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It's Now Even Harder to Google for Child Porn
ReutersYou don’t need permission to put a website online, and, once it’s there, anyone in the world can see it. Much of what makes the web incredible can also make it a harsh, unkind place: Just as...
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What We Want to Know When We Search for Bitcoin
A Raspberry Pi bitcoin mining rig (Adafruit)Bitcoin, the newish digital currency, is a hot topic today, as legislators on Capitol Hill took up the issue of regulating this new form of money. We...
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English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet
Skreened.comLet's start with the dull stuff, because pragmatism. The word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in...
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5 Intriguing Things: Supercomputers, Digital Labor, Sexttering, Wolfram,...
From 59.7 gigaflops in 1993 to road to 33 petaflops in 2013 (Top500.org) 1. After years and years of American dominance, the Tianhe-2, a Chinese machine, sits atop the world's supercomputer rankings....
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The Human Stain: A Deep History of Tattoo Removal
Europeans and indigenous Americans being judged at the court of Nature for modifying their bodies, from the frontispiece to John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosiss, London, 1656 (Wikimedia Commons)In...
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The Gettysburg Address as a Powerpoint
NorvigWhen powerful, executive politicians speak, they often forgo visual aids. Obama, Reagan, Kennedy: There’s something about the prestige of the president, of presiding, that demands he (or she)...
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How Many Stars Are There in the Sky?
The Milky Way and its assorted stars, from the mountains of San Diego County (Shutterstock/Kevin Key)You look up into the night sky. Before you—above you, around you—stretches a pitch-black canvas...
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1 Gun, 2 Batteries, 3 Balaclavas: What Was in Soviet Cosmonauts' Survival Kits
Cosmonaut survival kit (RuSpace)Sure, Soviet cosmonauts had to face the difficulties of space travel, which were tough enough. But what if they happened to crash land in some unknown territory? At the...
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New at the Nursery: Tomato + Potato = TomTato
The TomTato™, in all its impossibly possible glory (Thompson & Morgan)It’s a tomato plant! It’s a potato plant! It’s Super—no, wait, it’s a tomato plant grafted onto a potato plant. This summer,...
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Why China's Solar Building Boom Is Good for the United States
ReutersChina is on track to install a record 12,000 megawatts of solar panels in 2014, according a report released today. At peak output, that’s the equivalent of a dozen huge nuclear power plants. The...
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Because, in 1 Chart
The way Americans use the word "because" is changing, as chronicled by my colleague Megan Garber. So, I got curious about the word "because." I've been playing with a bot—a little bit of code—that...
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The President's Hand-Written Response to the Gettysburg Address
ReutersToday, November 19, is the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. It’s a famously short speech and a famously ambiguous ones. No one’s quite sure how many words, exactly, Lincoln said at...
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5 Intriguing Things: Fritz Kahn, Stuxnet, McLuhan's Son, Hard Ware, The Drop
1. Fritz Kahn's remarkable 20th-century infographics. "In 1933, the Nazis chased Kahn out of Germany. His books were burned, banned, and put on the “list of damaging and undesirable writing.”...
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What Could Replace 'Airplane Mode'?
The Federal Aviation Administration lifted the ban on using portable electronic devices in planes during takeoff and landing last month, thanks to efforts of critics like the New York Times' Nick...
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Meet the Marines' Humdrum Toy: A Headless Miniature Pony Robot
The future doesn't always arrive with a gasp and a boom like Skynet in Terminator. No, sometimes it's more like Office Space. At least that's the idea I get watching this video of the Marines' testing...
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Some High Schoolers Built a Satellite and NASA Just Sent It to Space
Three satellites—or Cubesats—similar to the TJ3Sat floating above Earth last year (NASA)So, last night, a rocket took off. It launched from an island in Virginia, turned east over the Atlantic Ocean,...
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The Old Energy Economy, in 3 Maps
Representatives from 134 nations are gathered in Warsaw this week for the biannual exercise in dithering on the environment—otherwise known as the United Nations Climate Change Conference. But a...
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The Perfect, 3,000-Year-Old Toe: A Brief History of Prosthetic Limbs
The "Cairo Toe" (The University of Manchester)The earliest known prosthesis, dating possibly as far back as 950 B.C., was discovered in Cairo on the mummified body of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman....
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5 Intriguing Things Like a 12,597-Painting Homage to Blade Runner
1. Swedish artist Anders Ramsell made 12,597 tiny paintings into a 35-minute homage to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. "Never before has someone made a paraphrase on a movie like this, with thousands...
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Is Google's Secretive Research Lab Working on Human-Dolphin Communication?
An underwater keyboard at Epcot Center, shown at TED by dolphin researcher Denise HerzingIt started innocently enough, as rumors do: A friend of a friend and I were chatting about Google and he said...
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