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This Company Wants to Be the Apple of Super Secure Smartphones
Can technology alone keep your phone data secure? A former Navy SEAL and a famous cryptographer seem to think so. The DC-based security company they co-founded, Silent Circle, has announced a new...
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5 Intriguing Things: Thursday, 1/16
1. The company that hoovers up all the prescription-drug data, then sells it to pharma companies. "IMS Health Holdings Inc. says it pulled in nearly $2 billion in the first nine months of 2013, much...
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'The Floppy Did Me In'
Remember these guys? (AJ Batac/Flickr)The New York Times reports today on the passing of Ken Landwehr, the Wichita homicide detective responsible for solving the case of the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill)...
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Why Is This Bee Wearing a Sensor?
CSIROAustralian scientists have devised a way to pinpoint the causes of the global die-off of bees that pollinate a third of the world’s crops: Attach tiny sensors to 5,000 honey bees, and follow where...
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The History of Popular Music, According to Google
Google unveiled a new way to look at the history of music today, Music Timeline. Drawing on the songs that reside in the collections of millions of Google Play users, the company created a...
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The Farewell Fave Is the Best Kind of Fave
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment via IMDBLet's talk, for a minute, about favorites. Let's talk, in particular, about the nuanced uses of Twitter's most multifunctional button. People use the star...
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What Film Looks Like (When It's on Drugs)
Ecstasy, looking like a sea creature (Sarah Schoenfeld)The photographer Sarah Schoenfeld used to work in a nightclub in Berlin. Which meant, among other things, that she got to see first-hand how...
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On the Reign of ‘Benevolent Dictators for Life’ in Software
Django Reinhardt, jazz guitarist, provided a name to Django, the software (William P. Gottlieb/LOC)On Monday, a small change was made in Django, a popular open-source software framework. The change...
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The 5-Million-Year-Old 3D Printout
The 3D print and the fossil, together (University of Oregon)The University of Oregon has a remarkable specimen in its paleontology department: a rare fossil of a fish. In this case, Onchorynchus...
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5 Intriguing Things: Friday, 1/17
1. Drone strikes will stay within the CIA, says Congress. "An effort by President Obama to transfer America’s lethal, highly classified drone program from the CIA to the Pentagon appears to have been...
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The New York Times' Most Popular Story of 2013 Was Not an Article
The New York TimesThe New York Times has released its list of most-visited stories of 2013. As The Atlantic’s business editor Derek Thompson noted, they include four breaking news articles, one of...
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Hunting Licenses to Shoot at Drones: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Drone-hunting license. Comes printed on vellum. (Phil Steel)Last spring, a Seattle woman reported that some guy was flying a drone over her yard. It was, she wrote, a "warm spring day," and she at...
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The Rise of Curiosity Journalism
New York TimesLast week on these very pages, Robinson Meyer noted the surprising fact that the overall highest-trafficked story at the New York Times in 2013 was not a story at all, but a news...
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Sit Back, Relax, and Read That Long Story—on Your Phone
kgnixer/FlickrEarlier this month, Buzzfeed published a piece called "Why I Bought a House in Detroit for $500." The story ended up getting more than a million pageviews, which is notable because it is...
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5 Intriguing Things: Submergence Special Edition
Last week, I read a stunning novel called Submergence by J.M. Ledgard. It is so good that I'm devoting today's 5 Intriguing Things to links about the themes of the book. It's an experiment. But first,...
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There's All This Fish DNA in the Water
The Open Sea exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (montereybayaquarium.org)Fish are, in a lot of ways, like humans. They're amazingly diverse. They have well-defined senses of taste and smell. They...
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The Future of the Army: Fewer Soldiers, More Robots, More 'Lethality'
Semi-autonomous army vehicle (Reuters)In the future, an Army brigade might have 3,000 human troops instead of 4,000, but a lot more robots, according to recent remarks by General Robert Cone, the...
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U.S. Court: Bloggers Are Journalists
Tech bloggers—who are also journalists—at an Instagram event last year (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)Updated, Wednesday, 11:45 a.m. One of the great questions of our time came closer to resolution last week,...
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What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?
Alexis MadrigalOn a future road trip, your robot car decides to take a new route, driving you past a Krispy Kreme Doughnut shop. A pop-up window opens on your car’s display and asks if you’d like to...
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3D Printing and Legos: Perfect Together
Stefanie MuellerThere is a little thrill in watching something you designed get built, layer by layer, by a 3D printer. But it's a slow thrill. 3D printing, even for a small object, can take a...
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