Virtual reality offers enormous potential for journalism.

Elon Musk’s ambitious plan to dig tunnels beneath pretty much everything is catching on.

That student was admitted by unanimous vote of the admissions committee.

As humanity’s greatest incubator of comedic gems, the internet has birthed a thousand kittens and inner-monologuing dogs.

one particular book shop in Australia has embraced the exact opposite policy – instead of focusing on the cover, they want people to focus on the contents without even knowing what the cover looks like.

The SpaceX landing Thursday evening marked the first time in history that a rocket was used to put a satellite into geostationary orbit and then return to Earth.

Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions has completed its review of applications for the Class of 2021 and has offered admission to 2,272 students from a pool of 32,900 applicants. With Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin colleges scheduled to open in fall 2017, the incoming freshman class will be the largest in Yale College history —  with approximately 1550 students, 15% larger than recent classes.

Chiang’s story is driven by the obsolescence of the virtual world that is the host platform for the digients, who can continue to exist as social beings only if their software engine is ported to its successor. Unfortunately, their parent corporation has gone bankrupt and so porting the software is not commercially viable. The digients, who are themselves clamoring for individual liberties—you can think of them as woke Tamagotchi—have become what the industry would term abandonware. It is thus left to their small circle of caretakers and enthusiasts to create an incentive for the port—for example, by licensing the digients to a company specializing in artificial sex partners. In all cases, however, the real value of the digients turns out to be their accumulated experiential history as sentient lifeforms.

Feral spambooks will deploy probabilistic text generators seeded with the contents of your own ebook library to write a thousand vacuous and superficially attractive nuisance texts … They’ll slide them into your ebook library disguised as free samples, with titles and author names that are random permutations of legitimate works, then sell advertising slots in these false texts to offshore spam marketplaces.5

This is something the digients of Chiang’s story would understand very well, for their existence is continually imperiled by the limited capacity of the virtual worlds they inhabit to render their digital selfhood across changing platforms.

“The current measures are not an acceptable long-term solution to whatever threat they are trying to mitigate. Even in the short term it is difficult to understand their effectiveness. And the commercial distortions they create are severe,” said IATA director general Alexandre de Juniac.

In 1990, eight shades — maize, lemon yellow, blue gray, raw umber, green blue, orange red, orange yellow and violet blue — were retired and eight new ones, including the yellow hue known as dandelion, were introduced.

After 27 years, the crayon color dandelion is taking a retirement, making way for an upstart in the blue family

“It blew my mind,” recalled Giacobbe. He hadn’t called Alitalia directly in years. He was accustomed to almost always relying on Skyscanner for the best deal.

Unfortunately, rider Nick Bull wasn't quite prepared for the moment that Shamrock, a 9-year-old bay gelding, decided to kick their ride up a notch.

But for the many tourists who visit Madidi National Park, the crown jewel of Bolivia’s protected rainforests, an excursion into its depths is not so much a danger but an exhilarating prospect.

Small, portable medical devices can offer patient's newfound mobility. Engineers at the University of Pittsburgh developed an artificial lung that can be carried in a patient’s backpack. Trials have so far shown that the device works on sheep and could offer relief and mobility for people who suffer from lung failure.

Duquesne University announced plans to close its press in February, explaining that it could no longer justify the annual subsidy of more than $200,000.

“Stentor” sounds like a dinosaur or a minor He-Man villain. But in fact the stentor is one of the strangest, most mysterious organisms on Earth, and it just might be swimming in a pond near you.

This weekend saw a new eruption from Kambalny in southern Kamchatka. Now, the Kamchatka Peninsula is a very volcanically active area, with multiple eruptions going on simultaneously much of the time. There are certain volcanoes that are in almost-constant unrest, like Shiveluch, Kliuchevskoi, and Karymsky. However, Kambalny is not one of the usual suspects for activity.

If The Lego Batman Movie taught us anything, it’s that things don’t have to be this way.

DC’s only option was to focus on the fact that its movies had the brooding, “real” heroes, the ones with dysfunctional home lives and drinking problems who only come out at night. (Shout out to Suicide Squad!)

Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa) may trade some zingers, but they do it in monochromatic outfits … at night … on rock formations roughly the color of slate. And nearly every other scene hews to the same palette.

A U.S. Supreme Court decision on cheerleader uniform design copyrights will expand the number of 3-D printed objects with intellectual property protection, attorneys told Bloomberg BNA March 22.

President Trump’s childhood home in Queens has been sold, in a transaction facilitated by a lawyer who specializes in shepherding real estate investments made by overseas Chinese buyers.

