A definitive list of life hacks that will actually simplify and improve your everyday life. This selection of 55 life hacks were hand-picked from our two previous posts: 50 Life Hacks to Simplify your World and 40 Clever Life Hacks to Simplify your World. It also includes updated tips from the popular subreddit r/lifehacks. Enjoy! And please pass along to anyone who may find some of these tips helpful :)

Gaming used to be what D&D boss Mike Mearls called “a hobby of not playing the game you wanted to play.” Fate designer Fred Hicks calls time spent creating characters or reading game books “lonely fun.” Electronic games took away the appeal of lonely fun. Now wherever you have a laptop or phone, you can game.

While most buildings adhere to the standard design, there are still plenty out there that were clearly the work of insane, overgrown children.

By Carlo M. Cipolla.

Leonard Guarente is certain he’s succeeded where doctors (and quacks) before him have failed. His pill will either extend lives or tarnish his career.

Google could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself. The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products. The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people.

A robot vacuum cleaner sounds like a great idea. I have a Roomba, one of the most popular models, and most of the time it works great. But sometimes there are unexpected problems. In a recent Facebook post, an Arkansas man described just how bad these problems can be. His dog had an accident on the floor, and then the Roomba started its scheduled cleaning. "If your Roomba runs over dog poop, stop it immediately and do not let it continue the cleaning cycle," the man wrote. Unfortunately, he happened to be asleep when the Roomba ran.

Research has now demonstrated that meditation builds brain cells and increases gray matter in the brain. Using magnetic imaging (MRI), Harvard researchers found that meditation produced physiological changes in the brain’s gray matter. Some areas in the brains of the study participants thickened after only eight weeks of mindfulness practice. The research was published in 2011 and represented the first time that physical changes to the brain caused by mediation were documented.

Social scientists dismiss them, but rather than being universally inaccurate, stereotypes are often grounded in reality. There are good reasons for the bad reputation of stereotypes, which may give rise to malevolent propaganda about groups: disproportionate media representations of African-Americans as criminals, women as fit for nothing but child-rearing and homemaking, Arabs and Muslims as nothing but bloodthirsty terrorists, Jews as grasping hook-nosed Nazis perpetrating genocide on innocent Palestinian babies. Such characterisations are inaccurate, immoral and repulsive, to say the least.

It’s rare that a long, technical paper in a biology journal turns out to be a page-turner. But it happens. A team of researchers published a thorough review of the science of why we age this week in the journal Cell. It ties together that still-young field’s confusing, sometimes contradictory findings into a single coherent whole and offers the most complete explanation I’ve seen anywhere as to why human beings get old, as well as what we can do to slow the ageing process.

Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that's not entirely what it seems. It's about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot.

The best thing you'll see today.

We’ve discussed kitchen tools everyone should have, and tools everyone on a budget should have, but if you’re willing to put a little money into your home cooking, here are some solid kitchen tools that may cost a little more than usual, but will pay you back in flavor, time saved, or just plain quality of life.

You might have heard the news: Our world could be a clever computer simulation that creates the impression of living in a real world. Elon Musk brought up this topic a few weeks ago. Truth be told — he is probably right. However, there is a very important point missing in this whole “real vs. fake” discussion: It actually makes no difference. But first...why might our world be a simulation? Musk is nowhere near the first one to suggest our world might be fake. The idea reaches back to the ancient Greeks, though what we call a computer simulation, the ancient Greeks called a dream.

At the altar of motherhood, I have already sacrificed so much. Must I also give up my preferred mode of self-expression?

Peiter "Mudge" Zatko and his wife Sarah, formerly of the NSA, developed software that's already helped find flaws across 12,000 pieces of software.

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.

Next time you bite into a slice of watermelon or a cob of corn, consider this: these familiar fruits and veggies didn't always look and taste this way. Humans have been tweaking the genetics of our favourite produce for millennia.

Want to live forever? Science hasn't quite cracked that one yet, but a group of Harvard researchers has figured out how to give you the best possible shot. For 75 years (and counting), researchers have been following the same 600+ people to determine what makes a long, healthy, and happy life. These studies, titled the Grant and Glueck Studies, are two of the longest longitudinal studies on health and happiness ever conducted, containing tens of thousands of pages of participant questionnaires...

The next time dandruff dots your shoulders, you might want to reach for yogurt, not shampoo. The latest study into scaly scalps has found that nurturing particular bacteria on the skin could keep the white flakes at bay. Researchers in Shanghai took on the dandruff problem with an unprecedented investigation into flaky scalps and the ecosystem of microbes that set up home on the human head, feeding on the lavish menu of dead skin and oily secretions called sebum.

I’ve been interested in BitCoin since the very beginning but, until now, I considered BTC some very nice cryptographic experiment with high potential but almost no effects on real life. A few years ago, buying BTC or selling them in order to get fiat ( “real” currency such as USD, EUR, etc ) wasn’t easy at all, but now things changed, everything is way much easier.

How to tell if a plane ticket is a good deal.

A British startup is using the unique abilities of convolutional neural networks to do a sort of scaled-up version of Adobe’s content-aware fill — but instead of filling in the gaps in a picture, it’s imagining a whole new picture, larger and more detailed than the original. Kind of hard to believe without seeing it, right? That’s why they call their company Magic Pony. Just emerging from semi-stealth mode (and even then, only barely), Magic Pony Technology’s researchers have trained their...

An overview of the humorous accounts that aim to pull back the curtain on the Ivory Tower and share its oddities, culture and inconsistencies. Despite the silliness, the following accounts often discuss issues rarely touched on in the academic community. These accounts offer a lighthearted take on a business that takes itself too seriously and for that, we are immensely grateful.

I’m always surprised at how much rancor is directed toward “mythicists”—those who deny that there was a real Jesus who, whether or not he was divine, was the nucleus around which Christianity accreted. I’m also surprised at how certain many biblical scholars are that Jesus existed (Bart Ehrman, to give a prominent example).

Before you turn away from these words in frustration, thinking the last thing you need to read is another anti-Hillary rant, allow yourself to play devil’s advocate for just a couple of minutes longer. After all, if Hillary is the wiser choice, then nothing you can read below will change that irrevocable fact.

Do you aspire to be one of those people who knows at least a little bit about a lot of things? There's any easy way to do it: read ... everything! You can't just stick to the thrillers, or anthologies, or biographies you've grown partial to. If you really want to become a more well-rounded person, you'll need to force yourself out of your comfort zone at the bookstore. If you're not sure where to start, you've come to the right place. We've selected 24 timeless books on all different topics...