Newsweek

Virginia Tech (VT) offers a glimpse into just how much “big data” has changed the game by magnifying the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to forecast—with phenomenal accuracy—human behavior on a global scale by scouring Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Tor, Facebook and more. VT is using algorithms and a variety of advanced tools to sort through…

The world’s diet has deteriorated substantially in the last two decades, a leading nutrition expert said on Monday, citing one of the largest studies available on international eating habits.

Malaria has plagued humankind for more than 4,000 years, causing every second human death since the Middle Ages. There has never been an effective vaccine against malaria or any other human parasite, mostly because they tend to be very complex, single-celled organisms (malaria, sleeping sickness,Leishmania) or complex multicellular organisms, like the worms that cause lymphatic…

Scientists at the University of California Irvine have developed a way to unboil egg whites by “untangling” their proteins, a development that has the potential to significantly reduce costs for any biotechnology process that requires the folding of proteins.

As the world warms, glaciers around the world are rapidly hemorrhaging ice and threatening catastrophic sea level rise. But melting glaciers also pose another kind of menace: the release of vast amounts of stored organic carbon into waterways.

The birds left one to two full days before we humans had seen any sign of it. When they began their travels, there was no change discernible in wind speed or direction, in barometric pressure or temperature. The birds had somehow known a very violent storm was coming, which might have killed them with its…

The technology could be used by surgeons to treat patients virtually before operating

It involves hours staring at a piece of paper or screen. Scores of frustrated attempts, blind alleys, cruel false hopes and a very remote chance of success. Yet it is utterly absorbing and, perhaps surprisingly, increasingly fashionable among schoolchildren. What on earth is behind the appeal of code breaking?