Has your Tuesday been super? Maybe TaskRabbit can help with their new real-time option to connect you with taskers and get some chores done on demand. Read more…
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Remains of the Day: TaskRabbit Promises to Complete Certain Tasks in 90 Minutes
The media scrambled to make sense of this strange, baffling double homicide—the angle that most outlets came up with was “unfriending on Facebook leads to murder!” (Including 20/20 , which devoted an episode to the case.) But as prosecutor Dennis Brooks explains in Too Pretty to Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee , the situation was a lot more complicated than that. Read more…
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The Bizarre Facebook Hoax That Escalated Into a Real-Life Double Murder
Computer animation evolves at an alarming rate. One year, a movie like Frozen or Big Hero 6 looks like the peak of what’s possible. Then, only a year later, the next thing goes way beyond that. In this case, the next thing is Zootopia , and in this movie a single giraffe has more individual hairs on it—nine million—than every single character in either Frozen, Big Hero 6, or Wreck-It Ralph . Read more…
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One Animal in Zootopia Has More Individual Hairs Than Every Character in Frozen Combined
On the eve of a Congressional hearing about the Department of Justice’s fight with Apple over a locked iPhone, a Brooklyn judge has ruled that the DOJ cannot force Apple to assist in unlocking an iPhone in a separate New York drug case . Read more…
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New York Judge Rules US Can’t Force Apple to Help Unlock an iPhone
A team of scientists has discovered a fossil with what may be the the oldest and most well-preserved example of a central nervous system ever found. Uncovered in southern China, the specimen goes by the name of Chengjiangocaris kunmingensis and clocks in at roughly 520 million years old. Read more…
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This 520 Million-Year-Old Fossil Is So Intricate You Can See Individual Nerves
More than a thousand years before the first telescopes, Babylonian astronomers tracked the motion of planets across the night sky using simple arithmetic. But a newly translated text reveals that these ancient stargazers also used a far more advanced method, one that foreshadows the development of calculus over a thousand years later. Read more…
An anonymous reader sends this report from NBC News: The State Department on Thursday released 5, 500 more pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails, but fell short of meeting a court-ordered target of making 82 percent of the former secretary of state’s messages public by the end of 2015. The email dump is the latest release from the private server Clinton used during her time as America’s top diplomat. The State Department said it failed to meet the court’s goal because of “the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule.” Portions of 275 documents in the batch were upgraded to classified, though they were not classified at the time they were sent to Clinton’s personal email, according to the State Department. In total, 1, 274 of her emails were retroactively classified by the government before their release. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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State Dept. Releases 5,500 Hillary Clinton Emails, 275 Retroactively Classified
French fries. Baked potatoes. Mashed potatoes. Potato chips. Potatoes are everywhere because they’re easy to grow, nutritious, and totally delicious. But they’re also crucially important to the creation of the world as we know it. The modern world was built on potatoes! Ted-Ed explores the history of potatoes and shows how Western countries rose to power off the backs of potato eaters. Read more…
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How the potato changed the world and altered the course of history
A Spanish galleon sunk in the Caribbean 300 years ago with an exceptionally valuable cargo has been discovered near the port city of Cartagena, Colombia. Called the San Jose , the ship is rumored to contain gold, silver, and jewellery worth an estimated $4 to $17 billion. Read more…
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A Sunken Spanish Galleon Worth Billions Has Been Discovered Off the Coast of Colombia
szczys writes: Theremin, yes the same Theremin who built the instrument that made the Star Trek theme song famous, had a hand in espionage as well. Albeit not a willing one. Turns out his life is actually quite tragic. In addition to that story, Adam Fabio takes a trip through the details of “The Thing”, a bug installed in the US Embassy by the Soviet Union during the cold war. It used no batteries, instead depending on a carrier frequency transmitted by the “listener”, causing the resonant cavity to transmit back the audio from the room at a higher frequency. Pretty nifty, and so was the hiding place: a hand-carved wooden seal of the United States. Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts, right? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Theremin’s Bug Let Soviets Spy On USA For More Than 7 Years