The beautiful and historic seaside town of Dubrovnik is both charming and compelling. There’s plenty to see and do around the area to fill four days in Dubrovnik. This itinerary can be done as a short vacation or combined with other cities in Croatia.

A primer, for all you nerds.

Article published in The Realist in May 1959.

The report found that when you took the externalized costs into effect, essentially NONE of the industries was actually making a profit. The huge profit margins being made by the world’s most profitable industries (oil, meat, tobacco, mining, electronics) is being paid for against the future: we are trading long term sustainability for the benefit of shareholders. Sometimes the environmental costs vastly outweighed revenue, meaning that these industries would be constantly losing money...

Reports today in the New York Times and ProPublica confirm what EFF’s Jewel v. NSA lawsuit has claimed since 2008—that the NSA and AT&T have collaborated to build a domestic surveillance infrastructure, resulting in unconstitutional seizure and search of of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans' Internet communications.

On May 27, in her first major prosecutorial act as the new U.S. attorney general, Loretta Lynch unsealed a 47-count indictment against nine FIFA officials and another five corporate executives. She was passionate about their wrongdoing. “The indictment alleges corruption that is rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted both abroad and here in the United States,” she said. “Today’s action makes clear that this Department of Justice intends to end any such corrupt practices...

Footage of an unusual marine animal covered in tentacles allowed oceanographers to identify it as a siphonophore

Ault and Wiborg's Art Nouveau lithographic poster ads. Color lithography was rapidly replacing letterpress in popular graphics and in a classic case of “at the right place at the right time” demand for Ault & Wiborg’s coal tar-based inks rose almost geometrically.

Explore the deepest mysteries at the frontier of fundamental physics, and the most promising ideas put forth to solve them.

AirPano is a not-for-profit project focused on high-resolution virtual tours from a bird’s eye view. Being the largest resource for 360° aerial panoramas in the world – by geographical coverage, number of aerial photographs, and artistic and technical quality of the images, AirPano has already photographed over two hundred of the most interesting locations on our planet.

How a rich entrepreneur persuaded the city to let him create his own high-tech police force.

George Osborne is under pressure to reveal if he held a private meeting with Rupert Murdoch days before the Treasury imposed a £650m budget cut on the BBC.

The Imperial examination system is a clear example of the kind of bureaucracy David Graeber describes in his new book The Utopia of Rules, published by Melville House. Graeber, an anthropologist and political activist based at the London School of Economics, is a provocative critic of bureaucracy, which he believes to be stupid-making, hostile to outsiders, needlessly cruel, explicitly violent (he writes pithily that “Police are bureaucrats with weapons”), and in many ways hopelessly corrupt.

The White House has finally responded -- more than two years later -- to a petition asking for a pardon of Edward Snowden. The petition surfaced soon after Snowden went public with his identity. Less than three weeks later -- June 25, 2013 -- it had passed the 100,000-signature threshold.

It's been two years since filmmakers making a documentary about the song "Happy Birthday" filed a lawsuit claiming that the song shouldn't be under copyright. Now, they have filed (PDF) what they say is "proverbial smoking-gun evidence" that should cause the judge to rule in their favor. The "smoking gun" is a 1927 version of the "Happy Birthday" lyrics, predating Warner/Chappell's 1935 copyright by eight years.

I look forward eagerly, almost greedily, to the weekly arrival of journals like Nature and Science, and turn at once to articles on the physical sciences — not, as perhaps I should, to articles on biology and medicine.

We brought our cameras to the same position and angles of our favorite Portland historic images. We wondered, what’s changed? What’s remained the same?

Researchers in the US have developed a new drug that can be delivered directly into the eye via an eye dropper to shrink down and dissolve cataracts - the leading cause of blindness in humans.

Ray Flynn was fitted with the bionic eye in June and can make out faces for the first time since he lost his vision to age related macular degeneration

Guardian investigation uncovers extensive role of authorities, fishermen and traffickers in enslaving thousands of Rohingya, who were held in deadly jungle camps

It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're almost gone. Could we do it again without them?

Judge Alex Kozinski has long been one of the few judges willing to speak up against our nation's thoroughly corrupted justice system. It's not the normal form of corruption, where juries and judges are openly bought and sold. It's...

UFOs, loud booms, strange creatures,the Missouri witch hunts, plagues. a comet and a native american prophecy. Events surrounding the earthquake.

Researchers are uncovering the hidden laws that reveal how the Internet grows, how viruses spread, and how financial bubbles burst.

From the ages of twelve to fifteen, I went through an obsessive-compulsive rigmarole before bed every night. The process demanded a minimum of two hours filled with concentrated touching, blinking, gulping, repetitive thinking, and chanting. If I botched any part of this strict routine, or if I was interrupted, I’d have to start the whole ordeal again, often tacking on an extra hour.

In what they termed “a call to arms,” an organization of American university astronomers said last week that NASA should begin planning now to launch a sort of supersize version of the Hubble Space Telescope in the 2030s to look for life beyond Earth. This High Definition Space Telescope would be five times as big and 100 times as sensitive as the Hubble, with a mirror nearly 40 feet in diameter, and would orbit the sun about a million miles from Earth.

Humans have long believed that we are somehow special. But many traits once considered uniquely human are shared with animals

For ten years I have been raising animals, at first pigs, lambs, goats, and chickens (laying hens and broilers), then ultimately just pigs, to kill so that we can eat their meat. At first, I went sporadically, but for the last five years, I have loaded pigs, anywhere from two to fifteen, onto the livestock trailer at least once every week and have delivered them to the slaughterhouse, where within minutes, or perhaps hours, they were killed, eviscerated, split in half lengthwise...

by NaSser Alomairi