After the 2016 election, much was made of the threats posed to American democracy by foreign disinformation. Trump and his domestic allies were beginning to adopt the same tactics of information warfare that have kept the world’s demagogues and strongmen in power.
Unglamorous, rapidly scalable businesses that play into a theme investors affectionately refer to as “the consumerization of enterprise.” Unsurprisingly, most of these companies are also headed by a young, white, Mormon guy.
Cultural norms, complex religious influences and friendly neighbourhood police officers make losing something in Japan no big deal. But does this tell the whole picture about Japan’s relationship with honesty?
Far removed from the ultra-fast Shinkansens and myriad of metro lines that dominate Japan’s major cities, photographer Arnaud Montagard focuses his lens on a much more leisurely commute – Japan’s ferries.
This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.
Great documentary photography will capture turning points: moments that change the course of history on a global, national, or even personal level. The world’s best photographers pick out the most powerful images from their archives.
In October 2019 North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ordered the demolition of the world’s first floating hotel. Docked in North Korea, the hotel is currently owned by a South Korean company that bought it from a Japanese one. It was a major hit in Vietnam but it was originally made for Australia, designed in Sweden and built in Singapore.
Do we really have free will? In a three-part series, the BBC explores the hidden powers behind the choices we make. This episode looks at the neuroscience behind our understanding of free will.
Intrigued by the dedication of an airline crew who only fly to two destinations, photographer Arthur Mebius documents the experience of flying with North Korea’s Air Koryo. The photo series ‘Dear Sky’ offers an insight to Air Koryo’s aircraft and crew, from the perspective of Mebius as a passenger.
Sabika Sheikh, a Muslim exchange student from Pakistan with dreams of changing the world, struck up an unlikely friendship with an evangelical Christian girl. The two became inseparable—until the day a fellow student opened fire.
How Tommy Thompson, a brilliant scientist, went from discovering a mother lode of treasure at the bottom of the sea to fleeing from authorities with suitcases full of cash.
Researchers have recovered evidence of ancient viruses in the glacier ice, including 28 viral groups that are new to science. As our planet undergoes climate change, these frozen records can inform predictions about which microorganisms will survive, and what the resulting environment will look like.
For decades, the overwhelming majority of psychology research has examined people who live in the United States and other affluent Western countries. By focusing on such a narrow population, psychology researchers have — mostly unwittingly — presented a skewed view of the human mind.
Teri Culletto, aka the Vineyard Baker, creates art with focaccia bread as her canvas. Using fresh herbs and vegetables, she has crafted a series of Vincent van Gogh-inspired loaves she calls Van Dough that features floral imagery as both a way to add surface decoration and flavors to her baking.
thrilld offers easy-to-understand and extensive guides on how to make money, save money and grow money.
In some ways, living in a dense urban area has become much more pleasant for certain types of people — namely the affluent and those who prize proximity to the action above all else. Is a city still a city if urban living is a luxury good?
30 Years A Slave: A moving report from South Korea where the police have rescued hundreds of modern-day slaves tricked into working on salt and seaweed farms on a chain of remote islands. Shockingly, many of those rescued have learning disabilities.
Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. The Confederados in Americana, Brazil, are one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.
Before the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago–Antarctica was still joined to both Australia and South America. And it turns out that a lot of what we recognize about the southern hemisphere can be traced back to that time when Antarctica was green.
A police investigation rippled throughout greater Frankfort, Kentucky, revealing a web of theft that ensnared husbands and wives, fathers and sons, CrossFit instructors and jealous ex-girlfriends — and lots of locals with stolen whiskey on their shelves.
Medical debt is a uniquely American phenomenon, a burden that would be unfathomable in many other developed countries. According to a survey in the American Journal of Public Health, nearly 60 percent of people who have filed for bankruptcy said a medical expense contributed to their bankruptcy.
You’ve seen the pop-ups: “This site uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept cookies.” Without cookies, the online world we know today couldn’t exist. But that world relies on advertising, which gives three kinds of companies a strong incentive to track your online behavior.
To shed light on the essential workers who are healing the sick, stocking our groceries, delivering our packages and cleaning our streets, there is a new political art campaign called Immigrants Are Essential. It’s a project of non-profits Resilience Force and the National Immigration Law Center.
Faced with hyperinflation, a worthless local currency and a risky black market for dollars, Venezuelans are increasingly turning to bitcoin as a tool for survival in the world’s worst-performing economy.
Many cultures swear by the benefits of a hot bath. But only recently has science began to understand how passive heating improves health. Cycling resulted in more calories being burned compared with a hot bath, but bathing resulted in about as many calories being burned as a half-hour walk.
Liguria is Italy’s most famous basil-growing region. The herb is lifeblood here. It floods the stands of Genoa’s Mercato Orientale, a dizzying, circular market hidden on the interior of a city block. Everyone agrees that the best basil in Liguria is grown in the village of Pra’.
Work, in this context, means active, billable labour. But in reality, it rarely stops. It follows us home on our smartphones, tugging at us during an evening out or in the middle of our children’s bedtime routines. It becomes our lives if we are not careful. It becomes us.
We’ve been testing weekly short fiction pieces scribed by GPT-2, a text-generating artificial intelligence algorithm originally built by OpenAI. We give the algorithm a sentence from a real article, and the algorithm iteratively generates what it thinks the next word should be.
Imagine yourself as a modern-day alligator in central Florida, where 12 acres of wild land is sacrificed to development every hour. This is a story about what happens when the South’s creatures no longer have room to move — and about a project aimed at preserving the few corridors that connect what remains of the wild land.
At a time when Del Mar, Pacifica and other coastal cities are fighting to defend their homes and roads from the rising sea, Marina has embarked on a path less traveled. Here in this Army turned university town, residents are learning how to adjust with the ocean as the water moves inland.
She was once billed as “The World’s Most Beautiful Woman,” and that bored her. She wanted to fight Nazis, and to be taken seriously for her technical knowledge and creativity. She wanted control.
Every system of justice is inevitably found to be unjust. The question is in which direction, and how far. This is a fairly basic outline of Japan’s idiosyncratic nature.
Photographer Bruce Davidson crossed the nation, visiting London, the south coast and Scotland to create a portrait of Britain as it was finally beginning to recover from the traumas of war and decades of austerity.
Chile’s desiccated Atacama Desert was once considered a dead zone, but it hides great riches that could help us tackle a major threat to human health. “The premise was that since the conditions are so harsh in the Atacama Desert, organisms become adapted to those conditions.”
A deep learning model developed by NVIDIA Research turns rough doodles into highly realistic scenes using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Dubbed GauGAN, the tool is like a smart paintbrush, converting segmentation maps into lifelike images.
For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Baltic region has strengthened economic integration with the West and all three nations have become increasingly prosperous as a result. However, the Baltic success story also highlights NATO’s vulnerabilities in the region.
“Universal basic income” was for a long time an obscure term bandied about in economics circles. That’s no longer the case. The idea, usually involving a monthly cash grant to every person with no strings attached, has entered mainstream discourse. Small programs hint at how it might work — or not — on a national scale.
Stunning street scenes by James Takumi Shyegun, a talented photographer, videographer, and model from Tokyo, Japan. Takumi focuses mainly on urban, architecture, and street photography.
In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.