NASA caught a glimpse of Jupiter on Monday, as its Juno orbiter passed the red planet at 4.52 a.m. EST.

To create it, Musk has said that he thinks we will probably have to inject a computer interface into the jugular where it will travel into the brain and unfold into a mesh of electric connections that connect directly to the neurons.

Elon Musk’s neural lace project could turn us all into cyborgs, and he says that it’s only four or five years away.

The approach has also allowed Newman’s marketing team to learn what readers are interested in between the publication events, providing feedback to reporters and editors so that the next release of content reflects the priorities readers have stated.

the internet giant is "exploring" the possibility of appliance and furniture stores with a technological angle.

For those who enter two-year schools, less than a third will have graduated in three years.

librarians can do more to promote information literacy.

Librarians are gearing up for a “marathon” effort to preserve federal funding for libraries, research, the arts and the humanities.

This bird was thought to have been extinct for 100 years, with the creature passing into birding legend. Now, researchers have announced that they have found a population of the rare parrots hiding deep in the bush of Western Australia.

It means papers reporting Gates-sponsored research cannot be charged for.

One of Musk’s biggest goals with SpaceX is to get humans to Mars by 2025, nearly a decade ahead of NASA’s current plan.

The big idea is providing superyacht owners with flexibility after their (generally) huge yachts are finished.

Apple is reportedly working to bring a number of features to the iPhone and eventually develop wearable, wireless glasses that display content in augmented reality.

Empire Strikes Back is the rare sequel that manages to outshine its predecessor.

As film genres go, science fiction is often the one that’s hardest for folks to get into. Literal-minded moviegoers often have a hard time with worlds where anything—and everything—is possible and, well, some people just don’t like space.

Information literacy is not just a set of skills that are “nice to have”; such skills are truly a necessity of modern life.

Meta, with the stated intent of making the “AI-powered research search engine…free to all in a few months after enhancing the product.”

ittle direct indication that the Trump administration or congressional leaders known for attacking scientific research on climate change and human health are looking to exploit reproducibility campaigns as a political opportunity.

“The best way to see the planet’s surface would be to take a digital image and enhance it on your computer,”

these planets are so close that some scientists think microbes could potentially hop from planet to planet and colonize the system outright.

Today marks 28 years since I submitted my original proposal for the worldwide web.

Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future, Copyright © 2017

At The New Yorker, it is a copy editor’s duty to deploy the serial comma, along with lots of other lip-smacking bits of punctuation, as a bulwark against barbarianism.

Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine – enough to kill him twice over – in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.

most envisage that she will die after a short illness.

Supermassive black holes sit at the center of nearly every massive galaxy situated in the universe.

The ring of material created from the Sun’s interaction with Phoebe results in the largest, most diffuse and outermost ring known anywhere in the Solar System.

In 1671, Giovanni Cassini gazed through a telescope at Saturn, and discovered a number of incredible wonders: the famed gap in its rings, detailed band structures in its atmosphere, and a number of moons.

It really is the reach, though, that makes it so spectacular.

clip of a father in South Korea commenting on the removal of once-President Park Geun-hye, only to be interrupted on live TV by his kids breaking into his home office.

President Donald Trump relishes the comforts of his Mar-a-Lago estate for repeated weekends away from Washington, but former Secret Service and intelligence officials say the resort is a security nightmare vulnerable to both casual and professional spies.

ingested its 100 millionth content asset.

A new virtual reality app aims to make this learning process much easier and even fun.

a big rainstorm and take a deep whiff of that fresh, earthy smell, you're mostly smelling a chemical called geosmin.

As the first woman in American car design, she paired natural creativity with the hustle that would define her career.

“beauty parlor stroke syndrome.”

fast radio bursts sweeping across outer space have puzzled scientists for years, but some scientists are examining the possibility that these millisecond-long radio emission flashes come from advanced alien technology in extragalactic civilizations.

Bio-Response, based in Danville, Indiana, specializes in building machines for liquid cremation, a fast, environmentally-friendly, and controversial method for disposing of the deceased.

Pangolin

That’s exactly what March Mammal Madness has done

Ready to fly, drive and take the train to work? Airbus and Italdesign have taken the wraps off an incredible pod design that combines all three into the last vehicle you could ever need. The Pop.up system is a concept that combines artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and Hyperloop into a futuristic machine designed to traverse cities at speed.

Together, they plotted how they could take leading-edge machine-learning techniques and superimpose them on the universe.

we find Rick and Michonne far from home, searching for guns and living out of the Mystery Machine’s seedier cousin.

