The rituals -- fasting, wearing a hospital gown, undergoing anesthesia -- foster an expectation that the procedure will provide relief.

Hospitals and pharmacies are required to toss expired drugs, no matter how expensive or vital. Meanwhile the FDA has long known that many remain safe and potent for years longer.

Memories, points of view and the self

Taking proton-pump inhibitors, commonly prescribed to people with acid reflux, was related to an increased risk of early death from any cause, a new study finds.

Olivier Roy, one of France’s top experts on Islamic terrorism, tells Haaretz how assailants like Salman Abedi in Manchester turn into 'new radicals' who crave death

In a San Francisco federal court case, the plaintiff accused GMO giants Monsanto of hiring third-parties who hide their association with the company to respond to negative online comments, also known as ‘shills’.

If you're of the mindset that knowledge should be freely accessible to as many humans as possible, paywalls for academic journals can be downright frustrating. Now a free browser extension is promising to bust through those paywalls wherever...

Modernization, or first-strike capability? By Hans M. Kristensen, Matthew McKinzie, Theodore A. Postol.

A look at the balanced ternary notation and it’s use in Setun, a Soviet computer. By Andrew Buntine.

A great deal has been written in recent years about the perils of automation. With predicted mass unemployment, declining wages, and increasing inequality, clearly we should all be afraid. By now it’s no longer just the Silicon Valley trend watchers and technoprophets who are apprehensive. In a study that has already racked up several hundred citations, scholars at Oxford University have estimated that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines.

Darktable is an Open Source workflow app and raw developer for photography. Picture it as your virtual zoomable light table and darkroom at the same time.

When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus.

Sideways dictionary — it's like a dictionary, but using analogies instead of definitions. Use it as a tool for finding and sharing helpful analogies to explain technological ideas. Because if everyone understands technology better, we can make technology work better for everyone.

Long after research contradicts common medical practices, patients continue to demand them and physicians continue to deliver.

People have reported “near death experiences”, or NDE’s, over centuries and across cultures. The nature of them has historically been the territory of religion and philosophy. But now science has staked its claim in the discussion. And the questions are profound: where is consciousness produced, in the brain, or somewhere else? Can consciousness continue to exist even after the heart and brain have stopped working? Contributor Ashley Walters explores the science and the meaning of near death experiences. [Audio program]

The beautiful and otherworldly development of the human embryo has been revealed in unprecedented detail in an interactive three-dimensional atlas. The digital models, built by a team of scientists in the Netherlands, took around 45,000 hours to produce and offer researchers an unparalleled glimpse into the first eight weeks of human development.

Internal Endace documents reveal the firm’s key role helping governments harvest vast amounts of data on private emails, chats, and browsing histories. By Ryan Gallagher, Nicky Hager.

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. By David Graeber.

Do you ever feel pressure to "find your purpose"? You don't need to stress. There's one purpose we all share, and it's easily accessible.

The idea we can be anything we choose is “such an old-fashioned notion, with absolutely no backing whatsoever.” By Olivia Goldhill.

A gut full of diverse microbes – bacteria, viruses and fungi – is essential for a healthy mind and body. And evidence is growing that our modern diet, overuse of antibiotics and obsession with cleanliness are damaging the diversity of microbes that live in our guts, contributing to a range of conditions including depression, multiple sclerosis, obesity and rheumatoid arthritis. Microbes live in our guts, bodily fluids, cavities and skin. For every one of our human cells, there’s at least one of them.

"The only commitments any nation was willing to make amounted to slowing, at some undetermined point in the future, the rate at which the production of greenhouse gas pollutants is increasing. In the real world, meanwhile, enough greenhouse gases have already been dumped into the atmosphere to send the world’s climate reeling…" By John Michael Greer.

Each year when summer comes along, we all look forward to different things. Some of us head to the beach, others to the mountains for camping. Some look forward to the epicurean delights like watermelon and ice cones. But for a select group of photographers in Japan, Summer signals the arrival of fireflies.

Everybody's talking about gut bacteria. Pick a disease or disorder, and somebody, somewhere, has said that a probiotic supplement—an over-the-counter, unregulated pill usually filled with a single strain of friendly gut bacteria—might cure it, whether it’s cancer, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or a yeast infection. But there’s very little evidence that probiotic supplements do any good. “There’s a lot of promise here but not a lot of proof yet,” said Cliff McDonald, associate director for science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion.

A delegation of American executives flew to Beijing in April for a secret meeting at the Grand Hyatt hotel, just blocks from Tiananmen Square. They went to meet with the new kingmakers in what has become one of the grandest and strangest experiments in money the world has seen: the virtual currency known as Bitcoin. Against long odds, and despite an abstruse structure, in which supercomputers are said to mine the currency via mathematical formulas...

When it comes to what you bite, chew and swallow, your choices have a direct and long-lasting effect on the most powerful organ in your body: your brain. So which foods cause you to feel so tired after lunch? Or so restless at night? Mia Nacamulli takes you into the brain to find out. Lesson by Mia Nacamulli, animation by Private Island.

What happens after we die, and what becomes of us after we push through the mysterious boundary between life and death? By Brent Swancer.

One of the more unfortunate memes that makes an appearance whenever climate science is discussed is the accusation that, by hyping their results, climate scientists are ensuring themselves steady paychecks, and may even be enriching themselves.

An expert answers questions about what could happen at the cellular level after a report links radiofrequency signals to tumors in rats. The release of a study Friday linking cancer in rats to the type of radiation emitted by cell phones presents some of the strongest implications in more than two decades of research that higher doses of such signals could be linked to tumors in laboratory animals—unsettling news for billions of mobile phone users worldwide. Still missing, however, is a clear understanding of exactly how radiofrequency (RF) radiation used by mobile phones might create cellular-level changes that could lead to cancer.