The Artists and Their Alley, in Postwar France

From Brancusi to Ernst to Klein, the greatest painters and sculptors of the time once lived and worked together, sharing beds, a single toilet and their creative brilliance.
Continue to article

New Yorkers Can Now Get Unlimited Uber For $100

Uber's subscription plans are rolling out across the United States for flat rate or even free rides.
Continue to article

The Socialite Spy Who Played So Dumb She Outsmarted the Nazis

Big game hunter, legendary French Riviera partier, and a quintessential WASP—Gertrude Sanford was also a vital U.S. spy who managed to outmaneuver the Nazis after being captured.
Continue to article

Why Australia is home to one of the largest language families in the world

Researchers put linguistics and genomics together to explore how ancient Aborigines expanded across Australia and began to speak different languages.
Continue to article

Mythbusting Ancient Rome – the emperor Nero

The image of a crazed and capricious Emperor Nero is immortalised in popular culture: from fiddling while Rome burns to having a sexual relationship with his mother. The historical evidence, however, is rather different.
Continue to article

Is Japanese Tea Safe from Radiation?

Japan and its tea producers took the necessary precautions, in coordination with multiple organizations at home and abroad, to make sure their tea was safe.
Continue to article

The green of Scotland

Continue to article

Typhoon Megi Landfalls in Taiwan; Over 120 MPH Winds, 30+ Inches of Rain Measured

On the heels of typhoons Meranti and Malakas, Megi has hammered Taiwan.
Continue to article

Superblocks: How Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars

Modern cities are designed for cars. But the city of Barcelona is testing out an urban design trick that can give cities back to pedestrians.
Continue to article

The Secret Plan to Protect America’s Founding Documents During WWII

After Pearl Harbor, a fearful Library of Congress secretly stashed the crown jewels of U.S. history for safekeeping. This was the rescue plan.
Continue to article

Evening sky

The sky was on fire this evening.
Continue to article

The Year Hundreds of Bombs Went Off in New York City

Why bombing New York City wasn’t always so rare.
Continue to article

Where should you sit on a plane?

A former flight attendant reveals the top spots for comfort, safety and service.
Continue to article

A new literary genre critiques the scariest, most unbelievable part of life in China—reality

Traditional literary tropes have struggled to describe China’s day-to-day corruption, warp-speed modernization, supersonic development, and political oppression. Mystery, satire, horror—none feel quite expansive enough to begin encompassing the stories of the world’s most simultaneously populous yet secretive country. To help bridge this gap, Beijing-based novelist Ning Ken has created a new literary genre to properly convey the absurdity of modern life in China: chaohuan. Meaning “ultra-unreal,” this contemporary mode of literary expression is intended to reflect the modern Chinese zeitgeist in all its dark oddity.
Continue to article

Texas quakes caused by injection wells, scientists determine

Texas earthquakes, one reaching magnitude 4.8, were caused by injections of wastewater in drilling for oil and gas, scientists say. Using radar from satellites, a study published in the journal Science, found that five significant East Texas quakes in 2012 and 2013 were not natural occurrences. For the first time, scientists were able to track the uplifting ground movements in the quakes. The study's co-author, Stanford University geophysicist William Ellsworth, said the technique provides a way to determine which quakes are man-made.
Continue to article

Australia Is Drifting So Fast GPS Can't Keep Up

Australia is not quite where you think it is. The continent has shifted by 4.9 feet since the last adjustment was made to GPS coordinates in 1994, reports the New York Times. All of the Earth’s continents float on tectonic plates, which glide slowly over a plastic-like layer of the upper mantle. And the plate that Australia sits on has been moving relatively fast, about 2.7 inches a year (northward and with a slight clockwise rotation). In contrast, the North American plate has been moving roughly one inch a year, though the Pacific plate moves three to four inches a year.
Continue to article

How One Woman Photographed Every Library in New York

When architectural photographer Elizabeth Felicella was not working for clients, she spent her free time photographing all 210 branches of New York City’s Public Library system. Five years later, the resulting work, Reading Room, is essentially an enormous catalog covering libraries in all five boroughs.
Continue to article

Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms

Claims that Indigenous Australians are the most ancient continuous civilisation on Earth have been backed by the first extensive study of their DNA, which dates their origins to more than 50,000 years ago. Scientists were able to trace the remarkable journey made by intrepid ancient humans by sifting through clues left in the DNA of modern populations in Australia and Papua New Guinea. The analysis shows that their ancestors were probably the first humans to cross an ocean, and reveals evidence of prehistoric liaisons with an unknown hominin cousin.
Continue to article

