When people die from lack of access to medicine, health care profiteers should expect resistance. By Mike Ludwig.

At 70 years old, Prince Charles is the longest-serving heir apparent in British history-a distinction that hasn't always helped his already-strained public persona. For years, the Prince of Wales was seen as stuffy and impatient to inherit the throne. Thanks in large part to the scandal surrounding his divorce from Princess Diana and the huge impact her untimely death had on the public, Charles spent a long time as one of the less popular members of the royal family.

Long before the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a Japanese video game developer predicted society's issues of truth and reality. Over a decade before my posts on post-truth aphorisms and our struggles in constructing narratives, Hideo Kojima would create a game in which the archenemy was none other than the American government itself in 2001.

The U.S. has spent over $5.9 trillion on wars that have directly led to the deaths of close to 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks in September 2001. Around 370,000 died due to direct war-related violence, while several times more died as a result of the indirect effects of war such as malnutrition and damaged infrastructure, according to Costs of War, an annual research project published by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

Verily, Alphabet's life sciences arm, has paused work on its so-called "smart lens" program, which was aiming to put tiny sensors on contact lenses to measure blood sugar levels in tears. If it worked, the lenses could help diabetics track their glucose levels in real time and in less invasive ways than the traditional meters that require piercing the skin. But in a blog post on Friday, Verily said that after four years of research it has determined that detecting blood sugar in tears is a massive — and potentially insurmountable — technical and scientific undertaking.

Scientists have found the first evidence of plastic contamination in freshwater fish in the Amazon, highlighting the extent to which bags, bottles and other waste dumped in rivers is affecting the world’s wildlife. Tests on the stomach contents of fish in Brazil’s Xingu River, one of the major tributaries of the Amazon, revealed plastic particles in more than 80% of the species examined, including the omnivorous parrot pacu, herbivorous redhook silver dollar, and meat-eating red-bellied piranha.

US authorities on Friday agreed on how to regulate food products cultured from animal cells—paving the way to get so-called "lab meat" on American plates.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are brilliant at building businesses, but we shouldn't let them take control. For the sake of my health, I walk on beautiful Hampstead Heath at least once a week, and I get there via the revamped London Overground train service. It's clean, frequent and gets me there in less than 15 minutes. "So what?" you may be thinking; the significance is I get there by train rather than by flying car.

Ducati MotoGP rider Andrea Dovizioso emerged victorious in a stop-start, attrition-heavy 2018 MotoGP season finale at a wet Circuit Ricardo Tormo in Valencia

Yoshua Bengio wants to stop talk an AI arms race, and make the technology more accessible to the developing world. Alongside Geoff Hinton and Yan LeCun, Bengio is famous for championing a technique known as deep learning that in recent years has gone from an academic curiosity to one of the most powerful technologies on the planet.

Rain is on the way for fire-scorched and smoke-choked northern California, forecasters said on Sunday, as the search for the dead and missing continued after the state’s most destructive wildfires.

The average temperature of the planet has been rising since the 1700s and its Industrial Revolution. Three years ago, in 2015, 195 nations signed onto what is known as the Paris Accord. In it, they agreed to curb greenhouse gas emissions to limit that warming by 2100. The goal is not to let it exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial times. But a new report says there may be big benefits to setting an even lower target.

Just two years ago, amid global fanfare, the Paris climate accords were signed — initiating what seemed, for a brief moment, like the beginning of a planet-saving movement. But almost immediately, the international goal it established of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius began to seem, to many of the world’s most vulnerable, dramatically inadequate; the Marshall Islands’ representative gave it a blunter name, calling two degrees of warming “genocide.”

In a new paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers have shared that there may be a super-Earth orbiting Barnard's Star, a very-low-mass red dwarf star that is only six light years away from regular Earth. The astronomers didn't exactly see the planet, but they do have the data to back up what they believe is out there.

Promises are personal. They build trust. When a person makes a promise they usually feel a social commitment to stay true to their promises, especially if they are being held accountable. If you promise a friend you’ll take care of their pet while they are on vacation and you ignore the responsibility, you damage your friendship and perhaps even your reputation. Similarly, if you make a promise to your colleague that you’ll deliver training resources to a client by Friday and you fall short, you’ll probably feel disappointed in yourself and now you have to answer to your boss and face potential consequences.

When U.S. President Donald Trump signed the order to keep Guantanamo Bay open, he shut down the State Department office responsible for closing it and resettling released detainees. That office, called the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure, was also responsible for tracking inmates already released. Now several have gone missing.

Have you ever wondered why every planet we know about is shaped like a sphere? Why not a cube, or an hourglass? While those—and let's be honest, most other shapes—would definitely break the laws of physics, there's one odd planet form that wouldn't: a donut.

The signs of serious, destructive climate change have been difficult to miss this year. Hurricanes Florence and Michael caused at least 98 deaths, billions of dollars of destruction, with tens of thousands of lives uprooted. In Iowa, we are seeing increased humidity, which is both uncomfortable and affects crop growth (increasing mold growth, insects, and hindering grain drying) as well as unprecedented rainfall (September saw 7.05 inches of rainfall in Iowa City, compared to the normal average of 3.35 inches).

The US refused to join a new global cybersecurity agreement this week—maybe because it was created by French president Emmanuel Macron, with whom President Trump isn’t on great terms with. On the same day, internet traffic that was supposed to route through Google’s cloud servers instead went haywire, traveling through unplanned servers based in the likes of Russia and China. Hack? No, as Lily Hay Newman explains, though the cause was still worrisome.

Sweet, wide-eyed Mark Zuckerberg swears he didn’t know anything. The Facebook CEO was shocked and appalled at the conduct of his company, he told reporters on a conference call Thursday, responding to a bombshell New York Times report that Facebook hired a D.C. opposition research firm called Definers Public Affairs which proceeded to undertake all manner of ethically fraught actions on its behalf.