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New research shows that many young children, prior to reaching the age of six or seven, mistakenly believe that birthday parties cause aging. It’s a truly adorable finding, but the study also offers an important glimpse into the developing brain and our early tendency to seek out causal explanations for the unfolding world around us.…
Is it a coincidence that Twitter’s shares jumped by double-digit margins on the same day that it began enforcing a policy designed to clear out violent hate speech and hordes of angry trolls? Unfortunately, probably. Shares in the social-media company jumped 10 percent on Monday alone, TechCrunch reported. But it’s probably not directly linked to…
France’s data privacy agency CNIL has ordered WhatsApp to stop sharing data with its owner Facebook, the Verge reported, saying users never consented to sharing data for business intelligence or targeted advertising functions when Facebook disclosed the collection last year. In a blog post, CNIL explained that while it agreed it was reasonable for Facebook…
President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert, claimed that North Korean hackers were behind this year’s massive, global WannaCry ransomware attack on Monday evening in a Wall Street Journal editorial. Beginning in May 2017, the WannaCry malware spread rapidly across computer systems across the globe, allegedly aided by leaked National Security Agency technology. The…
The bombastic, high-profile war over net neutrality isn’t over—but the battle is about to move deep into the weeds. In a party-line vote last Thursday, the FCC’s three Republican commissioners voted to repeal and replace the 2015 Open Internet Order, giving broadband carriers the ability to legally block or throttle content and to create “fast…
Oak Ridge. Y-12. Los Alamos. For drone operators it appears these and four other Department of Energy nuclear research facilities were theoretically places an unmanned aircraft could have been flown. And for the next week and a half that remains the case until new FAA restrictions take effect on December 29th. Yes, by all accounts…
Since taking office in May 2017, Food and Drug Administration head Scott Gottlieb has set about working to make drug approval a less “slow and burdensome” process. In one case, though, the drug approval process might have moved a little too quickly, according to the independent watchdog group the Project on Government Oversight. A letter…
After months of delay, Walt Disney World’s Hall of Presidents will reopen tomorrow with a controversial addition. Yes, President Donald Trump has been immortalized in robot form and will stand next to other presidents like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. And a Disney superfan, Scott Gustin, just posted a preview. The big question that has…
For years, people have complained about declining performance in their aging iPhones, an issue that’s commonly attributed to Apple’s software updates. Something beyond a rumor percolated just last week, when a Reddit thread suggested that the cause for the slow performance could be due to Apple throttling phones with degraded batteries. This inspired the makers…
You won’t feel as proud of yourself for being able to shuffle a split deck at poker night after you watch the card manipulating skills of Huron Low, Kevin Ho, and Daren Yeow. The trio, also known as Virtuoso, can make a deck of cards leap through the air as if the effects of gravity…
Facebook released its latest transparency report today, which covered account data requests from the first half of 2017 and revealed a 21 percent increase in government requests for user data worldwide. Those requests rose from 64,279 in the second half of 2016 to 78,890. This is not a new trend, and it’s not unique to…
In September, the US government mysteriously announced that it was banning Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs’ anti-virus software from use on its employees’ machines. A war of words, official and unofficial, has ensued and on Monday, Kaspersky filed a lawsuit claiming that its due process rights had been violated. In a blog post, the company’s co-founder and…
Early this year, we all pretended to be shocked when we saw a video of monkeys having sex with deer in Japan. New research actually studies the behavior. Scientists headed to the Meiji Memorial Forest in Japan from November 2012 to January 2013 and again from November 2014 to January 2015 to watch Japanese macaques…
Our planet popped into existence some 4.5 billion years ago. Life didn’t waste time, emerging shortly thereafter—but the exact timing of this momentous event is still unknown. A study published today offers new clues into this enduring scientific mystery by claiming to have discovered Earth’s oldest fossils in 3.5 billion-year-old Australian rock. Sounds like an…
Have you seen this GIF of a humanoid robot in a lab? It shows an inventor gently tossing a basketball at his robot. The inventor excitedly turns to the camera only to have the robot throw the ball back and hit him in the face. The GIF has gone viral recently, but it’s totally fake.…
In the constant battle to ensure your privacy online, there are some precautions you can take to protect yourself, such as avoiding clicking random links and using different passwords for every site. But other measures require some help from the websites you visit, and based on a hidden option found in the latest Firefox beta,…
As part of a wave of new suspensions, Twitter took down several far-right accounts that had been retweeted by President Donald Trump. The suspensions of the Britain First account, as well as those of leader Paul Golding and deputy leader Jayda Fransen, appears to be part of Twitter’s new promise to crack down on hate…
A pair of hackers discovered a vulnerability in Air Force software that allowed them to gain access to the Department of Defense’s unclassified network—a find that earned them more than $10,000, the largest payout ever in a government bug bounty program. Security researchers Brett Buerhaus and Mathias Karlsson uncovered the vulnerability during Hack the Air…
I’m not going to tell you what to do with your baby’s placenta after birth. If the doctor lets you have it, and you would like to encapsulate it, sauté it, or even ink it to make placenta prints, that is your decision to make. But you should at least know whether scientists have found…
A man in Minnesota accused of snatching packages from porches chose the wrong house this weekend. Police pulled over 36-year-old Raymond Montel Hester around 4:15am on Saturday and found a stolen laptop package. How did they know it was stolen? Police put a GPS device in the delivery box and tracked down the guy as…