Behind the stunning White Cliffs of Dover, scientists unlock a mystery of algae

The bluffs' iconic white dust once belonged to the shell of a single-celled plant known as a coccolithophore.
Continue to article

In Poland, a preview of what Trump could do to America

Right-wing nationalists launder a conspiracy theory into official truth.
Continue to article

USF Study Finds Police Body Cameras Reduce Use Of Force

Tampa police officers wearing body cameras did not use physical force as often as officers who did not wear them, according to the findings of a new study conducted by the University of South Florida. In 2015, the Tampa Police Department equipped 60 officers with body cameras. USF examined and compared their activity with 60 officers who did not wear body cameras for the course of a year. The results of the two-year study found that officers who wore body cameras reduced use of force by 8.2 percent.
Continue to article

Dangerous New Natural Gas Pipeline Will Span Most Of Florida, Georgia And Alabama

The US Army Corps of Engineers finalized permits earlier this month for a $3.2 billion natural gas pipeline that will span 516 miles, crossing through the majority of Florida as well as large swaths of Georgia and Alabama. The pipeline project is owned by the Sabal Trail partnership, composed of Houston-based Spectra Energy, North Carolina’s […]
Continue to article

Brexit has had 'no major effect' on economy so far

There has been little impact of the Brexit vote on the UK economy so far, says the Office for National Statistics (ONS). "The referendum result appears, so far, not to have had a major effect," its chief economist Joe Grice said. Official figures have not yet reflected the collapse in confidence predicted by some surveys since the referendum. But the ONS warned that we have not yet had official figures for the service sector, which are due next week.
Continue to article

How open borders killed the Labour party

Barring a most spectacular Mossad operation – and I wouldn’t put it past them – Jeremy Corbyn will be re-elected Labour leader on Saturday. There is almost nothing Labour moderates can do about this now but accept the annihilation facing them at the next election; even then, party members may still re-elect Corbyn, or choose someone from a similar background, maybe even someone more left-wing if such a thing exists. There is nothing that can be done because the make-up of the Labour Party has now changed.
Continue to article

Forty-nine per cent of Aussies support Muslim ban

A NEW survey has found almost half of Australians support a ban on Muslim immigration. The Essential poll asked more than 1000 respondents whether they would support or oppose Pauline Hanson’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration. Sixty per cent of Liberal voters, 40 per cent of Labor voters and 34 per cent of Greens voters said they would support the ban.
Continue to article

The language the government tried to suppress

Most of Singapore’s population speak the unofficial language or dialect known as Singlish. But why would the government rather it went away? James Harbeck takes a look.
Continue to article

Where Is It Illegal To Insult Religion?

In Egypt, a woman was sentenced to jail for making an anti-religious comment on Facebook. So where else can you be punished for blasphemy?
Continue to article

Leap Into Freedom: East German Soldier Escaping the Border, And the Story Behind One of the Most Famous Photographs of the Cold War Era

It was the Cold War era. Berlin was divided in two: East and West Berlin. Tensions were high and the then Berlin Wall was a mere barbed wire fence. Two young men were about to make history as one would make a break for it and run to the other side while the other captured it on film.
Continue to article

Solar-powered skyscraper planned for Melbourne

Plans have been unveiled for a solar-powered skyscraper in the Australian city of Melbourne. The high-rise building will be clad with photovoltaic cells.
Continue to article

Derren Brown On Self-Help Industry: 'The Universe Doesn't Give A F**k'

Derren Brown rubs his eyes. It’s no illusion. He’s just tired. The 45-year-old has a new puppy and didn’t sleep much the night before we meet at a club in Soho to speak about his new book, Happy: Why More Or Less Everything Is Absolutely Fine. Brown, the mentalist and star of TV shows like Trick or Treat, Messiah and Pushed To The Edge, is deeply relieved that my first question isn’t ‘What is the secret of happiness?’. “Thank you for not asking that. I think the reason why I expect to be asked that is that there is an idea that is perpetuated by the self-help industry - not just the self-help industry...
Continue to article

Unbylined: A Q&A With a Chinese Fixer

Behind the scenes in one of the world’s least press-friendly countries.
Continue to article

A dangerous backward step for women and girls in Poland

Pregnant at 11, a girl raped by her own father, will have no choice but to give birth. Equally, a woman at high risk of dying in childbirth or of carrying a dead baby, will not be able to seek a termination. This will be the impact of new legislation due to be debated on in the Polish parliament later this week which, if passed, would usher in an almost complete ban on abortion.
Continue to article

