Life expectancy in the United States declined from 2016 to 2017, yet the 10 leading causes of death remained the same, according to three government reports released Thursday. US life expectancy drops in 2017 due to drug overdoses, suicides - CNN
René Descartes’s dog, Monsieur Grat (‘Mister Scratch’), used to accompany the 17th-century French philosopher on his ruminative walks, and was the object of his fond attention. Yet, for the most part, Descartes did not think very highly of the inner life of nonhuman animals. Inside the mind of a bee is a hive of sensory activity | Aeon Essays
Modern DDR3 SDRAM. Source: BY-SA/4.0 by Kjerish During my recent visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, I found myself staring at some ancient magnetic core memory. Every 7.8μs your computer’s memory has a hiccup
In 2003, Jay Siegel was up for a new challenge. Siegel was a tenured professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, but he took a job at the University of Zurich. "When I first moved, people said, 'Oh, you're crazy to leave San Diego; it's a paradise. China Pours Money Into Research, Luring U.S. Scientists And Students : Shot
Amazon confirmed on Tuesday that it's launched a project to mine data from electronic medical records, as the company pushes deeper into the health-care market. Amazon is working to mine patient records to diagnose disease
If you have ADHD, chances are higher that your siblings do, too. Estimates differ as to how strong the connection is, but the arrows point in the same direction: genetics helps determine someone's risk for ADHD. Large genetic study finds first genes connected with ADHD | Ars Technica
If you spend much time on Instagram, there’s a decent chance you have been served an advertisement for the online retailer Brandless. What a brandless brand is selling you | The Outline
Some compare it to snooker, others to figure skating. But for those who have given their lives to competitive ploughing, it’s more than a sport, it’s a way of life. By Field of dreams: heartbreak and heroics at the World Ploughing Championship
If you spend much time mooching around the internet, you will probably have come across articles on sites such as Quartz and Forbes called things like “17 habits of highly successful people”. Triathlons, ultramarathons and ambitious baking: why is modern leisure so c
Join us this weekend as we bring the DIY movement back. Not only is it a chance to start working on those ideas you've been putting off for months, but it's also a great way to learn while playing. Bring back the DIY movement and start with your own Linux servers. Weekend Reading: Do-It-Yourself Projects | Linux Journal
In the final months of 2018, Rockstar Games has absorbed the full force of video game culture’s radicalization. It’s an awesome force. It’s an awful force. It’s modern politics. ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’ and Gaming’s Iron Curtain - The Ringer
Many chief technology officers study technology, consider different architectures and challenge their team to deliver products and services. The problem with this approach is that many CTOs today no longer maintain application development proficiencies. Can your CTO still code? - Recode
(Reuters) - U.S. farmers finishing their harvests are facing a big problem - where to put the mountain of grain they cannot sell to Chinese buyers. For Louisiana farmer Richard Fontenot and his neighbors, the solution was a costly one: Let the crops rot. Harvesting in a trade war: U.S. crops rot as storage costs soar | Reuters
There are two reasons to love this paper. First off, we get some insights into the backend that powers WeChat; and secondly the authors share the design of the battle hardened overload control system DAGOR that has been in production at WeChat for five years. Overload control for scaling WeChat microservices | the morning paper
GUIDE TO COMPUTING This colourful series of historic computers documents the evolution of design within computing history. Guide to Computing — docubyte
IBM's Watson supercomputer is the author of a script recently used in a Lexus commercial, marking a first for the advertising and AI industries. Lexus debuts first AI-scripted commercial, and it's surprisingly good.
