Eight ways labs benefit from the popular workplace messaging tool. By Jeffrey M. Perkel. (Dec. 29, 2016)

Bruno Latour on the election of Donald Trump and the coming ecological crisis. (Nov. 17, 2016)

I consider this a super human talent. Alien in fact. Seriously, why aren’t they checking this painter’s DNA for extra-terrestrial origins? His name is Yigal Ozeri, an oil painter from Isräel best-known for his cinematic-scale portraits of pretty girls hanging out with nature in perfect sunlight. Let me know when you see a brushstroke…

Doctor Pidjin will see you now.

Those who want to combat Fake News should stop aggressively spreading it when it suits their agenda. Julian Assange is a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him (into which category one falls in any given year typically depends on one’s feelings about the subject of his most recent publication of leaked documents). But one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report published this week by The Guardian that recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make.

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

Japan is a scrapping an experimental reactor which has worked for just 250 days of its 22-year lifespan and cost $9bn (£7.2bn). The Monju reactor, in western Japan's Fukui city, was designed to burn most of its own spent fuel, eliminating the need to deal with the nuclear waste. But it suffered its first problems months after it went live, and has not worked properly since. It would now need billions more for safety upgrades to be restarted.

From our origins in Africa, humans began migrating around the globe roughly 100,000 years ago. But it was only with the advent of agriculture about 12,000 years ago that our population started to swell to more than a million. This data visualisation from the American Museum of Natural History beautifully charts humanity’s stunning – and increasingly alarming – exponential expansion to our current population of roughly 7.4 billion.

If you’re a map nerd or a history buff or someone who likes to travel or just a person who enjoys learning new things, the latest video from Wendover Productions is an absolute delight to watch. It’s a quick tour of all the countries in the world (this is the first part, so exactly half the countries show up) filled with totally random but fun facts about each country.

Langley, VA - A decades-long plot to get Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to pass away peacefully in his sleep has come to fruition, according to a statement from the CIA.

The Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Social Network and mastermind behind The West Wing reacts to Donald Trump being elected the 45th president of the United States in a moving letter written to his 15-year-old daughter Roxy and her mother Julia Sorkin.

The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media...

Good solutions to biology’s problems are astonishingly plentiful. By Phillip Ball.

Put simply, if Congress were to adopt a territorial system to tax only U.S.-originated revenue without addressing profit shifting, corporations would continue to artificially book income in tax havens. Tax revenue would continue to plummet. There is a remedy that fixes profit shifting, adopts a territorial tax, and solidifies tax revenue, by adapting a variation of the corporate tax system already used at the state level.

Carl Jung used to argue that meaningful coincidences—in his jargon, synchronicity—were as important as cause and effect... By John Michael Greer.

Ann Jones examines schemes seeking to use veterans for corporate interests and dismantle the VA system in the name of privatized profits. (Aug. 25, 2016)

It’s October. The leaves are turning brown and the nights are drawing in. It’s cold and it’s raining and it’s nearly Halloween. The perfect time, then, to curl up with a good book and give yourself the creeps. But which book?

I had no idea there was a specific order for adjectives until I read a viral post. It was a side-of-the-mallet moment

Because you’re an idiot, like everyone else. By Alex Balk.

Alcohol When it comes to substance use and abuse, our society is built upon a bedrock of hypocrisy. We drink alcohol at nearly every single social event or gathering we attend, whether it be a birthday party, a child’s party, a wake, marriage, public holiday, or sporting event. We drink just because it’s the weekend or because we had a long day at work. And why? The most common (usually unspoken) reasons are “social lubrication” or escapism. We are trying to escape from feelings, emotions, memories, reality, or the troubling aspects of our lives. Often we need it to have an interesting conversation, to make human interactions more appealing.

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

The far right has been trying to besmirch Hillary Clinton for more than two decades, and yet after some 20 official investigations, they still have little or nothing to show for it.

Fallacies are fake or deceptive arguments, arguments that prove nothing. Fallacies often seem superficially sound, and they far too often retain immense persuasive power even after being clearly exposed as false. Fallacies are not always deliberate, but a good scholar’s purpose is always to identify and unmask fallacies in arguments. Note that many of these definitions overlap, but the goal here is to identify contemporary and classic fallacies as they are used in today's discourse.

Most of us have wondered what we might do if we didn’t need to work – if we woke up one morning to discover we had won the lottery, say. We entertain ourselves with visions of multiple homes, trips around the world or the players we would sign after buying Arsenal. For many of us, the most tantalising aspect of such visions is the freedom it would bring: to do what one wants, when one wants and how one wants.

I was visiting my sister recently when I was shocked to discover that my nearly five-year-old nephew had grown into a full-blown walking…

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation. It’s hard to believe I’ve flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it—how I changed my brain.

In the last couple of years, deep learning techniques have transformed the world of artificial intelligence. One by one, the abilities and techniques that humans once imagined were uniquely our own have begun to fall to the onslaught of ever more powerful machines. Deep neural networks are now better than humans at tasks such as face recognition and object recognition. They’ve mastered the ancient game of Go and thrashed the best human players.

Two dolphins have been recorded having a conversation for the first time after scientists developed an underwater microphone which could distinguish the animals' different "voices". Researchers have known for decades that the mammals had an advanced form of communication, using distinctive clicks and whistles to show they are excited, happy, stressed or separated from the group.