science and technology

“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10pm and it’s a Tuesday night?…Let the hacking begin.” So typed a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, liveblogging from his Harvard dormitory as he began work on a website called Facemash. The site displayed randomly selected pairs of students’ mugshots, harvested from the university’s intranet, and allowed users to vote on who was hotter. It caused a stir and was promptly shut down. But before long, a successor was in the making. On February 4th 2004 Mr Zuckerberg launched a new site: TheFacebook.com.

Exciting new research on anxious adolescents shows that successful therapy is associated with positive changes in the brain.

Iran’s Defense Ministry says the country has long-term plans to develop satellite launch vehicles capable of putting cargoes weighing up to 15 tons into orbit.

A team of researchers led by Professor Hiroshi Takagi from Tokyo Institute of Technology have proposed a self-powered movable seawall system (SMS) that uses microtidal energy to generate electricity.

When tech companies design their products, they usually think of younger generations first. After all, these are the people most likely to become long-term, recurring customers—and spread their love of the product far and wide on social media. But the cohort on the other end of the age spectrum—the elderly—frequently seems to be an afterthought.

In recent decades, neuroscience has seen some stunning advances, and yet a critical part of the brain remains a mystery. I am referring to the cerebellum, so named for the Latin for “little brain,” which is situated like a bun at the back of the brain. This is no small oversight: The cerebellum contains three-quarters of all the brain’s neurons, which are organized in an almost crystalline arrangement, in contrast to the tangled thicket of neurons found elsewhere.

A strawberry isn't a berry. But scientifically speaking a banana is a berry. So what's the deal? Why are berries so hard to define? Despite its name, the strawberry isn't a true berry. Neither is the raspberry or the blackberry. But the banana is a berry, scientifically speaking, as are eggplants, grapes and oranges. 

Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And more than 850,000 autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are registered in the United States — not counting those owned by the military.

The Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s drive to regulate market-dominant online platforms could be evolving into a potential diplomatic dispute with the U.S., according to industry officials, Thursday.

There was a time when visionaries and dreamers alone imagined humanity could find great knowledge, riches and adventure in outer space—and were routinely belittled by mundane society for doing so. Now that entrepreneurs are making space more accessible and tapping into its potential, everybody seems to want a piece of the action. Government agencies are elbowing themselves to the head of the crowd to manage a burgeoning industry they once neglected, even benignly.