200,000 brave and/or insane people have supposedly signed up for a one-way mission to Mars. But the truth about Mars One, the company behind the effort, is much weirder (and far more worrying) than anyone has previously reported. By Elmo Keep Illustrations by Josh Cochran Photographs by Daniel Boud…

Video / Economics Stop deferring to the experts. Economics demands everyone’s attention 11 minutes Video / Ethics If soldiers act with unjust aggression they are as culpable as civilian criminals 6 minutes Video / Making Make shelter: how to build an awesome hut only with naturally occurring…

e iπ + 1 = 0 Euler’s identity: Math geeks extol its beauty, even finding in it hints of a myste­rious connected­ness in the universe. It’s on tank tops and coffee mugs. Aliens, apparently, carve it into crop circles (in 8-bit binary code). It’s appeared on The Simpsons . Twice. What’s the deal with…

Responsive web design is a great solution to our multi-screen problem, but getting into it from the print perspective is difficult. No fixed page size, no millimetres or inches, no physical constraints to fight against. Designing in pixels for Desktop and Mobile only is also the past, as more and…

A student in my online course asks, “What do I respond when a client comments that my rates are really high?” Good question, student! Because if you’re running your business the right way, someone, someday, and maybe even lots of people almost every day, will think that you’re too expensive. Which…

The point of the most famous thought-experiment in quantum physics is that the quantum world is different from our familiar one. Imagine, suggested the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, that we seal a cat inside a box. The cat’s fate is linked to the quantum world through a poison that will be…

Steven Pinker Credit: Credit: Rebecca Goldstein Writing guides tend to be pretty unsatisfying. They offer plenty of concrete rules, but why, a reader might ask, should the rules be followed? The answer is usually “because” — as in, “because I say so.” This, of course, is where humanity found itself…

Oil Scarff/Getty Images Time is seen in a particularly different light by Eastern and Western cultures, and even within these groupings assumes quite dissimilar aspects from country to country. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States and Mexico employ time in such diametrically opposing manners…

The player kicked the ball. The patient kicked the habit. The villain kicked the bucket. The verbs are the same. The syntax is identical. Does the brain notice, or care, that the first is literal, the second metaphorical, the third idiomatic? I t sounds like a question that only a linguist could…

Translating your app is a great way of reaching more users and increasing revenue. But in order to create beautiful language versions of your app, you need more than just a reliable translation partner, you need code that is fit for localisation. In this blog post, we want to highlight the three…