April 22, 2017

Move over Touch ID—Mastercard is building fingerprint scanners directly into their cards.



Rare supernova discovery ushers in new era for cosmology.



Please, God, Stop Chelsea Clinton from Whatever She Is Doing.



Vulgar: Language generator.



Literacy Privilege: How I Learned to Check Mine.



Dual Bowls: Striking Mixed Metal Bowls Forged With the Ancient Art of Sand-Casting.



Fire discipline.



April 21, 2017

Explaining science won’t fix information illiteracy.



Naked mole-rats survive in low oxygen by metabolizing fructose like plants.



Water is streaming across Antarctica. New survey finds liquid flow more widespread than thought.



What would people do if they had superpowers?



Of course, we don’t divide women into classes of Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives, and Wives; we call them “the help,” “surrogates,” the working class, and the one percent.



In Jail, Pads and Tampons as Bargaining Chips.



Meet the Helicopter That’s More Expensive Than the F-35.



April 20, 2017

The Isolation of Aging in an Auto-Oriented Place.



The Trouble with Innocence.



You’re Not Mad at United Airlines; You’re Mad at America.



Beyond right or wrong, beyond fact or fake, lies sincerity.



The trees that make Southern California shady and green are dying. Fast.



Feds knew of 700 Wells Fargo whistleblower cases in 2010.



Trillions of Plastic Bits, Swept Up by Current, Are Littering Arctic Waters.



How Florida Entraps Pain Patients, Forces Them to Snitch, Then Locks Them Up for Decades.



Here’s the Biggest Study Yet on Brain-Based Sex Differences. Note that physiological differences don’t necessarily mean much, and that these can still be culturally-caused.



April 19, 2017

The American Dream Is Killing Us.



Trobairitz.



Vanguard Is Growing Faster Than Everybody Else Combined.



Whistleblower uncovers London police hacking of journalists and protestors.



When Rising Seas Transform Risk Into Certainty. Along parts of the East Coast, the entire system of insuring coastal property is beginning to break down.



Navy drone software brings us one step closer to robot-filled skies.



For the first time in the U.S., a doctor is charged with female genital mutilation. Here’s how the law came to be.



When a health start-up “moves fast and breaks things,” it can directly result in the death, dismemberment, and injury of real people.



April 18, 2017

Too Late to Compensate Free Trade’s Losers.



I have to do some history — and for reasons I’ve never understood, some folks actively dislike history. It’s necessary though.



Appalachia Needs Big Government.



Google Fiber could get FCC help in fights to compete against AT&T.



Even as Mr. Trump was boasting about saving a few hundred jobs in manufacturing here and there, Macy’s announced plans to close 68 stores and lay off 10,000 workers. Sears, another iconic institution, has expressed “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay in business.



April 17, 2017

Mapping the Geography of the New Urban Crisis.



A living mesoscopic cellular automaton made of skin scales.



Weather and climate: in the eye of the storm.



Trump and The Problem of Militant Ignorance.



TLS: Not Actually Secure?



The Violent Clashes In Berkeley Weren’t ‘Pro-Trump’ Versus ‘Anti-Trump.’



The Elements of Bureaucratic Style.



April 16, 2017

Zanclean flood.



Reminder: You Are Hardly Overtaxed in America!



The daughters of our so-called village deserve better than to be exposed to the Bill O’Reillys of the world.



Diversity and the Alt-Left



This new solar-powered device can pull water straight from the desert air.



The tiny changes that can cause AI to fail.



Burger King Won’t Take Hint, Updates Ad To Trigger Google Home Devices Again. If you put an uncontrolled surveillance device in your own home, expect bad things.



The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans.



Why You Can’t Have a Shorter Workweek.



AI programs exhibit racial and gender biases, research reveals. Everything we create will always be a reflection of us. It must be this way because nothing else is possible.



The word ‘meritocracy’ was coined by my father, a left-wing sociologist called Michael Young, to describe a dystopian society of the future.



April 15, 2017

Deception as Competence: The Effect of Occupation on Ethical Judgment and Behavior.



The Crisis of Attention Theft—Ads That Steal Your Time for Nothing in Return.



When school choice means choosing segregation.



The Treasury Department essentially has a 1,000-page financial no-fly list.



‘Thought Leaders’ and the Plutocrats Who Love Them.



Quick thoughts about airline economics.



Why one Republican voted to kill privacy rules: “Nobody has to use the Internet.”



How the Government Is Turning Protesters Into Felons.



Being Anti-Trump Isn’t Enough.



The IRS took millions from innocent people because of how they managed their bank accounts, inspector general finds.



Corporations and Human Life



April 14, 2017

The De-Electrification of the U.S. Economy.



Fears mount over US construction boom.



Only So Much To Go ‘Round. The lump of labor fallacy is itself fallacious.



Updates for Windows 7 and 8.1 on newest Intel and AMD chips now blocked. As someone who works in the tech industry, I can tell you that there is absolutely no technical reason for this. The very same updates will still work on the server versions of the OS.



Welfare for Everyone.



The Despair of Learning That Experience No Longer Matters.



The Fundamental Problems of the Financial Crisis Are Still with Us.



America consumes 85% of the world’s opioid production.



Rapamycin inhibits the secretory phenotype of senescent cells by a Nrf2-independent mechanism.



Inactivity is more a consequence than a cause of obesity. In mice, but could apply to humans as well.



The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society. The deep distrust of media and scientific elites has its origin in old-time religion.



April 13, 2017

How Google Book Search Got Lost.



The Economy May Be Stuck in a Near-Zero World. Mostly bad journalism. Evidence shows lowering interest rates has only small real effect in improving economic outlook, and no mention of inequality, oligopoly, lack of good jobs.



Why ‘Useless’ Surgery Is Still Popular.



(Scorn) So You Read It In the Newspaper.



Contradictions.



Basic Income is JUST Compensation.



Grains piled on runways, parking lots, fields amid global glut.



No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.



Real Annual Growth of GDP Per Capita Over the 2000s.



Private Violence: 50% to 75% of abused women who are murdered are killed after they leave their partners.



How Land Disappeared from Economic Theory.



A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel.



April 12, 2017

My Alien Family: Writing Across Cultures in Science Fiction.



Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Likely a Massive Heat Source.



Greenhouse gas effect caused by mangrove forest conversion is quite significant.



Fines and Fees Are Inherently Unjust.



Conversations about food security need to go beyond physical access to include affordability.



US FCC kills plan to allow mobile phone conversations on flights.



As streaming booms, songs getting faster: study.



California’s Drought Is Over, but the Rest of the World’s Water Problems Are Just Beginning. But according to everyone, overpopulation isn’t a thing.



April 11, 2017

Cars and second order consequences.



Echo chamber and trench warfare dynamics in online debates.



An Actual Doctor Debunks 7 Myths About Single Payer Healthcare.



Do you hate how airlines treat you? Blame decades of deregulation and consolidation.