Every year, firms that offer citizenship-by-investment services to wealthy clients looking to move overseas or secure their business publish rankings of the world’s “best” passports—meaning those that offer access to the most countries on paper.
Over the past several years, marijuana has become increasingly available as a legal medical treatment. In the US, 23 states and the District of Columbia allow use of marijuana when recommended by a doctor, and in four states, it is legal for recreational use. Uruguay is building the world’s first state-run marijuana marketplace, and other countries are considering lifting legal restrictions.
Over the past few weeks, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have been busy photographers, capturing many brilliant shots of sunrise, sunset, and aurora from above Earth’s atmosphere. Here are some of those photos, as posted to the Facebook page of NASA’s Earth Observatory:
Some of NASA’s top minds believe we’re not alone in the universe. And they think we’ll find out for sure soon.
Scientists at Stanford University have created a battery that in the future could be a workhorse of consumer electronics such as smartphones. The battery, which is made from aluminum and graphite, is flexible, safe, cheap, and fast-charging—prototypes created by the scientists can charge from empty to full in the span of one minute. Results of the researchers’ work was published online April 6 in Nature.
Students at Columbia University are fretting over the arrest of a fellow undergraduate accused of dealing drugs on campus. The alleged dealer was an active user of Venmo, a mobile app for sending money to people, and on Venmo, transactions are public by default.
Skip the protein bars and sports drinks after your run—you might as well go ahead and grab a burger.
The Google-owned navigation app Waze just got an upgrade. The app, which leverages crowdsourced traffic information from its users to provide a layer of data showing things like construction slowdowns, police sightings, and nearby gas stations, will now add traffic wait time to that list.
Everybody makes mistakes. Google caught a big one before it was too late.
In 2014, at least 2,466 people were sentenced to death in 55 countries, and at least 607 people were executed in 22 countries, according to the Human Rights organization Amnesty International’s annual report on the death penalty.
Facebook has moved into its brand new, 430,000-square-foot (40,000 sq m) office in Menlo Park, California. The office, known as MPK20, was designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry and features a single, massive room—”the largest open floor plan in the world,” as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg describes it—covered by a 9-acre (3.6 ha) rooftop park.
Astronomers have observed an eruption from a baby star in the Orion Constellation that appears to a stellar growth spurt. Such an outburst has never been observed from a younger star. The eruption was first noticed by astronomers at the University of Toledo, and the resulting paper was published in the February issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Uber, the startup recently valued at $40 billion, is winning the online car-service industry. Lyft, its biggest competitor, is valued at $2.5 billion. Though the two companies are ruthlessly competitive, for now, Uber is ahead.
This morning (March 19) starting at about 8:18 a.m. and lasting until about 10:42 a.m. GMT, a solar eclipse was visible in the UK and other parts of Europe.
Venmo, which lets Americans easily send money to each other from their phones, is rapidly replacing cash. The app processed $700 million in the third quarter of 2014, up from $141 million in the same quarter of 2013. And it has plenty of room to grow: Mobile transactions in the United States are forecasted to grow to $90 billion per year by 2017.
New research from geneticists and historians at Oxford University uses DNA analysis to identify patterns of immigration from Europe to the UK. The DNA of longtime British residents—those from family lines that have been in the UK since the 19th century—tells a story of the influence of the French, Germans, Danish, and Scandinavian on people in the UK today.
Being rich may be a state of mind, but it’s also a factor of location. In the US, the amount you have to earn to be in the top 5% of earners in a city varies widely depending on where you live.
We already knew Microsoft would be giving free Windows 10 upgrades to Windows 8 and Windows 7 users. Now, the company has announced those upgrades will be extended even to those with illegal versions of the software—at least in China.
When Starbucks announced yesterday (March 17) that it wants to help start a national conversation on US race relations by encouraging workers to broach the issue with customers, the reaction was a combination of ridicule and confusion.
The end is finally in sight for Microsoft’s long-fraught Internet Explorer. At the Microsoft Convergence conference yesterday in Atlanta, Georgia, Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s head of marketing, said that the new flagship browser for Windows, which was announced in January and is codenamed Project Spartan, will not be associated with the Internet Explorer brand.
Our home galaxy is much bigger than we thought—and has a different shape that we previously believed. According to new research, published in the Astrophysical Journal and led by physicist Heidi Jo Newberg of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Milky Way is at least 50% larger than believed, and shaped like a corrugated disc.
Roughly 4,000 light-years (about 24 quadrillion miles) away from Earth in a particularly happening region of the universe full of star clusters, nebulae, and a star-forming molecular cloud, there is a constellation known as Ara.
Facebook has removed “fat” from the list of “feelings” that can be associated with a user’s status updates in response to a petition that garnered nearly 17,000 signatures on Change.org. The petition argued that the ”fat” feeling and emoticon were making fun of people who struggle with negative body image.
Nearly 400 companies and organizations have signed a brief of amici curiae to a US Supreme Court case arguing for marriage equality for same-sex couples.