The federal government dug the pilot’s approach.

Bringing Bridj to Kansas City seemed like a no-brainer to transit officials. For just $1.50, anyone could use an app to summon a ride downtown in van that would follow a route calculated on the fly by an algorithm. No one within the service area was ever more than a 10 minute walk from a stop, and as an added incentive, your first 10 rides were free.

It’s interesting that places like Stanford or Harvard, where Facebook was launched in a dorm room in a similar tale to Snap, Inc (right down to the lawsuit), are considered our top educational institutions when we know that the chief benefit of going to such a place is not necessarily the learning that happens, but the chance to rub elbows with people from well-resourced backgrounds.

Elsevier is doing just that in their analysis of 20 years of global research from a gender perspective, published today

The Club, which charges $40 per visit and has locations at 9 airports  in the US. In my experience, these lounges are rarely crowded, and relatively nice. There are also Escape Lounges in the U.S. and the U.K.

cultural heritage informatics, which looks at the relationships between cultural heritage, social memory, and digital technologies.

combination of digital and analog, Mr. Boahen said, is "fundamental to the difference between the computer and the brain."

speed of transistors — computerization’s fundamental building blocks — is hitting a wall.

My own view of where academic book publishing is heading is that it will mostly continue to publish the kinds of things it does now, but there will be increasing experimentation with formats, a renewed interest in selling directly to libraries, and enlarged activity in D2C — selling directly to end-users.

The listing represented an extraordinary opportunity in American history, one facilitated by both modern technology and a president with a large real estate portfolio: a chance for travelers to book a room in a building housing the president’s family — one of the most secure buildings in New York City, if not the world — with nothing more than the click of a mouse.

“The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition.”

The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning.

Much greater portions of the day are now spent on what’s called “seat work” (a term that probably doesn’t need any exposition) and a form of tightly scripted teaching known as direct instruction, formerly used mainly in the older grades, in which a teacher carefully controls the content and pacing of what a child is supposed to learn.

with the publication of the “New Oxford Shakespeare”, they have shaped the debate about authorship in Elizabethan England. 

By the time the staff at New Zealand’s National Aquarium noticed that he was missing, telltale suction cup prints were the main clue to an easily solved mystery.

Using data from the open access journal PLOS ONE, we highlight the need for a reference database of research organisations through analysis of author affiliation strings on articles published between 2006-2016.

In a remote, mist-wrapped island north of the eastern tip of Siberia, a small group of woolly mammoths became the last survivors of their once thriving species.

On the morning of Feb. 23, 1987, a couple of dozen subatomic particles known as neutrinos zinged through specially instrumented underground sensors in Japan, Ohio and Russia.

Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is.

The London transport manager has created a ‘Walk the Tube’ map, which shows how long it takes to totter between stations.

The tech company is still preparing itself for what’s next—whether it’s virtual reality or a Matrix-like pill with which one could hallucinate entertainment.

Superman is soft science fiction treading the line into fantasy. He’s more Star Wars than Star Trek,

It may be time to view the PDF and all the other pedestrian and popular imprints of the typographic mind with a smidge more respect.

Batman v. Superman:

Hacked medical devices make for scary headlines.

a group of wild turkeys bizarrely circling a deceased cat in the street.

Madagascar hissing cockroach curling up in the most adorable way as its owner gives him water.

A UConn engineering professor has uncovered new information about how particles behave in our bloodstream, an important advancement that could help pharmaceutical scientists develop more effective cancer drugs.

why are people so fixated on coal jobs anyway?

online exercises about "metaliteracy" — an extension of information literacy that recognizes students’ roles as both creators and consumers of online content.

Teaching students to separate fact from fiction has become a priority after an election in which false "news" played a large role.

The system that delivers fresh salad greens like clockwork to the nation's grocery stores is breaking down slightly.

Eve Marder, a neurobiologist at Brandeis University and a deputy editor at eLife, says that around one third of reviewers under her purview sign their reviews.

If Kriegeskorte is invited by a journal to write a review, first he decides whether he’s interested enough to review it. If so, he checks whether there’s a preprint available—basically a final draft of the manuscript posted publicly online on one of several preprint servers like arxiv and biorxiv. This is crucial. Writing about a manuscript that he’s received in confidence from a journal editor would break confidentiality—talking about a paper before the authors are ready. If there’s a preprint, great. He reviews the paper, posts to his blog, and also sends the review to the journal editor.

The tweet linked to the blog of a neuroscientist named Niko Kriegeskorte, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in the UK who, since December 2015, has performed all of his peer review openly.

