Before the PC Could Take Over, We Had to Learn to Define It

Welcome to this week’s Reading List, a collection of the internet’s most interesting science and tech stories. This week, we’ll experiment with medical marijuana, race a helicopter across New York City, and more.

• The personal computer today is ubiquitous, but in the 1980s, people were still learning how to define it. [Ratter]
  
• Medical marijuana is still largely unregulated, so it’s hard for potential patients to know what’s in the supplements they’re buying, and that creates serious health risks. [BuzzFeed]
  
• The UK’s Government Communications Headquarters runs a series of programs to collect, sort, and search billions of metadata records from internet users around the world. [The Intercept]
  
• In case you wondered, it’s faster to bike across Manhattan than to fly a helicopter from one side to the other. [Huffpost Tech]
  

Top image: Jeff Keyzer via Wikimedia Commons

Contact the author at k.smithstrickland@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter.