Christopher Groskopf

When the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) signed off on the new National Market System (Reg NMS) in 2005, the goal was to transform the 188-year-old New York Stock Exchange from an old school institution where specialists shouted from the trading floor into a hyper-efficient system of computers quietly matching orders in real time. This modern marketplace was meant to introduce competition, juice efficiency, and ensure investors got the best prices.

Look at the people around you. Some are passive, others more aggressive. Some work best alone, others crave companionship. We easily recognize that there is great variation among the individuals who live near us. Yet, when we speak of people from elsewhere, we seem to inevitably characterize them based on their country of origin.

Across the country a wave of dual-income couples and down-sizing baby-boomers are skipping home ownership and choosing apartment living instead. These elective nomads are pushing rents in American cities through the roof. Meanwhile, other renters—who have a median household income less than half that of homeowners—are finding that fewer and fewer homes fit their budget.

On May 30th, Mars will be the closest it has been to Earth in 11 years. To celebrate the occasion, Hubble scientists pointed the eponymous telescope at the red planet and took the photo above. Though better-known for snapping pictures of things much further away, the Hubble has frequently been used to to survey celestial bodies within our own solar system.

It’s been almost 20 years since David Bowie told us of he was afraid of Americans. Americans have used that time to grow increasingly afraid of their government, each other, and the rest of the world. By virtually every measure Americans have become less trusting, a situation which threatens to destabilize a wide variety of public and private institutions.

Oh, how the storied American middle-class has fallen. New numbers out from the Pew Research Center show that inequality has increased so much since 1999 that middle-income earners are no longer a majority in nine states and the District of Columbia.

In 2011, the State of California released more than 27,500 inmates from state prison as the result of a court order. A recent study, published online by the journal Criminology and Public Policy, is among the first to evaluate the effect of these releases on crime rates (paywall). Professors from three American universities examined data from the state and found there was no change in crime rates as a result of the releases.

This summer, if all goes according to plan, the second reactor at Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant will begin supplying power to the US electrical grid. Construction on the reactor in Spring City, Tennessee, has proceeded in fits and starts since the project began in 1973. It will be the first new nuclear reactor to come online in the US since the first Watts Bar reactor was completed 20 years ago.

Last year scientists briefly thought they might have discovered an advanced alien civilization. Changes in the brightness of KIC 8462852, a star 1,480 light years away, looked as if they might be evidence of a Dyson sphere or other megastructures designed to tap its solar energy on a massive scale.

Despite the proliferation of digital schedules and transit apps, it can be tricky to identify the most transit-friendly places within American cities. Most measures of transit effectiveness only take into account the number of stops, not how well they can help you navigate your city. AllTransit, a new website from the non-profit Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), aims to change that.

Looking to rent an apartment in a major American city? Good luck. Despite forests of cranes transforming New York, Houston, and Washington, DC into giant construction yards, rents are still rising in each of those cities. Development of new apartments is struggling to catch up to a surge of demand from young professionals and aging retirees. Nationally, rental vacancies are at a 30-year low.

Donald Trump has won the Republican primary in Indiana and, with that, effectively clinched his party’s nomination. The head of the Republican party took to Twitter with a call for the party to unite behind the presumptive candidate.

The Middle East and North Africa are already some of the hottest places on Earth. In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia daily high temperatures can exceed 40°C (104°F) for the entire summer. Unfortunately, it’s about to get a whole lot hotter. A paper from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Cyprus Institute in Nicosia today warns that by the end of the century parts of the region could be too hot for humans to survive.

If you’ve ever wondered where exactly words are in your brain, scientists from the University of California at Berkeley have something to show you. In a paper published Wednesday (April 27)  in the journal Nature (paywall), researchers describe the results of an experiment where they had test subjects listen to The Moth Radio Hour for two hours each. While the show played, they recorded the listener’s reaction using an fMRI machine. Their results show what specific parts of the brain react to different groups of words.

For the first time, the general public can get its hands on a big chunk of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). For those who have forgotten, that’s the 17-mile-long particle collider that first observed the Higgs Boson (a long-sought particle predicted by the standard model) back in 2013 and in doing so received praise from the Nobel Prize committee.

The map above is the work of two scientists from EarthEnv, a collaborative biodiversity project supported by Yale University, NASA, and others. It shows what percentage of days each year are cloudy, for every place on Earth. To create it they analyzed 15 years of twice-daily satellite measurements. They also used the same data to produce maps that show monthly averages, seasonal variation, and identify areas of near-constant cloud cover.

Bruno Kramm, the leader of the Berlin chapter of Germany’s Pirate Party, was arrested at a rally today for quoting a line from a poem satirizing Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The author of the poem is comedian Jan Boehmermann, who is himself the subject of a criminal complaint from the Turkish government after having read it on German TV.

This weekend marks the 26th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s ride into orbit on the space shuttle Discovery. Despite its age and storied history, the Hubble continues to be a crucial tool for astronomers. It also continues to absolutely blow our minds with jaw-dropping pictures of deep space.

Malaria cases in Europe have dropped from a peak of over 90,000 in 1995 to zero in 2015, according to the World Health Organization. This marks an important milestone in efforts to eliminate malaria globally.

The US government has abandoned its latest attempt to compel Apple to help unlock an iPhone, because someone gave them the passcode. This is the second high-profile case in which the government has insisted it required Apple’s assistance, only to find another way in.

Traffic accidents kill 1.25 million people per year, and it’s well-known that those deaths are disproportionately in low- and middle-income countries. Over at CityMetric, writer James O’Malley has added an interesting wrinkle, by showing a correlation between the number of traffic fatalities in a country and the corruptness of its government.

If you have lived anywhere in the US that frequently has severe weather, you are undoubtedly familiar with the the no-nonsense, all-caps style of the National Weather Service alert.

Spiking food prices over the past decade caused shortages, unrest, and maybe even revolutions. Now that prices have returned to normal levels, the question is whether the worst of the food crisis is over.

Today’s refugee crisis is about much more than Syria. An unprecedented number of people around the world are being forced to flee their homes. Watch the video to see what the data reveal about who they are, and what’s caused the problem in the first place.