On a street where men are known to harass and molest women, tables have been set up at which “Action Heroes” invite strangers to sit down and talk one-on-one.
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Trial by social media has ruled that the accused be reprimanded swiftly in 140 characters, with lazy and possibly sexist swipes, threats and sentences probably worse than the initial Tweet itself.
Blackfish is a beautiful and powerful documentary about, yes, the corporate greed of SeaWorld. But it also, through remarkable facts, shows us the neuroscience of orcas. These animals—most commonly and […]
If you can’t make it out to a cafe, a new website allows you to bring the bustling energy directly to your computer. The site is called Coffitivity. It’s free and plays an ambient coffee shop soundtrack.
Since a Tokyo-based PR firm announced the campaign earlier this year, more than 3,000 Japanese women have signed up. There are some conditions, though: Participants must be over 18, relatively active online, and dedicated miniskirt wearers.
“Paranoia’s the garlic in life’s kitchen,” remarks the central character, Maxine Tarnow, of Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge. “You can never have too much.” Pynchon seasons his latest epic […]
Drifting in the deep, the hulking, yet streamlined mammoth unleashes a string of sound, a booming, but delicate song.
I learned about last week’s fire in Seaside Park through a conspiracy theory. It read simply: ‘And I’m sure this was an accident.’ Given Jersey’s long history of questionable accidents—just […]
A few months ago I posted a piece on the alarming resurgence in the use of lie detectors in the UK and the US. A new documentary looks at the use […]
The brazen terrorist attack by Islamic militants on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi this week was tragic, devastating and emotionally wrenching. It was also, unfortunately, inevitable. No matter how good a job […]
People will not gloat about success. They will gloat about failure. It’s just the fact of life.
Just as religion informed the dawn of civilized man, so too do these 21st century stories act as a shield – protecting our sanity from an overwhelming sensation of entropic change. We are trying to find the signal in the noise. But increasingly, the noise is becoming louder and louder. It’s like this treadmill we’re running on has reached a speed we can’t keep up with. Today’s prowess Kairos is being pushed into yesterday’s fleeting Chronos. It’s a collision of dizzying proportions… everything happens now.
A spine chilling new documentary addresses the myriad of new tools for surveillance that are now being put to use in the the UK’s capital city. We learn of the […]
At the beginning of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes made a bold but logical prediction (pdf): In the long run, humanity was solving its economic problems, so that by […]
The Center for Perceptual Systems at The University of Texas at Austin has just released a free web-app that will denoise and enlarge photos in a heartbeat to an extent […]
It is impossible to overstate how important this is. On Tuesday, President Obama will lay out a plan for dealing with climate change, and reports indicate it will include regulation […]
A Swedish architecture firm proposes covering a landmark Stockholm building with plastic “hairs” that would convert the wind they capture to electricity.
Don’t try this at home A man who expects to soon be blind has implanted a magnet into his ear, which can now be used as a wireless headphone. The […]
A team of German researchers who wanted to find out of if certain noises help humans sleep better designed an experiment to track individuals’ sleep patterns while they listened to certain sounds.
It is so easy now to mock the millions who freaked out at the “War of the Worlds”, the Halloween radio play 75 years ago this week about an […]
One of the beautiful things about the Internet is that everybody has a voice. And one of the terrible things about the Internet is that everybody has a voice.
A team of scientists from Oxford University have shown that zapping the brain with electrical impulses improves its ability to complete mathematical problems in the short and long term.
As comedian Martin Mull (allegedly) once said, “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Sound’s non-verbal qualities help it elude any attempts to pin it down definitively through the […]
Walter, we hardly knew you. When I saw that American artist Walter De Maria had died at the age of 77 on July 25th, my mind’s eye immediate pictured The […]
Food scientists are now discovering that the process of tasting food is one of the more complex things the brain is tasked to do, combining data from all our senses into one unified and delicious experience.
The benefits of tourism in New York City (or any city) are not only financial. Tourists are anti-beacons: wherever they flock, residents like me immediately know where not to go. […]
Cybersexism: Sex, gender and power on the Internet Laurie Penny Bloomsbury, 2013 (available from Amazon) Sexism – whether existing in meat- or cyberspace – is the noise people make who […]
The discovery, announced by NASA on Wednesday, is encouraging but still needs to be corroborated. That’s the job of scientists who are conducting experiments deep beneath the Earth’s surface.
Complaints of headaches and ear pain from those living near turbines have largely been viewed skeptically from within the scientific community. A new study may start to change those views.
The twisting path to becoming less dumb has led to many stops.