The Week: Most Recent unknown Posts

The 'morning-after' pill: A guide

The Week — Sat, 18 May 2013 14:40:00 -0400

What is emergency contraception?
It's a means for preventing pregnancy after an episode of unprotected sex or sexual assault. Throughout the ages, women have resorted to various ineffective — and often desperate — methods to avoid pregnancy, from postcoital douching with Coca-Cola to drinking hot mercury. The search for a safer, more effective "morning-after" pill can be traced back to the 1920s, when veterinarians realized that a dose of estrogen could prevent pregnancy in female dogs and horses who had mated against their owners' wishes. Doctors adopted the use of estrogen to prevent...

Why Facebook makes breaking up even worse

The Week — Sat, 18 May 2013 13:30:00 -0400

Before you gleefully change your status to "in a relationship" and post photos with your new love for all of Facebook to see, consider this: A new study suggests that photos, posts on Facebook, and other digital reminders of an ex-love may prolong the pain of a break-up. Corina Sas of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom and Steve Whitaker of University of California Santa Cruz have researched how having to "dispos[e] of digital possessions" — posts, blog entries, videos, photos, even songs — hinders people's ability to move on after a relationship.

The authors interviewed 24...

The week's best of the internet

The Week — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:14:00 -0400

1. The most beautiful man in the world
"Ahmed Angel must've been sent down from heaven to model for us, and he is 100 percent perfect," writes Buzzfeed. Hot fire.

2. Bandz-a-make Stephanie Tanner dance
If you knew an obscure Full House clip could sync up perfectly with one of last year's best rap tracks, shame on you. How rude, indeed. (Via Vine)

3. Recurring developments
This interactive single-serving site does a neat job of tallying all of Arrested Development's inside jokes and what episodes they appeared in. It's the perfect refresher course before the series comes back.

4. The best...

Why Google Glass' privacy concerns are grossly overstated

The Week — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:19:00 -0400

Google Glass, the not-really-made-of-glass monocle you have to yell at, already has more than a few problems on its plate. Fast Co. Design notes that Glass was suspiciously missing from every presenter's face during the I/O keynote, suggesting that it's still "a little weird" to don in public. And Wired's Marcus Wohlsen theorizes that the device is simply "too rational" to be a hit, and may be doomed to go the way of the Segway.

What shouldn't be a problem, argues Dan Nosowitz as Popular Science, is the headset's overstated surveillance concerns, which are exemplified in a "very serious" petition...

Can you buy cool? Yahoo reportedly looking to purchase Tumblr

The Week — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:57:00 -0400

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wants to have it all, including getting 18-to-24-year-olds to think her company is cool. And lo and behold: Peter Kafka and Kara Swisher at All Things D report that Yahoo is in "serious talks" to partner with or buy what many adults consider the swaggiest hangout on that Internet thingamajig: Tumblr.

It's not the first time that Mayer has reportedly shown interest in "the New York-based hipster blogging service," as All Things D puts it. Only now Tumblr has climbed to a somewhat puzzling $1 billion valuation, and has shown — sometimes to a fault — that it's...

Why is there so much poop in swimming pools?

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:45:00 -0400

Who would've guessed Caddy Shack would prove so prophetic?

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than half of all public pools had tested positive for E. coli, the bacteria most commonly associated with fecal matter.

In the study, the CDC sampled water from filters in 161 public swimming pools, both indoor and outdoor, in the Atlanta, Ga., area. Of those samples, 58 percent showed signs of E. coli. Though the researchers could not definitively blame human waste for the results, they wrote that it "signifies that swimmers introduced fecal material into...

Scientists: Climate change is real

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:04:00 -0400

As if the backing of NASA, 18 independent American scientific societies, and an intergovernmental panel established under the United Nations weren't enough to quell the protests popping up in comment sections across the Internet, a new study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters confirms — once again — that climatologists almost unanimously believe that climate change is directly related to human-made carbon emissions.

Researchers pored over nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers from 1991 to 2011. These papers, according to Michael Todd at Pacific Standard...

Why do we lie? A look at the evolution of mendacity

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:34:00 -0400

The answer to the question "Why do we lie?" seems fairly obvious: The truth is messy, inconvenient, and a time-consuming pain to untangle. Hence, the existence of little white lies: "I'm on my way!" when really you're still brushing your teeth.

It turns out that there's scientific evidence to back that theory. A new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B looks at the phenomenon of lying through an evolutionary lens, and the research suggests that lying has helped grease the wheels of human interactions for ages.

"Tactical deception," claim the study's authors, "[or] the misrepresentation...