SAN FRANCISCO — After the financial crisis 10 years ago, unhappy customers were expected to flee the megabanks for smaller competitors. It didn’t happen. And the big banks became even more entrenched. The ‘Neo-Banks’ Are Finally Having Their Moment - The New York Times
Fruit flies are commonly used in experiments as they provide many advantages over more complex animals. In this case, they have small brains, only 100,000 cells, which can be more easily monitored than a larger animal and a genome that is well known and can be manipulated with few hidden variables. A new study says alcohol changes how the brain creates memories
This image shows mound fields. The mounds are found in dense, low, dry forest caatinga vegetation and can be seen when the land is cleared for pasture. (Credit: Roy Funch) Two hundred million mounds of dirt dot an area about the size of Great Britain in a tropical forest in northeastern Brazil. These Termite Mounds Are 4,000 Years Old — And Still In Use - D-brief
Armed with big data, researchers turn to customized lifestyle changes to fight the disease. Sally Weinrich knew something was terribly wrong. On two separate occasions, she forgot to pick up her grandkids from school, and she kept mixing up their names. A New Treatment for Alzheimer's? It Starts With Lifestyle | DiscoverMagazin
Google will be launching a fund of $200,000 to sponsor the development and implementation of performance-related features in third-party JavaScript frameworks. The fund's launch was announced earlier this week at the Chrome Dev Summit 2018, Google's annual web dev conference. Google to pay JavaScript frameworks to implement performance-first code | Z
Forty feet underground in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in a bright white laboratory that requires three separate keys to enter, the United States stores a precious collection of small, shiny metal cylinders that literally define the mass of everything in this country. New kilogram standard: how the SI unit of mass is being redefined - Vox
Electronic Arts’ classic real-time strategy game series, Command & Conquer, is being remastered for modern platforms. Command & Conquer 4K remaster coming - Polygon
Technically, "S1" is a stream of debris from a dwarf galaxy torn apart by the Milky Way's gravity, passing through space. What S1 is pulling along with it, though, is being described in a far more dramatic way, as "a dark matter hurricane. A stream of dark matter is slamming into us
PagerDuty, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based company that sends companies information about their technology, doesn’t receive a fraction of the press that other fast-growing enterprise software companies receive. Meet Jennifer Tejada, the secret weapon of one of Silicon Valley’s fastest-
Machine learning is one of those hot technology categories that has lots of business and technology executives scrambling to see how their organizations can get in on the action. Machine learning lessons: 5 companies share their mistakes | InfoWorld
In early 2018, it was estimated that over 12 million people had had their DNA analyzed by a direct-to-consumer genetic test. A few months later, that number had grown to 17 million. Your genome, on demand - MIT Technology Review
What do you do when you’re overwhelmed with too many ideas? Do you abandon them, or do you finish what you start? Juggling multiple ideas and goals — to write, exercise, read more, wake up early and… 5 Things to Do When You Have Too Many Ideas and Never Finish Anything.
I used to believe that being more productive meant getting more done. That my personal productivity was defined by the sheer volume of tasks that I managed to take down each day. Willpower Doesn’t Work. Here’s the Key to Being More Productive According t
Holding a strong goal intention (“I intend to reach Z!”) does not guarantee goal achievement, because people may fail to deal effectively with self‐regulatory problems during goal striving. Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta‐analysis of Effects
The protocol that's been called HTTP-over-QUIC for quite some time has now changed name and will officially become HTTP/3. This was triggered by this original suggestion by Mark Nottingham. The QUIC Working Group in the IETF works on creating the QUIC transport protocol. HTTP/3 | daniel.haxx.se
The Glossier sales associate, who’d introduced herself as an “editor,” was addressing a rapt audience. “Basically, our whole message is just democratizing beauty in an age where everybody is heavily covering up their faces and using so much heavy makeup,” she said. Glossier wants to be the happiest place on Earth | The Outline
Metro: Map | Text Streetcars: Map | Text Railroads: Map | Text Cars: Map | Text Aqueduct: Map | Text I | Text II | Text III Sewers: Map Steam: Map Capitol: Map Pedestrians: Map Capitol Hill Tunnels | The D.C. Underground Atlas — Washington Tunnels
Weekly Drawing Update Jun 17, 2017 SkyscraperPage's illustrators have added 151 building illustrations to the diagram system in the past week. Have a look • Contact Us • FAQ SkyscraperPage Diagrams • Weekly Drawing Update151 new drawings this week (updated Sat., Jun. SkyscraperPage.com
Investments in roads and cities can shape an economy for hundreds of years. Now economists are showing how one-time investments in education can endure every bit as long. Jesuits arrived late to the Guarani people’s homeland where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet. It ended in 1767, yet this experiment is still linked to higher incomes and
