merely a matter of procrastination and willpower, say psychologists, but of taking our emotional temperature.

A pair of anthropologists have recently argued that cultures in which women take more than one husband have been more common in human history than previously thought. 

A Rhode Island arts center is one of several that have created a section for audience members who are willing to live-tweet during a particular performance.

Writer Olga Khazan discusses the impact of a recent French court ruling requiring Twitter to disclose personal information of anyone tweeting hate speech.