Those with dysexistential syndrome can literally will themselves to die. Medicine is just starting to understand

Oppressively hot summer days often evoke the expression, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” That sticky, tropical-like air combined with high temperatures is more than unpleasant — it makes extreme heat a greater health risk. 

Climate models project…

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope team fully deployed its 21-foot, gold-coated primary mirror, successfully completing the final stage of all major spacecraft deployments to prepare for science operations.

Life is short

Aversive emotional reactions to real or imagined social harms infuse moral judgment
and motivate prosocial behavior. Here, we show that the neurotr...

The Keck Observatory telescopes on Maunakea in Hawaii, are the world’s largest optical and infrared telescopes. Keck Observatory's vision is to advance the frontiers of astronomy and share our discoveries with the world.

A laptop, which was intended “for mobile professionals”, with up to 8 hours of battery life, with an $1899 price… in 1985. How was it…

Here’s a subtly impossible figure devised by UC-Santa Cruz computer scientist David Huffman. If it’s a three-sided pyramid, then its edges define the intersections of three planes and should meet in a single point. But they don’t: This is intriguing because…

It is my belief that you, the postgraduate students and job-seekers for whom the book is primarily meant will benefit from reading it; however, it is my hope that even the most experienced research...

U.S. doctors have transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life — a first for medical science.

EU police body accused of unlawfully holding information and aspiring to become an NSA-style mass surveillance agency

Programmer chronicles.

Carl Størmer (1872-1957) enjoyed a hobby that was very, very unusual at the time. He walked around Oslo, Norway in the 1890s with his spy camera and secretly took everyday pictures of people. The subjects in Størmer's pictures appear in their natural state.…

AS A SOBER ADDICT and addictions therapist, I understand addiction as a likely outcome of the intersection of human nature and human cleverness. We are

Have you ever noticed that gradients tend to look a little gray and washed-out in the middle? This happens because of a mathematical quirk with RGB colors. Fortunately, we can work around this quirk, and create beautiful, lush, saturated gradients.

Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations, you’ve earned the right to read the results! If not, you could be doing yourself a big disservice and not understanding the true intricacies…