Evergreen Review, the legendary counterculture and literary quarterly

how the world gasped when Boston Dynamics dropped a video of its newest bot, Handle, this week.

cloud storage service S3, which Amazon confirmed is experiencing “high error rates,”

The latest figures by the Duke Reporters' Lab indicate there are 114 dedicated fact-checking teams in 47 countries.

Through Ebook Central, ProQuest will manage rights and licenses associated with these e-textbooks, which will be accessible online or downloadable onto a student’s preferred device, including smartphones or tablets.

SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company headed by Elon Musk, wants to send a couple of tourists around the moon and back to Earth before the end of next year.

A group of German and South African researchers studied fetuses and determined that right- or left-handedness develops in the womb.

Dinosaur 13 tells the story of a group of geologists, led by Peter Larson, who dug up the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever found.

But don’t discount Netflix for beautifully shot science documentaries on everything from microbes to food to the mysteries of space.

Get a tour bus full of unsuspecting movie fans and tell them they’re going to get to see a special exhibit about the Oscars. Then: Surprise! After winding their way through a backstage labyrinth, they’re at the Oscars. For real!

To some degree, the challenge Spicer and other press aides face is unique — they are working for a president who takes an unusually intense interest in the work his communications office does. Trump is known to watch Spicer’s daily press briefings while eating lunch in the White House dining room.

Uber's self-driving car program, suspended in San Francisco two months ago, had mapping problems that caused the cars to run at least six red lights in the city, the New York Times reports.

Menlo Park-based LeoLabs currently tracks some 13,000 objects in low Earth orbit — a zone that extends from about 100 miles to 1,200 miles away from the Earth’s surface and is home to the International Space Station, Hubble Space Telescope and many hundreds of commercial satellites.

The Yale Science Building will be a seven-level structure that includes a rooftop greenhouse, aquatics and insect labs, state-of-the-art imaging technology, a quantitative biology center, innovative physics labs, and a 500-seat lecture hall. It has an expected completion date of late 2019.

A definition like that will let a lot more of the solar system’s bits of rocky debris count as planets.

I learn from space.com that a research group is going to try to get a new geophysical definition of the word planet approved by the International Astronomical Union, and is drafting it in a way that will allow Pluto to count as a planet once more. (It lost that status in 2006 and was reclassified as a dwarf planet.)

The club, F.H. King Students for Sustainable Agriculture, provides students with, among other things, fresh produce from the student-maintained farm,

A recent piece in the Charleston Gazette-Mail about the press that I direct, while oriented toward regional audiences, is the sort of thing I have in mind. The interview Peter Berkery and Fred Nachbaur did with Publishing Perspectives last fall is also good.

Inside Higher Ed made factually incorrect statements about the state of university press publishing.

“fausse nouvelle.”

The biggest challenge in building an autonomous vehicle is giving the car the ability to see the world. It requires a thorough understanding of lidar, the radar-like system of lasers that creates the digital map each car needs to navigate the world safely and competently.

VX, a nerve agent that the United Nations classifies as a weapon of mass destruction.

The exhibit’s centerpiece, however, was a gargantuan slab of Titanic’s hull, known as the “big piece,” that weighs 15 tons and was, after several mishaps, hoisted by crane from the seabed in 1998. Studded with rivets, ribbed with steel, this monstrosity of black metal reminded me of a T. rex at a natural history museum: impossibly huge, pinned and braced at great expense—an extinct species hauled back from a lost world.

we’ve mainly glimpsed the site as though through a keyhole, our view limited by the dreck suspended in the water and the ambit of a submersible’s lights.

What emerged was a prototype for a feature that could let blind or visually impaired people put their fingers over an image and have their phones read them a description of what’s happening.

Facebook has built its neural net so it will work on the phone itself.

“Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger, you may not realize it, but your experiences are being powered by AI.”

you can leave a comment a few inches below this text, email or tweet at me through the links a few inches above it, or react to it with an emoji on Facebook. Some random Twitter bots will tweet the link, advertisers will track its success, and sophisticated search engines will rank it.

One of those worlds, TRAPPIST-1e, might be the vacation hotspot of the future.

Some fans of both fantasy and science fiction will cite the 2004 Best Picture win for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King as the compensation for Star Wars not winning in 1978 since Hobbits fighting off a dark lord is the closest thing to Jedi Knights and Darth Vader.

n 1978, the indisputably most popular science fiction movie of all time — Star Wars — was nominated for Best Picture at the 50th Academy Awards, but it lost to Annie Hall.