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Why Should We Even Care If the Government Is Collecting Our Data?
June 12, 2013 As people have tried to make sense of the recent revelations about the government's mass data-collection efforts, one classic text is experiencing a spike in popularity: George Orwell's 1984 has seen a 7,000 percent increase in sales over the last 24 hours. But wait! This is the wrong piece of ...
NASA Reveals New, Detailed Portraits of Two of Our Closest Galactic Neighbors
June 5, 2013 The next time you have a chance to look up at the night sky, bear in mind that nearly every thing you can see with your bare eyes is something in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Of the 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the universe (some estimates put ...
This Is What It Feels Like to Finally Reach Space
May 29, 2013 The smiles on their faces say it all. Last night, a little after midnight on the East coast, three astronauts floated off a Russian Soyuz space capsule and onto the International Space Station where they will live for the next six months. The astronauts (from left to right: Fyodor Yurchikhin ...
'We're Trying to Portray the Universe as a Real Place With Real Landscapes'
May 28, 2013 "It's a beautiful universe out there," says Zolt Levay -- and he would know. As an "image processor" for the data that comes from the Hubble Space Telescope, Levay is the man behind many of our most jaw-dropping pictures of space. If you've ever wondered just how we get those ...
So This Is How It Begins: Guy Refuses to Stop Drone-Spying on Seattle Woman
May 14, 2013 Back in October, Alexis wrote a piece asking what rights do we have with regard to the air above our property. Walk onto someone's lawn and you're trespassing; fly over it in a helicopter and you're in the clear -- "the air is a public highway," the Supreme Court declared ...
Google Sees More Government Requests to Remove Content 'Than Ever Before'
April 26, 2013 In the latest edition of its Transparency Report, released this morning, Google revealed that the final six months of 2012 saw an increase in government requests to remove content -- often YouTube videos. All told, Google received 2,285 such requests (compared with 1,811 during the first half of 2012) that ...
NASA Released a Magical Timelapse of 3 Years of Solar Beauty
April 24, 2013 For three years, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has been orbiting our planet, keeping its watchful eye on our sun, a star in our own backyard. During that time, we've seen amazing things: massive, absolutely massive, solar flares,the planet Venus transiting the solar face, and a mystifyingly beautiful phenomenon known as ...
Now, With No Further Ado, We Present ... the Digital Public Library of America!
April 19, 2013 Two-and-a-half years ago, at a meeting in Cambridge, leaders of 42 of America's top libraries and research institutions decided that the time had come to buildsomething together. But what was that thing? After a half hour, Robert Darnton told The Atlantic last year, the group was able to agree on ...
Google Death: A Tool to Take Care of Your Gmail When You're Gone
April 15, 2013 Perhaps you, like me, have had the pleasure of finding some old family letters or calendars squirreled away in a box somewhere, and sitting there for hours, reading about the daily life of your family before you existed. But for future generations, those quotidian texts won't exist in a physical ...
The First Direct Image of a Two-Sun System
March 29, 2013 Last fall, to much geeky fanfare, NASA announced the discovery of Kepler-16b or, as everybody liked to call it, Tatooine, because, like the Star Wars world, Kepler-16b orbits two suns. Scientists found the planet not by seeing it but by seeing its shadow: NASA's Kepler mission detects tiny variations in ...
