City dwellers are thought to be, on average, healthier than their rural counterparts. This so-called urban health advantage is usually attributed to better access to health care and improved overall infrastructure, such as clean water, safety and education. But many of the globe’s cities are already bursting and actually offer a far worse quality of [...]

The Facebook IPO earlier this month left us a bit disappointed. There were financial and ethical let-downs. But the over-arching surprise is that people were misled in advance about the value of the company. Yes, it has assembled one of the world’s largest potential marketplaces, but beyond advertising, the social network still has no killer [...]

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin has renounced his U.S. citizenship, reportedly to save an estimated $67 million on his tax bill (Saverin denies that the decision was based on financial considerations). The move has drawn the ire of Senators, academics and (especially) newspaper columnists, who view it as a cynical attempt to avoid paying his fair [...]

The once rare brown argus butterfly is on the move, expanding its range and numbers in the U.K.—and it’s all thanks to climate change. Thus far, the world’s climate has warmed roughly 0.8 degree Celsius over the course of the last century or so, thanks to a rise in greenhouse gas concentrations now approaching 400 [...]

There’s something unnerving about unifying physics. The two theories that need to be unified, quantum field theory and Einstein’s general theory of relativity, are both highly successful. Both make predictions good to as many decimal places as experimentalists can manage. Both are grounded in compelling principles. Both do have flaws — including an unfortunate tendency to [...]

As you may already be aware from my previous posts, The Guardian U.S. and NYU’s Studio 20 journalism lab have teamed up to push a project called The Citizens’ Agenda into the media discourse surrounding the U.S. presidential 2012 election. The idea: find out what you–the citizens–want the candidates to be discussing over the next [...]

Apollo Robbins, a.k.a the “Gentleman Thief,” explains his technique of managing attentional spotlight during the Neuromagic 2012conference on the Island of Thought, San Simón, near Vigo, Spain, while demonstrating on neuroscientist Flip Phillips of Skidmore College. Attentional spotlight is the focus of consciousness at any given moment, and it can be directed–or, as in magic, [...]

Engineers have invented a way to store a single rewriteable bit of data within the chromosome of a living cell—a kind of cellular switch that offers precise control over how and when genes are expressed. For three years, Jerome Bonnet, Pakpoom Subsoontorn, and Drew Endy of Stanford University tinkered with the switch in Escherichia coli [...]

SpaceX’s history-making mission to the International Space Station is on hold, following a valve malfunction Saturday morning that caused a last-minute launch abort. But the California company says its rocket is now good to go and will be ready to launch in the early hours of Tuesday, May 22. If all goes as planned, SpaceX’s [...]

This time-lapse video of Sunday’s solar eclipse highlights the Sun’s outer layers: The photographer Cory Poole constructed the video by pasting together 700 photographs taken with a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stack telescope. According to Jason Kottke, Poole used a filter that only allows light from hydrogen atoms moving from the 2nd excited state [...]