We knew Japan had a sex problem. We just didn't know how bad it was until now

Japan's demographic challenges are well-known: It's home to the world's oldest population and has a shrinking birthrate and an astonishing number of single people. And it seems that, despite government efforts to incentivise marriage and child-rearing, things aren't quite trending in the right direction.
Continue to article

Here’s What Happens When You Give $1,000 to Someone in Extreme Poverty

My wife, Adrienne, and I are long-time supporters of unconditional cash giving. From handing $5 to a homeless person on the street in Manhattan to raising $450 to give to a working father of one in rural South Africa — we believe in the virtues of sharing abundance in an empowering fashion that enables people to decide how best to allocate their resources themselves. When we found GiveDirectly in November 2015, an org that gives $1,000, unconditionally, to people who are in extreme poverty...
Continue to article

Disposable income (PPP) per capita by region in Europe

Disposable income is defined as income (from employment, business, property, or social security) minus taxes and social security
Continue to article

The harrowing story of the woman in the Brussels bomb photograph

When she regained consciousness, Nidhi Chaphekar was lying on the floor of Zaventem airport in Brussels, across the room from the bird-shaped statue she had been standing near a few moments before. She tried to open her eyes, but her body wasn’t doing what she wanted it to. Around her was a haze of thick black smoke, which was making her light-headed. She could hear her own internal voice, saying: “Nidhi, you’re alive. Nidhi, it was a bomb. Nidhi, you have to tell your family. The children have exams. Nidhi, come on, get up.”
Continue to article

In Pictures: Flash Flooding in England

Thunderstorms and flash flooding have caused travel chaos in parts of England, as commuters have been warned by the Met Office of worse to come. The stormy conditions brought an abrupt end to the heatwave, which saw the hottest day of the year recorded on Tuesday.
Continue to article

17 September 1939 – the Soviet invasion of Poland

On 17 September 1939, early in the morning, the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Poland was already in the state of war with Nazi Germany that had started on 1 September 1939.
Continue to article

Japan's Lighthouse Legacy Lives on in Taiwan

In the summer of 1867, the American merchant vessel Rover, sailing north from southern China’s Guangdong Province, lost its way during a storm, drifted into waters off the southern coast of Taiwan, struck a reef, and sank.
Continue to article

Do Female Graffiti Artists Have It Harder?

We spoke to 3 female and 3 male street artists about the challenges of being a woman who tags.
Continue to article

Just-Like-That Mind: A Great Zen Teacher on Navigating Loss and Grief

How to reconcile an acceptance of mortality with the unswallowable pain of grief is what the great Zen teacher Seung Sahn Soen-sa (1927–2004) explores in one of the many small doses of potent wisdom found in "Only Don’t Know: Selected Teaching Letters of Zen Master Seung Sahn."
Continue to article

The ‘Blue’ for Blue Jeans was First made 6,200 Years Ago in Peru

It's the oldest-ever example of indigo blue fabric.
Continue to article

Meet the 800-Year-Old Golden Rhinoceros that Challenged Apartheid South Africa

Treasures from pre-colonial southern Africa were suppressed because they contradicted apartheid's official history.
Continue to article

California Cops Lose It Over a Drone

One SHARK "Angel" drone causes the California Highway Patrol and the Fresno County Sheriff's Department to totally lose their cool for two straight days.
Continue to article

Inside Ethiopia’s Sizzling Cauldron

The tribal Afar people have inhabited this arid moonscape for centuries, eking out a living by transporting salt across the brutal desert by camel caravans.
Continue to article

Spring Storms:Wild Weather Day in Australia

This fellow was rescued and is doing fine.After being rescued the koala then crossed shallow floodwaters and found his way up a gum tree.
Continue to article

Baton Rouge after the Flood

Trey Peters took this photo of daughter Ashlyn, 9, she stood and silently stared at the piles of debris from flooded homes on their street in Baton Rouge.
Continue to article

The north/south weather divide on hottest day of year

While many in the UK were enjoying the hottest day of the year, it wasn't such a sweaty day in other parts of the country on Tuesday. The warmest September day since 1911 was recorded in Gravesend, Kent, where it reached 34.4C. But 230 miles away, the Champions League match between Manchester City and Borussia Monchengladbach was called off due to heavy rain. With 32.4mm of rainfall in an hour the match had to be moved to Wednesday.
Continue to article

Denmark's 'House Of Memories' Re-Creates 1950s For Alzheimer's Patients

The apartment in a museum is a detailed reconstruction of a 1950s home, with all its smells, sounds and textures. Psychologists say it can spark memories for people with dementia.
Continue to article

Twin Peaks

by Daniel Casson.
Continue to article