Could you say "no" to this face? Christoph Bartneck of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand recently tested whether humans could end the life of a robot as it pleaded for survival.
Originally published on Mon January 28, 2013 6:47 am
The hacker-activist group Anonymous is claiming responsibility for taking down a government website Saturday. NPR's Giles Snyder reports for our Newscast unit:
Two young Syrian activists, Mohsen and Sara, say they met and fell in love on Facebook while monitoring the country's uprising. They didn't want their faces shown, but provided this photo, taken in the Old City of Damascus.
Credit Jim Lopez / AFP/Getty
Yusef puts a wedding ring on his fiancee Ghada's finger in the war-torn city of Aleppo in northern Syria on Jan. 17. They met on Facebook and were wed by a rebel commander.
Originally published on Sat January 26, 2013 10:35 am
Syrian activists tend to spend long nights on Skype and Facebook, sending and receiving updates on the battle to oust the government.
And online is also where they sometimes fall in love.
Mohsen, an activist from Hama, says he first met Sara, his girlfriend of nearly two years, on Facebook.
She sent him a friend request because she saw he worked in the field of journalism, and for months they chatted casually about the Syrian uprising. Then, after government troops stormed Hama, Moshen fled to Damascus, where he and Sara finally met face to face.
Melissa Block talks to Curtis Melvin, editor of the North Korean Economy Watch blog, about using Google Earth satellite images to identify the locations of North Korean prisons.
Originally published on Fri January 25, 2013 6:13 pm
The agency charged with finding French alternatives to foreign-language terms has put an end to the word "hashtag" in France.
From now on, reports Fast Company, the Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie has decided "mot-dièse" (that's MO-dee-YEZ for those of you who are not Francophiles) is the new hashtag.
Researchers at Rice University in Houston have discovered a cheap source of the wonder material graphene: baked goods. Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of The Annals of Improbable Research, talks about how to transform a box of Girl Scout cookies into $15 billion worth of graphene--in theory, at least.
Originally published on Fri January 25, 2013 1:00 pm
Reporting in Nature, researchers write of encoding a variety of files--jpg, mp3, txt and pdf--in strands of DNA. Lead author Nick Goldman says DNA is extraordinarily long-lasting, compared to today's hard drives and magnetic tapes. And if all the world's information were written in DNA, he says, it would fit in the back of a station wagon.
This Boeing 787 battery case was damaged in a fire in Boston earlier this month. The state-of-the-art aircraft is still grounded, as the investigation of the fire's cause continues.
Credit Mark Wilson / Getty Images
National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Deborah Hersman speaks as NTSB Aviation Safety Director John DeLisi looks on during a news briefing on the Boeing 787 investigation Thursday.
Federal safety investigators remain perplexed by what caused a battery on a Boeing 787 to burst into flames earlier this month in Boston. All of the 787s are grounded worldwide after problems with the new airliner also surfaced in Japan.
At a briefing Thursday, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said it could be a long time before the plane dubbed the Dreamliner is cleared to fly.
