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You Can Now Pay for Access to JSTOR’s Trove of Scholarly Articles
From within a university, scholarly research seems easy to access. Go to Google Scholar, or search a library website, and it’s there. From outside a university, scholarly research seems impossible, if...
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Take a Digital Joyride Through the Large Hadron Collider
GoogleBack in 1989, working from a computer at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee put into the place the ideas and the infrastructure that would become the World Wide Web. In 1990, he released a formal proposal to...
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Your Story Is Ready: Medium Experiments With the Homepage of the Future
Library of CongressThe web is vast and full of text. What should you read? The Internet’s history resides in this question, a little. Google News trusts in what its algorithms turn up. Twitter endorses...
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Update: Chromosomes Are Shaped Less Like X's, More Like O's
GoogleI just did a Google Image search for "chromosome," and the images above are the top returns. A sea of X's: the familiar shape of the chromosome. Some detailed, some vague; some dark, some...
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The Man Who Saved the World by Doing Absolutely Nothing
Petrov receives a 2011 German media award from Karlheinz Koegel, chief of the German Media Research Group, during a ceremony in 2012. (Reuters)It was September 26, 1983. Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant...
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Did the U.S. Government Make the Greatest GIF of All Time?
ReutersThe U.S. Census Bureau works with a lot of data. That makes sense, because they have a lot of data! So they need a tool to collate it, organize it, sort through it, sniff through it… a...
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What Leading Scientists Want You to Know About Today's Frightening Climate...
Arctic sea ice on September 13, 2013, as measured by satellite microwave sensors and arrayed on NASA’s cloudless Blue Marble satellite imagery. How many years does it have left? (NASA) The polar...
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Water on Mars: A Brief (and Extremely Long) History
A map of a region known as Deuteronilus Mensae, in the northern hemisphere of Mars, shows the locations of ice deposits that have been detected by the Shallow Radar instrument of NASA's Mars...
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We Are Terrifyingly Close to the Climate's 'Point of No Return'
Brace yourself for more of this. (AP)In a landmark report, a global panel of leading scientists again called the evidence for climate change “unequivocal” and for the first time said humans are...
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Today in Modern Diplomacy: The U.S. President Gets Scooped by a Tweet
Obama leaves today's press conference announcing the historic phone call. (Reuters)Earlier today, President Obama and the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani had a phone call. The discussion was, it...
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The Carl Sagan of Our Time Reprises the 'Pale Blue Dot' Photo of Earth
Of all the space photos NASA has ever made, there are a few that are as iconic as an image Voyager took looking back at Earth from Saturn. It's a picture known among space nerds as the 'Pale Blue...
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XKCD Is Amazing, but Its Latest Comic Is Wrong
A student uses her laptop at Harvard University in 2009. Maybe she is lonely. Hang in there, lonely, lonely laptop user. (Reuters)Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic XKCD, does amazing work....
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An Ode to Scaffolding
The scaffolded Washington Monument on November 11, 2013 (Flickr/Paulo Ordoveza)The skyline of the nation's capital is in the process, I am sorry to tell you, of becoming considerably less epic....
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Is the Official Description of the Aboriginal Music on the Voyager Records...
The Golden Record (NASA)In the summer of 1977, humans sent two spacecraft ad astra—to the stars. Last summer, the first of those two machines, Voyager 1, crossed beyond the bubble around our sun and...
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The Botany of Empire and Emoji
1. Mapping New York's languages, we see more Portuguese than one would expect. "We have visualised the geography of about 8.5 million geo-located tweets collected between Jan 2010 and Feb 2013. Each...
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The Dark Art of Bots: How to Make $2 Million Online Without a Human Audience
Sadly, bot traffic is not a bunch of these guys with iPads (Reuters).Here is the weirdest thing about the modern web: humans are only one constituency, and maybe not the most profitable one. Consider...
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The Case for Secrecy in Tech
Sharing. Openness. Transparency. These are things we value—not just in the startup spaces of Silicon Valley, but in society at large. Whether you're talking about information or weather, what could...
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This New Web IPO Didn't Go Quite as Well as Twitter's
Chegg President and CEO Dan Rosensweig, at the right, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday morning (Richard Drew/AP)This morning, the online education company Chegg had its initial...
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The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom
Wikimedia CommonsEach year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured...
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Why Are Gas Prices Falling?
The price Americans pay for fuel at the pump has fallen to its lowest in more than then two years. At $3.19 per gallon, you can fill up a 12-gallon tank for less than $40. So, what's going on? And...
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