By tracking the movements of cell phone users in Kenya for nearly one year, between 2008 and 2009, scientists fleshed out travel patterns of a disease that killed about 665,000 people the following year – "mostly in Africa":http://www.who.int/mediace…
After a decade of hearings and British court appeals per Gary Mckinnon's extradition to the United States to be tried for the biggest military hacking incident the U.S. Justice Department had ever seen.
Having whole-heartedly employed "drones":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/6/20/who-the-hell-knows-how-many-civilians-drones-have-killed for air strikes, the U.S. military is now embarking on a project to put autonomous robots on the ground to serve a…
Hackers, the phantoms of the opera of the Internet, have had an enormous impact on the rich narrative of our online reality. The video below, the first episode of "Net Cafe" from 1996, begins by describing "the first time the CIA website got hacked":…
Looks like that news spike about those hackers taking Romney's tax records for ransom has dampened. Waiting on hands and knees for a comment from a Romney campaign spokesperson, I've come across Death and Taxes speculation as well as The Tennessean
Some of the most powerful images in the United States come from the clean white rows of headstones in Arlington National Cemetery. But as haunting and pride-inducing those "'gardens of stone'":http://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Image.aspx?ID=2814e6f8-4…
Everybody loves an election year. The campaign volunteers are out and about, wearing matching T-shirts, holding clipboards and sticking lawn signs into the dirt. The TV is buzzing with the latest scooplet about this candidate's silly gaffe or that ca…
YouTube user/rocket scientist Ben Krasnow put up an amazing demonstration of how a hybrid rocket works, complete with a clear acrylic motor that lets you see the action. It's an example of a "hybrid rocket":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_rocket
I have at least eight different emails, most of which I never use, but they've all got gigabytes of storage that's slowly filling up all the time. For $25 a year, Flickr stores as many gigabytes of photographs I can produce. Meanwhile, for the small
As Bitfloor.com (the U.S.' largest Bitcoin site) services have come grinding to a halt in the wake of a "$250,000 theft of its currency":http://www.techspot.com/news/50043-bitfloor-breached-hacker-makes-off-with-250000-in-bitcoins.html, two questions…
The fun-loving, government oppression-hating hackers at AntiSec are back in action with the release of over a million Apple user IDs. The encrypted file hit the web late Monday night along with a characteristic rant against everything from the NSA to…
The 3D-printing gun enthusiasts are at it again coming up with master plans to democratize weapons manufacturing, and this time, they're doing it in the name of the First Amendment. That's right. The Second Amendment is important too, but if you list…
The only thing holding me back from being a cyborg -- aside from cost, science, a robo-averse girlfriend, and a fear of being stared at -- is the fact that once you go bot, you probably can't go back. I like being flesh and blood, even if my old sack…
Anonymous, the world's preeminent becostumed online activist group, is going after pedophiles again. Never mind that the name of the project, Operation PedoChat, sounds almost as creepy as the assholes they're attacking—Anonymous is aiming to shut do…
Tomorrow, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is set to announce some of the most highly-anticipated — and poorly-embargoed - findings in recent memory: evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson. Now, we won’t know for sure until…
Japan is well-known for spawning multitudes of sub-cultures within any cultural sphere, be it music, fashion, and even cars. Japanese car culture, tortured movies like Tokyo Drift aside, is filled with so many derivatives, offshoots, and homages that…
The vast majority of technological progress effects our above-ground environs. Which makes sense, because that's where we live. And the great bulk of tech innovation these days is a mad dash to improve our relationship with the environment we routine…
Google is no longer satisfied with being the largest search engine on the web, as well as the most visited website on the Internet. It now wants to save users the time it takes to click on outbound links by directly providing answers as well.
Last Thursday, Beijing showed off what might be a new tool in its war on information. At around 11am China time, Internet users on the mainland found themselves unable to access multiple foreign websites and a number of Chinese sites, including Sina'…
I've always been fascinated by Occupy Wall Street's "Bat Signal," a projected "99%" blasted onto buildings as a rallying cry that first appeared in mid-November 2011. It reminded me of Graffiti Research Lab's "Laser Tag project":http://www.graffitire…
Before "Anonymous and LulzSec":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/12/21/2011-was-the-year-of-anonymous, before "warez":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez bulletin boards, before logins and passwords, before everything, there was phreaking. The first…
The brilliantly crazy -- or is it crazily brilliant? -- people behind Jodi have no respect for the Internet. Wait, that's not quite right. They have no respect for the stale, rigid collar corporate mouthpiece that the Internet has become. By aggressi…
The most ubiquitous images of Africa usually include a scorched, barren landscape and some insanely thin babies. People starving. No food. And one usually gets the impression that we -- the West -- must swoop in and save the day. "Let us feed those b…
