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Why Didn’t People Smile in Old Portraits
Let’s play a short, highly contrived game, called called “Smile or Grimace?” Here’s Major General Samuel P. Heintzelman, an officer of the Federal Army, photographed during the war: Library of...
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The Time a Cleveland Newspaper Divulged the Manhattan Project
The Cleveland Press/Alex WellersteinThe Manhattan Project was, the director of the Office of Censorship once said, the "best-kept single secret of the war," as The New York Times put it in a piece that...
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Found: The Lost 'Steve Jobs Time Capsule' From 1983
The time capsule as buried in 1983 (John Celuch via CNET)The year was 1983. A group of tech geeks were attending a conference in Aspen: the International Design Conference. They wanted to commemorate...
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Stephen Colbert: Comedian, Emmy Winner, Fitness Trainer to Astronauts
NASA's official patch for the C.O.L.B.E.R.T. (NASA/Wikimedia Commons)The International Space Station has a gym. It's a tiny gym, yes, and a gym that's been substantially modified to accommodate the...
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What Did the Continents Look Like Millions of Years Ago?
The west coast of North America as it appeared roughly 215 million years ago (map by Ron Blakey)The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once...
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49% of the Links Cited in Supreme Court Decisions Are Broken
Shutterstock/spirit of americaIn March of 2001, Timothy Scott, the sheriff's deputy for Coweta County, Georgia, and Victor Harris engaged in a high-speed car chase. Scott had caught Harris, then 19...
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Are Your Gmails Not Sending?
ReutersIf you're having problems with your Gmail this morning, it's not just you. At its handy App Status Dashboard, Google confirms that it Gmail is experiencing a "service disruption." "The delivery...
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The History of Invisibility Cloaks, as Told by People in the Future
Last week, MIT researcher Sophia Brueckner told me that "reading science fiction is like an ethics class for inventors." That's the short of it, but the long was a bit deeper. In an interview,...
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The Single Switch That Saved the East Coast From Nuclear Disaster
The undetonated Mark 39 bomb after its landing in a meadow in North Carolina (U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons)The date was January 23, 1961. Three days earlier, John Kennedy had been sworn in as...
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Today in Selfies: Bill Clinton, Bill Gates
Bill Clinton via Bill Gates via Ow.lyThis week, the Clinton Global Initiative is holding its annual meeting in New York City. Bill Clinton, obviously, is in attendance. As is Bill Gates. Which led to...
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@Horse_Ebooks Is the Most Successful Piece of Cyber Fiction, Ever
Updated, 1:13pm. Back during the 2000s, when blogs were new, pioneers of the form argued over when blogs would be art. Pioneers of the form decided that a blog would have to be fiction, would have to...
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What Is a JPEG? The Invisible Object You See Every Day
In 2012, the photograph of Barack and Michelle Obama embracing after his re-election was 'liked' over 4 million times. That photo, like the 250 million other images uploaded to Facebook every day is...
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Why Do We Go to Space, Anyway?
The space program was forged from paranoia and fear. Our first rockets were weapons. Our first moves into the world beyond our own were motivated by competition. But when we finally got ourselves into...
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The #More #You #Know: Fallon and Timberlake Make an Anti-Hashtag PSA
Hashtags, as conveners of conversation, can be #whimsical #practical #totallyfantastic. Hashtags, as extensions of language, can be #playful #artistic #totallydelightful. But hashtags, as both of...
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Incredible Rotating Moon
A new video from NASA shows a complete, rotating view of the moon as seen from space. The images shed light on the side of the moon that is not normally visible from Earth, and it's something to...
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'The First Time a Tumblr Has Been Used in an Argument in a Supreme Court Brief'
The Supreme Court, as it appears today, under construction (Charlie Loyd)On October 8, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. The case centers on whether...
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'Alien Jesus': The Pre-Modern History of Outer Space
A few weeks ago on The Toast, Mallory Ortberg wrote a piece called “Another Lifeless, Empty Planet Found.” Beginning as a faux news report about scientists announcing their discovery of earth-like...
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A Spoon for People With Parkinson's
Lift LabsI have very clear memories from when I was a girl of my grandpa sitting at the table, hands fluttering wildly, struggling to get a spoonful from his plate to his mouth without making a mess....
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Claim: Twitter Is 2,000 Years Old
Dinner, (probably) pre-Instagram (Shutterstock/Renata Sedmakova)There's Twitter, the 140-character bound communications service. There's Twitter, the multi-million-membered social network. There's...
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Referencing a Tweet in an Academic Paper? Here's an Automatic Citation Generator
TwitterSay you're writing a paper on Twitter during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. How do you cite all those tweets you'll be referencing? The Modern Language Association (MLA) has an answer to...
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