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Humanity Could Give a Name to Its Common Ancestor via Hashtag
Radiolab and the American Museum of Natural History are crowdsourcing suggestions for what to call a species that lived some 65 million years ago, and from which all humans are descended. Carl...
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The Birth of a Planet, Observed From Earth
"If we are correct, this is the first time we are seeing a planet forming inside its natal environment." Two views of the gas and dust around star HD 100546, via PopSci. Left: a visible-light image...
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SpaceX's Dragon Capsule Encountered a Problem in Orbit
Three of the four thruster pods on the capsule failed to deploy. The Dragon capsule, in orbit during a previous mission (SpaceX) This morning, just after 10:00 am East Coast time, SpaceX's Dragon...
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Sinkholes: Why Does the Ground Sometimes Just Disappear Right Beneath Us?
And why does it always seem to happen in Florida? A 60-feet-deep. 50-feet-wide sinkhole opened up in Orlando in 2002. The sinkhole swallowed two trees and forced dozens of resident to evacuate. (AP)...
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Sequestering Science Research
My colleague Tom Levenson took a moment to speak with physicist, and current Dean of the School of Sciences at MIT, Marc Kastner about the effects of the sequester on research:For MIT itself the...
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What Is 3D Printing? And Will It Change the World?
The PBS series Off Book considers the impact of this much-hyped technology. 3D printing, futuristic name notwithstanding, is a pretty simple phenomenon: the conversion of a digital file into a...
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Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation
Once your life is inside a federal investigation, there is no space outside of it. The only private thing is your thoughts, and even they don't feel safe anymore. Every word you speak or write can be...
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Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation
A reluctant witness's account of a Federal prosecution. If you haven't been following the case, start with the editor's note for context. Quinn Norton's grand jury subpoena (Quinn Norton). Once your...
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Editor's Note to Quinn Norton's Account of the Aaron Swartz Investigation
We have just published Quinn Norton's account of her life inside the Federal investigation of Aaron Swartz for the alleged crime of downloading too many JSTOR articles too quickly. The story fills in a...
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The Best Books About Biotechnology
Here's my biotech reading list. I'd love your help fleshing it out. I've spent the last few weeks creating a syllabus for myself on the world -- people, techniques, theory, history -- of biotechnology....
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The Neanderthals May Have Died Out Because of ... Bunnies?
According to a new paleontological analysis, our furry friends allowed us to thrive -- while Neanderthals died away. A reconstruction of a Neanderthal male and the results of his hunt, from the...
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The Most Beautiful GIFs in (and of) Creation
I like a good GIF just as much as the next person, but the image format doesn't exactly call to mind scenes of serene beauty. GIFs are for spicing up a half-completed webpage, providing a sarcastic...
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White House Backs the Right to Unlock Your Phone—Will Congress?
The next step for advocates of phone unlocking is legislation that will give people who open up their devices -- with or without carrier permission -- legal protection. Apple In October, the Library of...
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The Catch-22 That Prevents Us From Truly Scrutinizing the Surveillance State
It's hard to find someone who can complain of his or her rights having been violated, because anyone's whose rights have been violated doesn't know it. Plan of the Panopitcon (Wikimedia Commons)...
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On Kurzweil: The Sleight of Hand That Makes It Seem We Understand the Mind
Is the way we talk about the human mind messing with our ability to think about it clearly? U.S. National Library of Medicine The philosopher Colin McGinn is a tough book reviewer. He looks like a cop...
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Tower of Light: When Electricity Was New, People Used It to Mimic the Moon
Before streetlights became the standard way to light cities, town leaders looked to "moonlight towers" to provide mass illumination. A New Orleans levee, lighted from above (Harper's Weekly, 1883 via...
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A Day in the Life of a Digital Editor, 2013
The biz ain't what it used to be, but then again, for most people, it never really was. Man, I feel everyone on how scary it is to be in journalism. When I made the transition from a would-be fiction...
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Book as Mobile Device: No Really, a Medieval Almanac That Attached to Your Belt
Transporting large quantities information has always been a challenge, including when that information was astrological tables and your medium was vellum. "Astrological man," late-14th-century folding...
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A History of Lunarcraft
Megan Garber writes about some of our earliest forays into lighting our cities with giant "moon-towers" which imitated luna, err, lumination:During the hot summer of 1882, the installation of the new...
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Sesame Street's Count von Count ... Can't Count
In a celebration of Sesame Street's YouTube channel getting to its one billionth view, the Count sings a song with some faulty math. Sesame Street I am a Sesame Street loyalist, but I must tell you...
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