C ’est un étrange phénomène qui se répand dans certains squares. Les bancs, initialement prévus pour que les parents discutent en retrait, se vident. Les adultes restent collés au toboggan ou à l’échelle de corde. « Tu veux que je te tienne ? » « Fais attention ! » Pas question de risquer une chute,…

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the online shoe and clothing store, lives in a trailer park in downtown Las Vegas. The Airstream Park , as it’s called, occupies about half a city block, surrounded by a tall fence crowned with barbed wire and punctuated with palm trees. When I arrived in April,…

I've always loved the idea of someone else making a mixtape for me. When I was in middle school and until the first year of high school, we didn't have the Internet at home. My parents were against buying me a PC; they thought it was a waste of time. Unlike many of my friends, I depended on books…

Today the National Academy of Sciences released a 420-page response to public concerns about “genetically modified organisms” (GMOs) in agriculture. The report is a leap forward in the discussion, capturing a comprehensive review of two decades of scientific literature as well as perspectives from…

foreign accent. “Could you take me to Bishop’s Beach?” says the young woman with long, dark hair and a shy smile as she climbs into my car,stomping mud from her boots. Though it’s a long way from tourist season, she introduces herself as a traveler. It’s an interesting time for a visit to this small…

Get Noticed Get Noticed The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex Don’t fall into the trap of being an expert before you’re ready. We have enough of those. 0 As editor of 99U, my inbox is (thankfully) filled with pitches of all kinds. Mainly, writers who’d like to contribute to this site and…

I am terrible at sharing the bed. When my boyfriend travels out of town, my first thought is how much space I will take up in the bed while he’s gone. I know people who claim to sleep on their same side when their partners are gone, the place reserved for the body of their loved one like the seat at…

A re-creation of the plutonium core that briefly went critical on May 21, 1946, resulting in the death of the Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin. Photograph courtesy Los Alamos National Laboratory The demonstration began on the afternoon of May 21, 1946, at a secret laboratory tucked into a…

Anechoic chamber - This room has long wedges of foam all over the walls so there are no echoes. Image credit: Gillie Rhodes, Flickr.com Echo chambers are a hot topic in the online science community of late. I recently wrote a blog post about whether science blogs are echo chambers , and that post…

Once upon a time, a friend of mine accidentally took over thousands of computers. He had found a vulnerability in a piece of software and started playing with it. In the process, he figured out how to get total administration access over a network. He put it in a script, and ran it to see what would…

Elena Scotti/FUSION Cecilia Bleasdale was mulling over an outfit for her daughter Grace’s wedding, at a Roman Originals store about 30 minutes outside of Liverpool in early February 2015. The 57-year-old snapped photos of three possible dresses and texted them to Grace. Bleasdale decided on the blue…

I n 2012, network scientist and data theorist Samuel Arbesman published a disturbing thesis: What we think of as established knowledge decays over time. According to his book “The Half-Life of Facts,” certain kinds of propositions that may seem bulletproof today will be forgotten by next Tuesday;…

B ertrand Russell famously said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.” Over the years, I’ve hammered on the importance of becoming comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity , in questioning all of your most…

Photo The author’s daughter pretending to run the controls of a space shuttle at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Credit Well Family Welcome to Well Family, Well’s new home for news about parenting, child health and relationships with advice from our experts to help every family live well. Sign up for…

M uch of the recent debate about string theory and the scientific method derives from the mis-use or mis-interpretation of the word ‘theory’. Scientific theorizing follows a logical progression from idea to hypothesis to theory, and I argue that a fully-fledged scientific theory must be grounded in…

arxiv/WIRED In the early days of the Internet, scientists erected their own online network, a digital utopia that still stands today. Here, astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, computational biologists, and computer scientists come together to discuss heady, cosmic topics. They exchange…

Lots of good advice here, much of it applicable well outside academic science: https://t.co/ztAgOIvP0y

This is the third in a series of dialogues with philosophers and critical theorists on the question of violence. This conversation is with Zygmunt Bauman, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, Britain. His latest book, “Strangers at Our Door” is published with Polity Press.…