Why tech critics are scoffing at Google's Larry Page

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:09:00 -0400

"Every story I read about Google is 'us versus some other company' or some stupid thing. We should be building great things that don't exist. Being negative isn't how we make progress."

That was Google CEO Larry Page at yesterday's Google I/O developer conference. The apparent call for unity was an odd punctuation mark at the end of a long day of announcing new products, considering Google's dogged reputation for copying and improving on the competition. After all, the company even unveiled a new music subscription service à la Spotify yesterday.

"Google is the company that built...

Can Kepler's hunt for another Earth be salvaged?

The Week — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:42:00 -0400

The mission of NASA's Kepler spacecraft is in peril.

The space agency says a malfunction has disabled a reaction wheel that keeps Kepler's telescope pointed precisely at far-away planets, a glitch that could, conceivably, put an end to Kepler's search for possibly habitable, Earth-like planets orbiting far-away stars. Losing Kepler would be a tremendous setback.

Kepler, launched in 2009, has identified 130 planets and 2,740 other possible planets, many of which are probably rocky worlds similar to Earth. Just last month, astronomers reported that the telescope — which detects slight dips...

Scientists for the first time create human stem cells through cloning

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:39:00 -0400

A team of scientists have successfully cloned human embryos that can produce stem cells, a major breakthrough that could lead to new medical treatments — and, potentially, human cloning.

Scientists from Oregon Health and Science University, reporting their finding Wednesday in the journal Cell, said they had taken a baby's skin cells and combined them with human eggs. The result? Human embryos genetically identical to the original baby that, crucially, were able to produce fresh stem cells.

The process, known as a somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), involves taking the nucleus of one...

Google's big day of announcements: 3 new features you should know about

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:39:00 -0400

At Google I/O on Wednesday, a procession of executives took the stage to announce all sorts of sweet new products. The four-hour (!!!) presentation included a Samsung Galaxy S4 with stock Android and a new streaming music service to take on Spotify. There was an awful lot of other stuff announced, too. Here are the top three highlights:

1. Voice search goes casual
Typing words into a search bar may soon be passé. In a slide promising "the end of search as we know it," Google's Amit Singhal showcased a more deeply integrated — and much smarter — voice search for Google...

The melting of Mount Everest: By the numbers

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 15:45:00 -0400

The authors of a new environmental study warn that the glaciers surrounding Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world, are receding at an alarming rate as temperatures rise and snowfall decreases. The team, led by researcher Sudeep Thakuri of Italy's University of Milan, used satellite imagery and topographic maps to piece together the glacial history of Everest and the surrounding 713-square-mile Sagarmatha National Park. Here's a look at the report the scientist compiled, by the numbers:

13
Percentage that the glaciers in the Everest region have shrunk in the last 50 years

590
Feet Everest...

Why Google's new music service won't kill Spotify

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 14:05:00 -0400

Google is on something of a hot streak. Its stock price soared past $900 this morning for a new all-time high. Facebook and Microsoft aren't nearly as big a threat as once thought, and its only real competitor — Apple — has been eerily quiet for the past several months.

Google, on the other hand, has been making a lot of noise. At Google I/O, the annual developer conference kicking off today, the company will pull the curtain back on all sorts of cool new stuff: Cloud platforms, messaging services, design tools, Samsung Galaxy phones loaded with stock Android (nice), and &mdash...

4 huge solar flares in 48 hours: What's going on with the sun?

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:28:00 -0400

2013 has been a relatively quiet year in terms of solar activity — at least until this week. For the past two days, the sun anchoring our solar system has been throwing something of a temper tantrum. And it's made for some rather spectacular fireworks.

In the past 48 hours alone, the sun has sent four colossal X-class solar flares whipping into space, all emerging from darkened sunspots dotting our star's chromosphere. (X-class flares, it's worth noting, are assigned a number to illustrate their relative strength: An X2 flare is twice as powerful as an X1, and so forth.)

Wired reports...

Your calorie-packed date night: By the numbers

The Week — Wed, 15 May 2013 09:25:00 -0400

Calorie counters may actually be better off at McDonald's than a sit-down restaurant, according to a new study from Tufts University.

It turns out, according to an analysis of the nutritional information of 157 meals from 33 independent, non-chain restaurants in the Boston area, that non-chain restaurants pack dinner plates with way too many calories. And you probably don't even know it. While McDonald's lists calorie counts on its menus, fancier sit-down restaurants are rarely as transparent.

Here, a roundup of some scary, appetite-suppressing numbers.

881
Calories in the...