In the United States and many other countries, there are no legal protections to stop internet service providers–landline or mobile–from tracking where you go online. (A 2017 act of Congress enshrined that right to snoop in the U.S. This incredibly simple privacy app helps protect your phone from snoop
Gary Cantrell clanged a bell at 6:40 a.m. on Saturday, Oct. 20, signaling 70 runners to jog off into the woods on his farm in Tennessee. They had an hour to complete a 4.1667-mile loop trail. Easy. Most of the group finished with 15 minutes to spare. The bell clanged again at 7:40 a.m. Courtney Dauwalter Takes On Big's Backyard Ultra
A stressed-out and traumatized father can leave scars in his children. New research suggests this happens because sperm “learn” paternal experiences via a mysterious mode of intercellular communication in which small blebs break off one cell and fuse with another. How Dad's Stresses Get Passed Along to Offspring - Scientific American
An empire of germs dwells inside you, trillions strong. About a half-pound of bacteria plus their genes make up our microbiome. Though each microbe is small, a healthy and diverse microbiome is mighty. Its influence, studies suggest, spans the human condition — from mood swings to weight gain. Immigrants arrive with flourishing gut microbes. Then America’s diet trashe
Three years ago, I coined the term The 5-Hour Rule after researching the most successful, busy people in the world and finding that they shared a pattern: They devoted at least 5 hours a week to deliberate learning. Since then, I’ve preached The 5-Hour Rule to more than 10 million readers. The Math Behind The 5-Hour Rule: Why You Need To Learn 1 Hour Per Day Just
This project wields data from the Global Human Settlement Layer, which uses “satellite imagery, census data, and volunteered geographic information” to create population density maps. In parts of the world where census data is unreliable (e.g. Human Terrain
The auto suggest results provided by Google & Bing are a goldmine of insight for today’s marketeers. As you type you are presented with an aggregated view of the questions & therefore a hint of the motivations & emotions of the people behind each search query. AnswerThePublic: that free visual keyword research & content ideas tool
Are you convinced the reason for your son or daughter's rowdiness lies in a box of Milk Duds? You?re not alone. Many concerned parents and health organizations believe there is a link between a child's diet and behavior. Busting the Sugar-Hyperactivity Myth
Last year, medical tests revealed that a rare genetic cardiomyopathy is slowly but surely mutating, expanding, and gradually weakening my heart. Though there are no outward symptoms yet, my heart pumps only four-fifths of what it should, and my future health feels less certain. Grappling with Mortality in the White Mountains | Outside Online
Last Earth Day, I published a column in the Washington Post on common recycling myths. I received so many comments and emails in response, often asking additional questions, that I wanted to follow up with a new list here at National Geographic. 5 recycling myths busted
If, like me, you spent too much of your youth playing video games, well, at least now you can finally conquer all those games with a little help from artificial intelligence. Master any classic video game (with help from an AI algorithm) - MIT Techno
Beijing-based ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of tween and teen-focused social app Musical.ly is paying off. The company this year merged Musical.ly with its own short video app TikTok as a means of entering the U.S. market. Today, the result of that merger is sitting at the top of the U.S. TikTok surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat & YouTube in downloads last
Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College, London, says young people have so little experience of craft skills that they struggle with anything practical. Surgery students 'losing dexterity to stitch patients' - BBC News
In a landmark study, 20 experienced US-trained lawyers were pitted against the LawGeex Artificial Intelligence algorithm. The 40-page study details how AI has overtaken top lawyers for the first time in accurately spotting risks in everyday business contracts. AI vs Lawyers: The Ultimate Showdown | LawGeex
Contrary to what its name suggests, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is not an empty void. It’s a piece of space that weighs as much as several million suns. Black Holes and the Chaos at the Center of the Milky Way - The Atlantic
Scientists in Canada have warned that massive glaciers in the Yukon territory are shrinking even faster than would be expected from a warming climate – and bringing dramatic changes to the region. 'We've never seen this': massive Canadian glaciers shrinking rapidly | Worl
Italians may find their morning espresso tastes awfully bitter this week, as the Bialetti group – the maker of the iconic stove-top moka coffee pot – struggles to stay afloat. Moka pot, machine, filter or instant – which produces the best coffee? | Fo
Some personal secrets are so well-kept that even family and friends are oblivious. So it is with the story of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist's marriage proposal to a Stanford Law School classmate in the early 1950s. O'Connor, Rehnquist And A Supreme Marriage Proposal : NPR