The Weakest Link is Motherboard's third, annual theme week dedicated to the future of hacking and cybersecurity. Follow along here . At 3:15 a.m. local Italian time on July 5, 2015, the usually quiet Twitter account of the infamous spyware company Hacking Team posted a confusing message: “Since we…

As you travel this holiday season, bouncing from airport to airplane to hotel, you’ll likely find yourself facing a familiar quandary: Do I really trust this random public Wi-Fi network ? As recently as a couple of years ago, the answer was almost certainly a resounding no. But in the year of our…

Note. This post had a great response on Reddit with over 300 comments . I’ve added an update section to the end of this post to address some of the main criticisms. A visual programming language is one that allows the programmer to create programs by manipulating graphical elements rather than…

In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to protect children from failure in order to safeguard their fragile self-esteem. This seems logical – failure is unpleasant. It tends to make you look bad, you have negative feelings of disappointment and frustration, and you often have to start…

The first time I encountered Michael Laufer, he was throwing thousands of dollars worth of homemade medicine into a packed audience at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), a biennial conference in New York City. “Does anyone here suffer from anaphylactic shock and not have access to epinephrine?” Laufer…

Arizona skies: astronomy contributes $250 million annually to the state’s economy.Photograph: Bureau of Land Management T ake a nighttime drive into Arizona Sky Village, in a remote valley in south-east Arizona , and the only thing you can see clearly are the millions of stars twinkling overhead.…

On a warm Phoenix night five years ago, Aaron Cashatt walked down the red-carpeted hall of the second floor of a Marriott hotel, trying to move casually despite the adrenaline and methamphetamine surging through his bloodstream. Six feet tall with blond, close-cropped hair, he wore a black sports…

Paul Simon felt grateful. It was March 2001, and the occasion was the 16th-annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, held at the Waldorf Astoria in midtown Manhattan. Along with another honoree that night, Michael Jackson, Simon joined an elite group of artists that has been inducted…

What if you could lose weight and reduce your risk of life-threatening disease without any changes in what you eat — other than a five-day special diet once every few months? That’s what happened for 71 adults placed on three cycles of a low-calorie, “fasting-mimicking” diet. The phase II trial,…

Geoff Johnson for POLITICO Irakli Loladze is a mathematician by training, but he was in a biology lab when he encountered the puzzle that would change his life. It was in 1998, and Loladze was studying for his Ph.D. at Arizona State University. Against a backdrop of glass containers glowing with…

I’ve been going to the Waffle House since I was 15. I grew up in rural Virginia and we would all leave work and go to my house, which everyone called the Brock Hotel, to drink beer. We had this huge porch overlooking the police station and we had an old-school 1960s fridge with a Brock Trucking…

Bone broth has become so popular these days that the bones used to make it are getting harder — and more expensive — for broth retailers to source. Alex Reynolds/NPR Dear dogs of America — sorry about bone broth. Since this well-marketed take on an ancient beverage started sweeping hip enclaves like…