The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.
posted on Dec-1-09 at 9:14 AM

Forgotten Objects. Found objects from an imagined past. [Via]
posted on Nov-12-09 at 8:31 AM

Defending the Arsenal: In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe?
posted on Nov-10-09 at 10:44 AM

Against Transparency. "How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement--if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness--will inspire not reform, but disgust. The 'naked transparency movement,' as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff." [Via]
posted on Oct-11-09 at 10:35 AM

The Virtual Museum of Iraq.
posted on Oct-4-09 at 9:55 AM

Understanding the Anxious Mind. A good article on the psychology of anxiety and how an anxious temperament at birth can ebb and flow during one's lifetime. [Via]
posted on Oct-2-09 at 6:16 PM

'You are being shagged by a rare parrot'. Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine have been revisiting the animals on the edge of extinction which Douglas Adams described in Last Chance to See. Here they make the acquaintance of an amorous kakapo.
posted on Oct-1-09 at 5:53 PM

Tehran Bureau, the independent Iran news website which became indispensable during the post-election protests in June, has found a new home at PBS's Frontline, which is taking them under its wing by financing and hosting the Web site and providing editorial support. [Via]
posted on Sep-28-09 at 2:03 PM

Redwoods: The Super Trees. "They can grow to be the tallest trees on Earth. They can produce lumber, support jobs, safeguard clear waters, and provide refuge for countless forest species. If we let them."
posted on Sep-23-09 at 12:30 PM

Torturing the brain (PDF). Extreme pain and stress can actually impair a person's ability to tell the truth. [Via]
posted on Sep-22-09 at 11:52 AM

Reprocess of Bubble Nebula Data. NGC 7635, also called the Bubble Nebula, is an emission nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. It's created by stellar winds from a superhot star 40 times the size of our sun which whip the cloud of gas around the star into a bubble. [Via]
posted on Sep-20-09 at 11:44 AM

Toxic Waters: A series about the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators' response.
posted on Sep-14-09 at 8:58 AM

The Big Picture: Recent Hindu festivals and rituals. "Many Hindus throughout India recently celebrated Ganesha Chaturthi, a 10-day festival celebrating the birth of Ganesh, their supreme god of wisdom, prosperity and good fortune. Hinduism, the predominant religion in India, is rich with traditional festivals and rituals, celebrated in many ways and locations around the world. Collected here are a few photographs from recent Hindu festivals and of Hindu devotees worshipping and practicing ritual ceremonies in India, England, Nepal and Indonesia."
posted on Sep-9-09 at 2:22 PM

What the Internet knows about you. "This project was started by a small group of Web developers and security researchers in order to highlight the problem of Web browser history detection -- a problem which can dramatically affect the Web and hurt many people, if not solved quickly. Our direct goal is to educate the mainstream public and show them the direct consequences of allowing this aspect of Web browser behavior, as well as provide some solutions which mitigate the problem. However, since there are no existing satisfactory solutions, our other objective is to point the attention of browser developers to this issue and strongly encourage them to implement the necessary and long-overdue fixes." [Via]
posted on Sep-3-09 at 9:06 AM

Out of the Shadows: The elusive Central Asian snow leopard steps into a risk-filled future.
posted on Sep-1-09 at 9:17 AM

Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery. "The masterpieces of Minoan art are not what they seem... The truth is that these famous icons are largely modern. As any sharp-eyed visitor to the Heraklion museum can spot, what survives of the original paintings amounts in most cases to no more than a few square inches. The rest is more or less imaginative reconstruction, commissioned in the first half of the twentieth century by Sir Arthur Evans, the British excavator of the palace of Knossos (and the man who coined the term 'Minoan' for this prehistoric Cretan civilization, after the mythical King Minos who is said to have held the throne there). As a general rule of thumb, the more famous the image now is, the less of it is actually ancient."
posted on Aug-30-09 at 2:16 PM

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
posted on Aug-25-09 at 9:08 AM

Detonography is a technique created by Evelyn Rosenberg for making metal sculpture. Detonographs are created by detonating a sheet of plastic explosive over a sandwich of a carved image and a metal plate, forcing the metal plate onto the carved image. [Via]
posted on Aug-21-09 at 8:31 PM

Orbital skydives to follow inflatable heatshield success? "NASA has announced a successful live test of a prototype inflatable heat shield for re-entry to a planet's atmosphere. The blow-up shield could have important implications for future missions to Mars - and also, perhaps, for the nascent field of orbital spacesuit skydiving."
posted on Aug-20-09 at 3:47 PM

The Women’s Crusade: Why Women's Rights Are the Cause of Our Time.
posted on Aug-19-09 at 3:10 PM

Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?
posted on Aug-17-09 at 8:42 AM

The Living Root Bridges of Cherrapunji, India. [Via]
posted on Aug-8-09 at 8:06 PM

Human Motions Sculptures. [Via]
posted on Aug-5-09 at 2:19 PM

The Making of an Iran Policy: Inside the Obama administration’s struggle with its biggest diplomatic challenge.
posted on Aug-1-09 at 8:08 PM

Evolution's third replicator: Genes, memes, and now what?
posted on Jul-31-09 at 2:40 PM

