The first five tracks from the new 'Day Of The Dead' compilation of 59 Grateful Dead covers by a wide range of artists have been released. The five tracks feature performances by The National, The War On Drugs, Phosphorescent w/ Jenny Lewis, Bruce Hornsby w/ Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and Courtney Barnett.

Bob Ebeling spent a third of his life consumed with guilt about the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. But at the end of his life, his family says, he was finally able to find peace. "It was as if he got permission from the world," says his daughter Leslie Ebeling Serna. "He was able to let that part of his life go." Ebeling died Monday at age 89 at in Brigham City, Utah, after a long illness, according to his daughter Kathy Ebeling.

The FBI has been investigating Clinton for months—but an even more secretive Federal agency has its own important beef with her.

How cool does the Aurora look?

A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a longstanding assumption about how they behave.

Something really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing huge leaps in technical capability—virtual reality, live video, artificially intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps.

We think of Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck as the origin of our iPhones. It’s never a happy moment when you’re shopping for a tombstone. When death comes, it’s the loss that transcends everything else and most tombstones are purchased in a fog of grief. Death is a threshold for the relatives and friends who live on as well, changing lives in both intense and subtle ways. It’s the most dramatic and yet the most mundane event of a life, something we all do, no exceptions, no passes.

‘No kill’ animal shelters have unleashed an epidemic of suffering. Is a life of misery any better than a quick death? In March 2013, my husband and I were on our way to a museum when we saw a sign advertising an adoption event at the Petco pet store on the Upper West Side in New York City. ‘Should we adopt another cat?’ my husband asked. We’d got our scaredy-cat Gilbert from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty...

The surprising chances of our lives can seem like they’re hinting at hidden truths, but they’re really revealing the human mind at work.

It’s six months since hackers leaked the names of 30 million people who had used the infidelity website Ashley Madison. Resignations, divorces and suicides followed. Tom Lamont sifts through the wreckage

Chilling photos of Norway's "radioactive reindeer."

The gnostic paradox of young, tech-savvy traditionalists, who see through everything except their own conspiracy theories

New Orleans — ON an ordinary day, the Criminal District Court here begins with a parade of handcuffed and shackled defendants being led out from cages behind the judge’s bench by sheriff’s deputies. They are clad in orange jumpsuits and are almost exclusively African-American men. When their case is called, a lawyer from the public defender’s office will rise and say: “Your Honor, we do not have a lawyer for this person at this time.”

Albert Woodfox, the longest-standing solitary confinement prisoner in the US, held in isolation in a six-by-nine-foot cell almost continuously for 43 years, has been released from a Louisiana jail. Woodfox, who was kept in solitary following the 1972 murder of a prison guard for which he has always professed his innocence, marked his 69th birthday on Friday by being released from West Feliciana parish detention center. It was a bittersweet birthday...

As if those loans weren't scary enough already.

Not too surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal has been a big booster of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement over the past year, repeatedly praising the deal and claiming it will save the world in all sorts of ways. Most of that is based on the faulty belief that the TPP is actually a "free trade" deal (it's actually the opposite)

Two scientific conferences have heard evidence that at least two Australian birds have learned to use fire, picking up smoldering sticks and dropping them in unburnt territory. The behavior has not been photographed, but numerous sitings have been reported, and is woven into the culture of local Indigenous communities.

Perl is a dynamic, dynamically-typed, high-level, scripting (interpreted) language most comparable with PHP and Python. Perl's syntax owes a lot to ancient shell scripting tools, and it is famed for its overuse of confusing symbols, the majority of which are impossible to Google for. Perl's shell scripting heritage makes it great for writing glue code: scripts which link together other scripts and programs. Perl is ideally suited for processing text data and producing more text data. Perl is...

A German man claims to be an Indian chief in the Amazon rainforest. His tales of El Dorado even impressed Steven Spielberg and Jacques Cousteau. His tales would be harmless if there were three unsolved deaths connected to his fantasy world.

Notes on John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Dave Tompkins rewatches the avant-garde horror classic.

An ant, a caterpillar, and a parasitic plant all interact in a strange web of mutual benefit in the Amazon jungle, new research suggests.

Bernie Krause has listened to nature since 1968, and in his decades recording environmental noise has become attuned to its changes.

The men pack the witch’s mouth with rags. The time for confessions has come and gone. Neighbors crowd into a circle around her, here on this hill of rubbish next to their settlement, Warakum. They watch as the men blindfold her before tying her arms, legs and stomach to a log. They watch as wood is stacked and gasoline poured. They watch as their witch is pushed facedown onto the pyre. Camera phones are held up and aimed. The match is struck and thrown.

If you knew where a million dollars' worth of blow was buried, would you go dig it up? Rodney Hyden would. We pick up the story at this critical juncture.

While evidence of abuse of the disabled has piled up for decades, one for-profit company has used its deep pockets and influence to bully weak regulators and evade accountability