The bright ball that hovers over Times Square on New Year’s Eve is special this year. Sure, it’s iconic and colorful and mesmerizing as it always is. This year, however, the ball will captivate us all with a brand new crystal coating. And, boy, is it pretty. Read more…
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Inside the Design of the New Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball
We already knew that the NSA had developed a taste for intercepting packages to put backdoors in electronics . Now, it turns out that those hacks provide it with almost complete access to the iPhone , too. Read more…
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The NSA Has Crazy Good Backdoor Access to iPhones
These images look pretty great considering they’re 100 years old. They look even better when you learn they’ve been sealed in Antarctic ice for 100 years. Read more…
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These 100 Year-Old Negatives Were Found Frozen in Antarctic Ice
People attribute a lot of annoying internet stuff to bots. Twitterbot followers, bots that sneak past spam filters, bots that send weird gibberish on messaging services. It sounds kind of tired, but maybe the situation is exactly as bad as everyone thinks. Read more…
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More Than Half of Internet Traffic Is Just Bots
The decrepit old visitor center at Stonehenge has been too small and too old for decades. In fact, it’s been described with typical Brit candor as “disgraceful” and an “embarrassment” to England. Finally, this month, a new, $44 million visitors’ center has opened—here’s a look inside. Read more…
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Stonehenge’s New Visitor Center Looks Positively Neolithic
We’re all outraged by the NSA’s invasions of privacy, sure—but we don’t perhaps understand exactly how it managed it. This video explains the maths behind the agency’s surveillance. Read more…
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The Math Behind the NSA’s Email Hacks
The island of California. A huge triangle of land called Florida. A great ocean that cut down from the Arctic into the Midwest. As the New World came into focus beginning in the 17th century, explorers and cartographers struggled to measure a massive expanse of land that would take centuries to accurately map. Read more…
Excerpt from:
12 Maps of America From Before We Knew What It Looked Like
Given the United States’ intolerance for copyright infringement and the piraters that propagate it , you’d think Uncle Sam would be a little more keen on making sure that his men were playing by the book themselves. As it turns out, a whole mess of computers running unlicensed, illegal copies of Windows 7 belong to none other than the US Army itself . Read more…
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A US Army Base Is Running a Bunch of Illegal Windows 7 Copies
We’ve all done it: stood in a library, looking around, we’ve been confronted by the fact that there are way, way too many books in existence for us to ever read. But when in history did that happen? Read more…
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When Did There Become Too Many Books to Read in One Lifetime?
If archaeology was once about digging through dirt, it is increasingly—like almost every other profession—about programming computers. Bernie Frischer, an Indiana University “archaeo-informaticist, ” has came up with a new theory about two Roman monuments. His finding are based on 3D reconstructions of the monuments using video game technology and calculations of the sun’s position 2, 000 years ago. Read more…
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Archaeologist Uses 2,000-Year-Old Sky to Study Roman Ruins