The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has approved the first clinical trial using MDMA along with psychotherapy to treat anxiety among people with life-threatening illnesses, researchers told Al Jazeera on Tuesday, adding that public support for the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs is rapidly growing. "The tide has changed for psychedelic research," said Brad Burge, communications director of for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies...

People in three adjacent Pennsylvania communities suffer from a rare blood cancer. In Juliette, Georgia, where radioactive water flows from the tap, people are also getting sick. What else do these communities have in common? Coal ash. Some 130 million tons of it is generated in the US each year. It contains toxins like lead, arsenic and mercury and it gets into ground water from unlined pond and pit storage sites.

Animal health experts and poultry growers are scrambling to determine how a dangerous new strain of bird flu infected turkey flocks in three states — and to stop it from spreading.

Edits to the Wikipedia entries of several high-profile police brutality cases, including those of Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, and Sean Bell, trace back to the headquarters of the New York Police Department, Capital New York reports this morning. The pages have been edited to cast the NYPD in a more favorable light and lessen allegations of police misconduct. The edits are currently the subject of an NYPD internal review.

We head to a glassblowing workshop in Alabama to reveal the unique mechanical properties of the Prince Rupert's drop – a tadpole-shaped glass structure created by dropping molten glass in cold water.

One of the most hurtful things you can say to a comic book reader is that comic books are for kids. It's a chilling insult that the stuff they read — the stuff they love — never advanced beyond its funny-page beginnings. But it's also — often unknown to comics fans — a blunt reminder of one of the worst things to ever happen to comic books.

A man is being reunited with his wallet, 65 years after he dropped it down the back of a medieval bookcase at Lambeth Palace, writes Newsnight's James Clayton. Most of us have lost our wallet at some stage in our lives. But few would imagine having it returned after a nearly seven-decade gap.

Two years since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant went into full meltdown, and the resulting 20km evacuation zone was enforced, one farmer still remains behind braving high levels of radiation and loneliness to tend to abandoned animals.

An interesting documentary on the life of Alan Turing, famous for his hand in breaking the Enigma Code and cultivating the seed for the computing industry, but sadly persecuted for his homosexuality. A much rawer take compared to The Imitation Game!

Two news stories and an op-ed piece in the media in recent days provide a useful introduction to the theme of this week’s post here on The Archdruid Report. The first news story followed the official announcement that the official unemployment rate here in the United States dropped to 5.5% last month. This was immediately hailed by pundits and politicians as proof that the recession we weren’t in is over at last, and the happy days that never went away are finally here again...

This archive is a collection of all documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have subsequently been published by news media. Our aim in creating this archive is to provide a tool that would facilitate citizen, researcher and journalist access to these important documents. Indexes, document descriptions, links to original documents and to related news stories, a glossary and comprehensive search features are all designed to enable...

For the first time, a cosmic magnifying glass has allowed scientists to see the same star explosion four times, possibly offering a revealing glimpse into these explosive stellar deaths and the nature of the accelerating universe. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have captured four images of a supernova explosion in deep space thanks to a galaxy located between Earth and the massive star explosion. You can see how Hubble saw the supernova in this NASA video.

Researchers have demonstrated a long-lasting device for making hydrogen from sunlight and water—but funding is running out.

Witnesses say the Chicago Police that kidnapped them from a deli resembled ISIS terrorists more than they did peace officers.

"I haven't looked at it."

Bug forces millions of sites to use easily breakable key once thought to be dead.

 Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired As a Facebook and Twitter competitor, Google+ never really stood a chance. By some combination of odd design, confusing nomenclature—remember Circles? Sparks?—and the simple fact that no one ever really used it, Google’s grand plan to unite its many products into a single social product just didn’t pan out. So it should…

Police officers in Ferguson, Mo., have routinely violated the constitutional rights of the city’s black residents, the Justice Department has concluded in a scathing report that accuses the officers of using excessive force and making unjustified traffic stops for years. The Justice Department, which opened its investigation after a white Ferguson police officer shot and killed a black teenager last summer, says the discrimination was fueled in part by racial stereotypes held by city officials.

The folds on this paper ring are precision-made by a laser so that when it's compressed, the hole at its centre stays the same size and protects its contents.

Scientists are developing ways to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children. Should they stop before it’s too late?

Hillary Clinton's homebrew email solution potentially left the communications of the top US foreign affairs official vulnerable to state-sponsored hackers.

A suspected gas blast at a coal mine in a rebel-held region of east Ukraine has killed at least 30 people and left some 40 missing, officials said.

We watched Google try to pop one of its massive Project Loon balloons.

Dogecoin was never supposed to be taken seriously. The cryptocurrency based on the do​ge meme was originally started for shits and giggles. It attracted lighthearted individuals who were more interested in cracking jokes than in getting rich quick, who preferred to donate coins for causes both silly and serious than to hoard troves of digital treasure. But its greatest strength was also its greatest weakness. The dizzying rise in popularity made Dogecoin a target.

UNTIL LAST SUMMER, pretty much anyone buying or selling sex in the San Francisco Bay Area used myRedBook.com. For more than a decade, the site commonly referred to as RedBook served as a vast catalog of carnal services, a mashup of Craigslist, Yelp, and Usenet where sex workers and hundreds of thousands of their customers could connect, converse, and make arrangements for commercial sex.

Steve Perlman wants to turn your apartment into an antenna for his new cellular phone network. Perlman is a serial Silicon Valley inventor and entrepreneur best known for selling his web TV company to Microsoft for half a billion dollars, and over the last few years, he and his team of engineers have built a contraption that aims to significantly boost the speed of our cellular services.

If you want to proclaim to the world that you’re a geek, one good way to go about it is to wear a wristwatch that displays the time in binary. [Jordan] designs embedded systems, and he figured that by building this watch he could not only build up his geek cred but also learn a thing or two about working with PIC microcontrollers for low power applications. It seems he was able to accomplish both of these goals.

If NASA plans to send robots to other planets, it’s going to need some new designs: ones that are easy to land, easy to move around, and easy to fix. That means they probably won’t look like a bipedal T-1000 chasing the one hope for mankind. They probably won’t even look like the four-legged galloping critters Boston Dynamics is building. Nope. Those robots will look like a hexahedral tent stripped of its fabric.