Tweet
Living ‘off the grid’ can entail going without some common luxuries.
Eric Valli spent 3 years taking photos of people in the United States who have “decided to live light on the earth.” The photographs are terrific. It looks like Valli spent time with two clans: a frontier/settler type group, and another group that look almost [...]
Tweet
Ancient people ate far differently than we do.
While we may brush and floss tirelessly and our dentists may regularly scrape and pick at our teeth to minimize the formation of plaque known as tartar or dental calculus, anthropologists may be rejoicing at the fact that past civilizations were not so careful with their dental hygiene…
Tweet
What other things can we cure with lollipops?
A 13-year-old girl from Connecticut named Mallory Kievman has come up with a pretty clever cure for hiccups: vinegar lollipops! She developed the idea after researching various at-home remedies—a teaspoon of vinegar, hard candy, etc—as well as the physiological reason for a bout of hiccups.
Mallory explained to the [...]
Tweet
The Scream sets a new record!
If he were alive, Edvard Munch would’ve screamed. You see, his iconic painting The Scream (the pastel version – one of four that Edvard has drawn) has just sold for a record $120 million at auction to an anonymous buyer.
The other three versions of The Scream are all owned by [...]
Tweet
A new first for a private spaceship.
You are looking at the first private spaceship that will dock with the International Space Station: a SpaceX Dragon on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s the beginning of the future of manned space travel, people…
Tweet
Doc Searls says our current ‘attention economy’ should be switched to an ‘intention economy’.
Every day companies are spending gobs of money to earn and keep your attention. Advertisers are collecting heaps of information about you in the hopes of presenting you with more targeted advertisements: advertisements on which you’ll want to click. Yet despite all [...]
Tweet
How does power get from there to here?
Electricity is generated at power plants. You know that already. But to really understand how it gets to your house—and why you can count on it getting there reliably—you have to understand that our electric system is more complicated than it looks. The electric grid isn’t just about [...]
Tweet
Function words – those unassuming “filler” words like the, this, though, I, an, there, and, that – are mightier than you think. For one, they’re a very good predictor of sex and love.
Yes, sex and love. Now that I’ve got your attention, on to the story of how analyzing the patterns of the use of [...]
Tweet
One billion dollars neatly stacked.
With all the chatter about Billion dollar valuations — like Instagram, Evernote, Splunk — combined with recent S1 filings and IPOs, the topic of tech company valuation is coming to the forefront of people’s minds. Specifically related to the software industry, the growing number of SaaS IPO candidates of late is [...]
Tweet
The Higgs Boson is kind of a big deal. If it does exist, it could provide a key to unifying the standard and quantum models of physics. But what is a Higgs Boson, what does it do, and how does it work? With the help of this animated short, UCI physics professor Daniel Whiteson breaks [...]
Tweet
The languages you know affect how you think.
Back in 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the economics Nobel Prize for showing that human beings don’t have a really good intuitive grasp of risk. Basically, the decisions we make when faced with a risky proposition depend more on how the question is framed than on what the [...]
Tweet
Futurist Thomas Frey: Every couple years, as the November election draws near, my wife Deb and I receive our ballots in the mail. Both of us spend considerable time studying the issues and candidates before making our final decisions. As with most couples, we don’t always agree.
Tweet
Sucks for American clean tech. Never mind that the industry is pretty universally regarded as one of tomorrow’s most important drivers of job growth and innovation—the already too-meager, maddeningly scattershot government support for clean energy is about to dry up altogether. So, goodbye ARPA-E?
David Roberts points us to this graph from a newish report from [...]
Tweet
How much time do you have to read the privacy policies you encounter?
In The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies, by Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, the authors calculate that the average Internet user would have to spend one full working month per year in order to skim all the Internet privacy policies she [...]
Tweet
From left: physicists Luis Delgado-Aparicio and David Gates.
Physicists have discovered a possible solution to a mystery that has long baffled researchers working to harness fusion. If confirmed by experiment, the finding could help scientists eliminate a major impediment to the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for producing electric power…