UC Scientists Determine That Ancient Maya Practiced Forest Conservation — 3,000 Years Ago. "As published in the July issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, paleoethnobotanist David Lentz of the University of Cincinnati has concluded that not only did the Maya people practice forest management, but when they abandoned their forest conservation practices it was to the detriment of the entire Maya culture." [Via]
posted on Jul-29-09 at 5:42 PM

Marcus Aurelius: Was He Quite Ordinary? [Via]
posted on Jul-24-09 at 12:08 PM

Forgive and Forget? "Rwanda's warring population has a lot to account for, and a lot to reconcile. Can science point the way to understanding?"
posted on Jul-20-09 at 10:39 PM

Sued by the forest: Should nature be able to take you to court?
posted on Jul-19-09 at 10:10 PM

Iran: The Rooftop Project. "This is meant to be the most complete possible collection of recordings of nighttime protest in Iran since the beginning of the uprising. Its goal is to locate and profile at least one video for each night primarily focusing on the nightly chanting of Allah-o-Akbar from the rooftops, whenever that footage is available. Some of these videos have not been widely seen until now." [Via]
posted on Jul-10-09 at 11:36 AM

Neurosecurity: security and privacy for neural devices. "An increasing number of neural implantable devices will become available in the near future due to advances in neural engineering. This discipline holds the potential to improve many patients' lives dramatically by offering improved—and in some cases entirely new—forms of rehabilitation for conditions ranging from missing limbs to degenerative cognitive diseases. The use of standard engineering practices, medical trials, and neuroethical evaluations during the design process can create systems that are safe and that follow ethical guidelines; unfortunately, none of these disciplines currently ensure that neural devices are robust against adversarial entities trying to exploit these devices to alter, block, or eavesdrop on neural signals. The authors define 'neurosecurity'—a version of computer science security principles and methods applied to neural engineering—and discuss why neurosecurity should be a critical consideration in the design of future neural devices." [Via Mind Hacks]
posted on Jul-8-09 at 8:29 PM

Churchyard Entertainment. Mad woman interview. Cave song. Three extracts from Book of Days, a 1988 film by composer, singer and choreographer Meredith Monk. Her work was explored by Peter Greenway in his 1983 documentary Four American Composers.
posted on Jul-5-09 at 1:46 PM

Operation Midnight Climax is a new web series about how the CIA used prostitutes to test LSD on unsuspecting American citizens. "Operation Midnight Climax was a CIA mind-control research program that began in the 1950's. The project consisted of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin and New York. It was established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were given a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind two-way mirrors." [Via]
posted on Jul-4-09 at 10:00 AM

Machu Picchu Post. Cute animation about an air mail pilot in the Andes and his strange encounter with a boy and his llama. [Via]
posted on Jul-2-09 at 7:32 PM

The surgery to give Mr Dapple the wings of a crow was scheduled to take twelve minutes...
posted on Jun-30-09 at 6:23 PM

Liquid Sand: High-speed camera catches liquidlike behavior in a stream of granular material.
posted on Jun-29-09 at 6:04 PM

The Baloney Detection Kit. "With a sea of information coming at us from all directions, how do we sift out the misinformation and bogus claims, and get to the truth? Michael Shermer, Publisher of Skeptic magazine, lays out a 'Baloney Detection Kit' — ten questions we should ask when encountering a claim."
posted on Jun-25-09 at 11:49 AM

Dancing plagues and mass hysteria: how distress and pious fear have led to bizarre outbreaks across the ages. [Via]
posted on Jun-23-09 at 3:36 PM

Civilization is a video mural created by video artist Marco Brambilla and Toronto-based studio Crush for an elevator in the Standard Hotel in New York. It depicts a journey from hell to heaven as the elevator goes up, or from heaven to hell as it goes down. [Via]
posted on Jun-18-09 at 3:36 PM

NSA E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress. "Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation." [Via]
posted on Jun-17-09 at 2:33 PM

Data Center Overload. "Data centers are increasingly becoming the nerve centers of business and society, creating a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources."
posted on Jun-15-09 at 10:30 PM

The Secret History: Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past?
posted on Jun-14-09 at 10:20 PM

Open to Revisions. "Some religious entrepreneurs have adopted an 'open source' model, where rituals and doctrines can be rewritten as easily as computer code."
posted on Jun-11-09 at 6:21 PM

Breach. Photographer Richard Mosse's pictures of Saddam Hussein's palaces.
posted on Jun-10-09 at 6:06 PM

The day pain died. "The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word 'anesthesia' itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city's physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever." [Via]
posted on Jun-9-09 at 5:55 PM

Watchwomen. A burlesque tribute to the Watchmen by the Peek-A-Boo Revue (probably NSFW). [Via]
posted on Jun-8-09 at 5:45 PM

The Roman Empire's Lost Highway: French amateur archaeologist Bruno Tassan fights to preserve a neglected 2,000-year-old ancient interstate in southern Provence.
posted on May-31-09 at 11:00 PM

On the Street and On Facebook: The Homeless Stay Wired. "Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge. 'You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper,' says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. 'But you need the Internet.'"
posted on May-30-09 at 8:40 PM

The portfolio of Christian rex Van Minnen. [Via]
posted on May-29-09 at 6:00 PM

Waiting for a New Day: Scenes from Afghan life in wartime.
posted on May-28-09 at 4:17 PM