The Sackler family got richer than the Rockefellers by marketing Oxycontin in ways that kickstarted the global opioid epidemic, whose body count continues to rise -- more than 200,000 dead in the US alone, which is more Americans than died in the Vietnam war.

The Sacklers aren't just as rich as a Gilded Age looter, ...

A French submarine missing for over 50 years has been found in the Mediterranean.  The wreck of the Minerve, according to Agence France-Presse, was discovered off the port of Toulon, on the south coast of France, with the find announced by offic... ...

Philanthropy is theoretically an expression of generosity and fellow-feeling, but in an increasingly unequal world, charitable giving is a form of reputation laundering for super-rich oligarchs who build their massive fortunes on savage programs of exploitation and immiseration. The idea is that you can paper over the fact that deliberately starting the opioid crisis ...

Team Telecom, a shadowy US national security unit tasked with protecting America’s telecommunications systems, is delaying plans by Google, Facebook and other tech companies for the next generation of international fiber optic cables. Team Telecom is comprised of representatives from the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice (including the FBI), who assess foreign investments ...

On this day 230 years ago, hundreds of French civilians stormed the military prison known as the Bastille in Paris. It was one of the biggest events in the French Revolution, and its anniversary in 2019 was an excuse to show off a goofy hoverboard. N... ...

The journey for Trevor Jackson started, as many things do in tech, with research. He’d become fascinated by the experiments done not with lithium batteries, which had come to dominate the battery industry, but with so-called “aluminum-air” batteries. Technically described as “(Al)/air” batteries, these are the — almost — untold story from the battery world. ...

Many years ago every sales deal was sealed with a handshake between two people. Today, digitization has moved into the sales process, but it hasn’t necessarily improved the experience. In fact, it’s often become a more time-consuming affair because information and communications are scattered across multiple channels and the number of people involved in a ...

One of the arguments against hate-speech laws is that once the state starts dividing expression into "allowed" and "prohibited," the "prohibited" category tends to grow, in three ways: first, because company lawyers and other veto-wielders err on the side of caution by excising anything that might be in the "prohibited" bucket; second, because courts respond ...

Three basement levels of the Louvre are given over to the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF), which provides research and restoration services to France's 1,200+ art museums and galleries.

C2RMF operates a 27m long particle accelerator called AGLAE that can bring particles up to 20% of the speed of light; ...

Leo Corvaisier, an art student in Paris, created this 3D rendered "bio-modem" based on an illustration from Things From the Flood, an alternative future-history of Sweden published in 2016 by Simon Stålenhag (previously), which was turned into a crowdfunded RPG last year. Corvaisier notes, "Tried getting a handpaint feeling to ...