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Classified Report Shows America's Drones Aren't Just Killing Al Qaeda Members
An anti-drone protest in Pakistan (Reuters).The Obama administration's drone attacks have not just targeted Al Qaeda leaders, but a wide variety of groups and individuals in Pakistan, according to...
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Google Gives $3 Million to Fight Human Trafficking
Around the world there are more than 65 different hotlines that people can call to report human trafficking. Generally speaking, these hotlines work independently, with little or no coordination. They...
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Happy Birthday, Eadweard Muybridge, You Have a Lot of GIFs to Answer For
Happy birthday, Eadweard Muybridge. You were born in 1830 and you died in 1904. I want to give you a quick update on what's happened since you took your leave of the mortal coil. First, the series of...
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Enter a Monster: How a Hollywood Effects Studio Builds Movie Creatures
p.caption {position:relative; top:-4px !important;} Mike Elizalde of Spectral Motion applies make-up to actor Ron Perlman, as Hellboy. Many of today's most original and bizarre visions of alternative...
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How to Be a (Human or Machine) Pinball Wizard
Kill Screen Magazine has a wonderful GIF guide to the moves you need to master to become a pinball wizard. For example, as illustrated above, the drop catch: "The drop catch is similar to a bunt in...
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Did Apple Ban a Comic From the App Store for Depicting Gay Sex?
Image Comics. Unedited version available here. Since it debuted in March 2012, the popular comic book Saga has illustrated the following: robot sex, a giant with five-story-tall sagging testicles, a...
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Pet GPS: It's Not Just For Cats
Earlier this week, I told you the story of Lost Cat, a new book about pets, love, and GPS. So, of course, a vendor of pet GPS products got in touch with me. As a public service, in honor of National...
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Firefox May Drop Support for Tags, Finally
In a forum about the development of Mozilla's Gecko, the rendering engine for Firefox, we read that the browser may soon drop support for blinking text. In fact, many browsers already don't render the...
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Massive Volunteer Collective Proofreads 25,000 Public-Domain Books
sanickels/Flickr Give these people a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records, because they surely deserve one: As of today, 100,000 people around the world have taken part in a massive proofreading...
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The Sun Lets Loose Its Biggest Flare of the Year (So Far)
The sun captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory in wavelengths of 131 and 171 Angstroms. Click to expand. (NASA) This morning at 3:16 AM Eastern time a spot on the sun emitted its strongest...
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One More Thing Not to Worry About: Airliners Turning Into Drones
Here's another quick item I can take six minutes to post while still in article-deadline-hell mode. It's a warning, from a computer-security conference in Amsterdam, that hackers equipped merely with...
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We've Taken More Than a Million Pictures of Earth From the Space Station
All the images ever taken from the ISS, mapped. Click to enlarge. (Nathan Bergey/Github) The official purpose of the International Space Station is Science: Astronauts living on the orbital laboratory...
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How Kaggle Is Changing How We Work
The job fair of the future (Facebook). The technology industry loves its laws. There's Moore's Law of processing power, Metcalfe's Law of networks, and Gilder's Law about bandwidth. And then there's...
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Google Death: A Tool to Take Care of Your Gmail When You're Gone
Casey Hugelfink/Flickr Perhaps you, like me, have had the pleasure of finding some old family letters or calendars squirreled away in a box somewhere, and sitting there for hours, reading about the...
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The Best Academic Blogs
I love Twitter, but it's a fast medium. If you follow a couple thousand people, like I do, there's no easy way to keep an eye on everything that people tweet. The same seems to be true more broadly:...
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Cell Networks Are Energy Hogs
For years, people have talked about the electricity consumption of data centers. Some people want to believe, somehow, that Googling is energy intensive. But it's not. Thanks to Koomey's Corollary to...
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Time and Navigation: How We Found Our Way in the World
"Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There," new at the National Air and Space Museum Type an address into your phone, and up will pop a step-by-step route from where you are...
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71% of Facebook Users Engage in 'Self-Censorship'
Most Americans now know the feeling of typing something into a social media input box, thinking again, and deciding against posting whatever it was. But while it certainly seemed like a widespread...
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How We Got All This Great Data on American Baby Name Popularity
Every year, the Social Security Administration releases its annual list of the most popular names in America. They've become a valuable source of data for researchers, as Ruth Graham brilliantly laid...
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Pain Rays and Robot Swarms: The Radical New War Games the DOD Plays
Reuters/Alexis C. Madrigal In the year 2025, a rogue state--long suspected of developing biological weapons--now seems intent on using them against U.S. allies and interests. Anticipating such an...
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