Help the New York Times find a better superpower metaphor

Over the weekend, New York Times tech reporter Nick Bilton posted an article about how Facebook can use its deep integration with other sites and apps (through Facebook Connect, the Open Graph developer platform, and Like buttons) to detect what's happening on the Internet before anyone else. "Facebook is more tapped…

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The stupidest statistic you’ll see this week

Godzilla failed in his apparent goal (at least in the first movie) to crush all the people of Japan under his big reptilian foot. But what the radiation-blasting monster couldn't achieve by brute force, the Japanese may themselves bring about by their own habits of reproduction—or lack thereof.

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Man pulled over for being radioactive

Last Wednesday, Mike Apatow was getting on to Interstate 84 in Newtown, CT, when police stopped him for no reason he could determine. When the cop told him that his car had set off his radioactivity detectors, it started making sense: Apatow was most certainly radioactive.

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Genetically engineered viruses could someday make typing-powered…

There have been quite a few efforts to harness people power, by putting specially designed energy harvesters in exercise machines, yo-yos, or right inside your shoes. But none of them have been quite as thin or just downright cool as a new device that uses a paper-thin electrode packed with viruses to turn mechanical…

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Finland’s brilliant plan for dealing with nuclear waste: pulling a…

After decades of planning and $12 billions of investment, the United States grand plan to dispose of the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada's remote Yucca Mountain melted down in political rancor like... well, kind of like a nuclear plant melting down. The Obama Administration pulled the plug on funding the project…

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Can peeing in a lake really kill fish?

There's been a story kicking around in the news recently about a fight in Hamburg, Germany, where recreational swimmers have supposedly killed fish by peeing in Eichbaum Lake, making fishermen really (get ready) pissed off. Reading this set off my potential-Internet-baloney alarm bells: short articles, coming from a…

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