In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.”

Yesterday, we looked at “Untitled Earth Sim 64,” a science fiction comedy based on the idea that Earth is a messed up simulation — created by entities that are in themselves simulations. And maybe their simulators were in turn simulated… And so forth. The problem is, where’s the original? Surprisingly, perhaps, there is a physics theory that offers an answer: The universe simulated itself:

Ranking of iPhone prices to average wages in various countries.

In 2021, cybercrime is a normal part of everyday life. But back in the early days of the internet—that is, the 1980s and ‘90s—the hacker was a bizarre new phenomenon that the American public had never encountered before. Many of the trailblazers of this trend weren’t cynical criminals but rather bespectacled teenagers—unadulterated nerds with a penchant for using their advanced computer powers to cause mischief. Back in these days, hacking was less about extortion and moneymaking than it was about hubristic achievement and the desire to do something that had never been done before.

Ksenia Coffman’s fellow editors have called her a vandal and a McCarthyist. She just wants them to stop glorifying fascists—and start citing better sources.

Australian musk ducks can imitate sounds including human speech, with one bird recorded repeatedly saying “you bloody fool”, according to a new study. The recording of the talking duck appears to be the first comprehensively documented instance of the species being able to mimic sounds they hear, joining other birds including songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds.

Scientists say that the recordings are evidence that musk ducks are like parrots in that they are vocal language learners.

After building his own version of Middle-earth, Nicolas Gentile has thrown a ‘ring’ into Mount Vesuvius

Even if you haven’t heard the term “biohacking” before, you’ve probably encountered some version of it. Maybe you’ve seen Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey extolling the benefits of fasting intermittently and drinking “salt juice” each morning. Maybe you’ve read about former NASA employee Josiah Zayner injecting himself with DNA using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Maybe you’ve heard of Bay Area folks engaging in “dopamine fasting.”

The photos feature otters, bears, monkeys, tigers, prairie dogs, penguins, and other wildlife in comical poses.

In a new book, Atlas of the Invisible, the geographer James Cheshire and designer Oliver Uberti redefine what an atlas can be. The following eight graphics reveal some of the causes and consequences of the climate crisis that are hard to detect with the naked eye but become clear when the data is collected and visualised.

Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer best known for penning "2001: A Space Odyssey," accurately foresaw the future of the way we live.

Rattlesnakes have evolved a clever method of convincing humans that danger is closer than you think.

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment. The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.

Using an object to crack nuts is considered one of the most complex tool-using behaviors in the animal kingdom. So far, only chimpanzees, capuchins and macaques have been observed cracking nuts with such tools in the wild. In a new study, Dr. Elisa Bandini and Dr. Claudio Tennie from Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen investigated whether other primate species such as orangutans also crack nuts with tools and how the animals can learn to do so.

The FDA has largely lost its ability to regulate the myriad pills, powders and potions that promise to grow muscle, shed body fat and improve your focus.