SIXTY is not the new 40. Fifty isn’t either. Your lung capacity in late-middle age is in steady decline, as are the fast-twitch muscle fibers that provide power and speed. Your heart capacity has been ebbing for decades. Your sight has been getting worse, your other senses, too, and this, along with…

Most of the matter in the Universe is invisible, composed of some substance that leaves no mark as it breezes through us – and through all of the detectors the scientists have created to catch it. But this dark matter might not consist of unseen particle clouds, as most theorists have assumed.…

Non sono mai stato un grande fan delle manifestazioni del 25 aprile — non ho nonni partigiani, non è una cultura che ho vissuto, da piccolo, in casa mia. Tutto ciò che so della Resistenza, come tanto altro, viene dai libri, che è poi il mio modo, spesso insufficiente, di imparare le cose. Non sarà…

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY THE DICE LAB Earlier this spring, at a mathematical circus of a conference in the basement ballroom of Atlanta’s Ritz-Carlton, two scientists from the Dice Lab, Robert Fathauer and Henry Segerman, débuted their newest specimen, fresh from the petri dish. They had invented—or,…

These steamy months, now coming to an end, provide a hothouse for the idylls of scientific research. Illustration by Keith Negley Patrick Honner, a math teacher at Brooklyn Technical High School, arrived at a recent class seemingly unprepared. This was surprising, given that, days before, he had…

(Photo by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post) When I read the following post, I was chagrined to see myself in it. Are you? Here’s why you need to change your tune. This was written by Petra Bonfert-Taylor, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College and a 2016 Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd…

M orale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN. Their corner of the office is loud; their desks are scattered with…

io9 Was Founded on the Idea That Science Fiction Belongs to Everyone https://t.co/8myOC0WcT2

Forse è stata un’illusione, ma molto realistica. Quella di poter spegnere lo schermo della banalità piovuta dall’alto. Di svestire gli abiti dello spettatore passivo e trasformarsi in Indiana Jones della conoscenza: piccoli esploratori che scoprivano il mondo attraverso Internet, avanzando in…

L ast fall, my daughter Veronica got an idea for the seventh grade science fair at her school. She’d compare different ways to clean a toothbrush. First she’d take a new toothbrush out of a package and brush her teeth, covering it with her mouth bacteria . Then, she’d clean it with one of three…

NGC 3597, seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image, is the product of a collision between two good-sized galaxies, and is slowly evolving to become a giant elliptical galaxy. ESA/NASA Many of my non-believer colleagues would think it foolish to step onto a stage with a high-ranking Vatican cardinal…

!!! Clive James on binge-watching and GAME OF THRONES, in The New Yorker. https://t.co/QJuMoeIAQe

The rise of social networks such as Facebook which encourage people to post short-updates have contributed to the demise of the blog. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images Once upon a time, weblogs were the future of media. Between 2002 and 2006, it seemed you could hardly move a digital muscle…

Andrés Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time. Versión en español It was just before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico . Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a…

Vandana Shiva accuses multinational corporations such as Monsanto of attempting to impose “food totalitarianism” on the world. Illustration by Jason Seiler / Reference: Amanda Edwards / WireImage Early this spring, the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva led an unusual pilgrimage across southern…

Petrini aggiorna il suo manifesto, “Buono, pulito e giusto”. Qualche refuso in meno, una spolverata di elogio dei migranti, ma restano le solite bufale su Ogm e “agroindustria”. Altrimenti il castello chic crolla. di Luca Simonetti 2 Aprile 2016 alle 08:00 Forse non tutti lo sanno, ma Slow Food,…

L ike many wealthy people, Jonathan Blow vividly remembers the moment he became rich. At the time, in late 2008, he was $40,000 in debt and living in a modest San Francisco apartment, having just spent more than three years meticulously refining his video game, Braid —an innovative time-warping…

The following is an edited, updated version of an article originally written for IEEE Spectrum. I’m 62, with all that entails. Grey hair, trick knee, trickier memory. I still play a mean game of hockey, but entropy looms ever larger. So part of me wants very much to believe that we are rapidly…

Why do so many digital assistants have feminine names? (The dek on this is perfect.) https://t.co/2U2to9nBZW

Brilliant article on #AppleVsFBI concludes that the core of the case "is not primarily technical, but political" https://t.co/nM0XB5FeQd