Government email spying in the United States may have all the headlines, but America hardly has a monopoly on privacy violations. Google revealed a massive phishing scheme against users of Google products in Iran last Wednesday.
Sounds like a scenario that could have come straight from The Phantom Tollbooth's Dictionopolis. Researchers have created a program to catch pirates by their commas... to trap them with paragraph breaks.
"First Woman Flies Overseas," republished below, originally appeared in the September 1928 issue of Popular Science magazine. On June 17, 1928, 30-year-old Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an aeroplane.
Add another point to the list of reasons why graphene, the darling child of material physics, is a wunderkind. A team led by researchers at the University of Manchester has succeeded in turning magnetism on and off in graphene, an important step for the field of spintronics, the study of the way electrons spin in solid-state physics.
Turns out Americans aren't the only ones getting spied on lately. By hooking up groups of mice with precise trackers, researchers have gotten a closer look at how societies form. At least in mice, the answer is: fast.
Last July, the United Nations' Human Rights Council declared that Internet access was a basic human right. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, has previously stated that everyone in the world deserves at least a low-bandwidth connection by default.
A small company in South Carolina is attempting to introduce electronic license plate's for the state's cars and trucks. The plates are fairly simple: an electrophoretic display that can display certain bold words when necessary, like "STOLEN" or "UNINSURED." (I was joking about the "teen driver" warning in the headline, although that's certainly possible.)
Are you a geek or a nerd? Because they're not quite the same. (It's okay to admit which one you are, by the way! Popular Science is a safe place.)
What's one of the most important limits to the heights of skyscrapers? How far up an elevator can go.