One of the biggest tech giants in the world, Google, has some of the most priceless commodities that anyone can offer today: information.

Data is what keeps Google alive and we're freely providing it to them. In turn, they sell that data to companies, third parties, and even the military and intelligence agencies.

Google was the first internet company to fully leverage this insight and build a business on the data that people leave behind. But it wasn’t alone for long. It happened just about everywhere, from the smallest app to the most sprawling platform.

Meanwhile, other internet companies depend on Google for survival. Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Lyft and Uber have all built multi-billion-dollar businesses on top of Google’s ubiquitous mobile operating system. As the gatekeeper, Google benefits from their success as well. The more people who use their mobile devices, the more data it gets on them.

It is a scary thought, considering that Google is no longer a cute startup but a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders. Imagine if Philip Morris, Goldman Sachs or a military contractor like Lockheed Martin had this kind of access.

Read more on The Guardian.

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It seems like a pretty blatant approach but having the CIA attend Soviet parades to gather information and other military intelligence makes you think that it is actually a very practical method.

You wouldn't think the US would do such a thing now, since it has the most sophisticated military technology in the world but probably back then, they needed a little bit of inspiration and where else to find it but in your rival's backyard.

During the Cold War, the CIA gleamed much of its information about new Soviet weapon systems simply by showing up at parades.

The Soviet Union regularly held parades through Moscow’s Red Square, displaying new equipment designed to showcase the power of the Soviet state.

The Soviets were on to the CIA though, and in at least one famous instance fooled Western intelligence into believing the country had far more nuclear-capable bombers than it really did.

Read more on Popular Mechanics.

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At the wrong place, at the wrong time. Would people believe you if you were suspected of, say, killing someone and you say that you just happened to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time?

Well, I wouldn't know anyone in person who were wrongfully accused of committing a crime that they did not commit and were convicted of it. But how can we really know if the accused is innocent or not?

That's where evidence and eyewitness accounts should come in to tie up the stories with the facts. But even then, can we be 100% sure about it? Because if we can't, then we're going to ruin an innocent person's life.

“I tucked Joel in, but I feel so guilty I didn’t hold him longer,” Julie Rea said, her voice welling with emotion. That is all she can muster about the worst night of her life. As she tries to say more, she breaks down.

The story remains, still, almost unspeakable. In the early morning hours of Oct. 13, 1997, Rea was jolted awake by a scream. She discovered an intruder, but saw no sign of her son, in her Lawrenceville, Illinois, home. She told police that she struggled with the man, who fled. Then ran for help. But it was too late. Her son, 10-year-old Joel Kirkpatrick, had been stabbed to death.

At the time of the murder, Rea was a single mother working toward a doctorate in educational psychology. She had divorced Joel’s father three years earlier and was leading a quiet, uneventful life in the wake of a turbulent marriage. The mild-mannered daughter of missionaries, Rea had devoted herself to her bright, inquisitive son.

But in 2000, after a protracted and deeply flawed investigation, Rea was charged with killing Joel.

Read about Rea's story on ProPublica.

(Image credit: Benjamin Rasmussen/The New York Times via ProPublica)

Intellectual property and copyright law are some of the trickiest things to navigate especially in the age of the internet, wherein anyone can upload any piece of work without any restriction as long as they have access to it in some form.

With the mass expiration of copyright happening at the start of 2019, we will now have the freedom to quote works such as Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", Winston Churchill's The World Crisis, and Theodore Pratt's The Picture of Dorian Grey, to name a few.

Check out this article on the Smithsonian Mag to find out other works which will be released to the public domain by 2019.

(Image credit: Gabriel Sollmann/Unsplash)

Being slightly anemic, I know what it means to have an iron deficiency blood and the effects that it has on your health. But as they say, too little or too much of something is bad. So the same is true when you have too much iron in your blood.

But how exactly does having too much iron affect our bodies? It turns out it has been linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer, and diabetes.

Read more on Nautilus.

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New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe meant to understand the formation of the Plutonian system, the Kuiper belt, and the transformation of the early Solar System.

The American space agency's New Horizons probe remains on course for its daring flyby of Ultima Thule.

When the mission sweeps past the 30km wide object on New Year's Day, it will be making the most distant ever visit to a Solar System body - at some 6.5 billion km from Earth.

Read more on The BBC.

(Image credit: NASA)

Having dementia can be a terrifying prospect. Losing your memories and not being able to control what you say or do during that time is painful, not just for the person suffering from it but for their loved ones as well. Just watch The Notebook.

But there is still hope for people who have been suffering from dementia as scientists will be moving on to the first phase of human trials on a breakthrough ultrasound treatment that could reverse the effects of dementia.

The ultrasound treatment was first developed back in 2015 at the University of Queensland. The initial research was working to find a way to use ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier with the goal of helping dementia-battling antibodies better reach their target in the brain.

However, early experiments with mice surprisingly revealed the targeted ultrasound waves worked to clear toxic amyloid protein plaques from the brain without any additional therapeutic drugs.

Learn more on New Atlas.

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What happened to Venezuela, which was once rich with a vast wealth of oil but is now poverty-stricken while the citizens just try to get by every single day?

A generation ago, Venezuela’s capital was one of Latin America’s most thriving, glamorous cities; an oil-fuelled, tree-lined cauldron of culture that guidebooks hailed as a mecca for foodies, night owls and art fans.

In 1998, as the setting for his election celebrations, Chávez chose the balcony of the Teresa Carreño, a spectacular, brutalist style cultural centre. “Venezuela is reborn,” Chávez declared.

Twenty years after that upbeat address, an economic cataclysm experts blame on ill-conceived socialist policies, staggering corruption and the post-2014 slump in oil prices has given Caracas the air of a sinking ship.

Read more on The Guardian.

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I watched a stand-up set by Romesh Ranganathan where he shared how he felt about his children. The first child was like an angel who behaved very well and did as was told. While the second child was the complete opposite and so he was wondering why they had a third.

This may not be at all surprising as a new research states that having a second child actually worsens parents' mental health.

For many parents, the decision to have a second child is made with the expectation that two can’t be more work than one. But our research on Australian parents shows this logic is flawed: second children increase time pressure and deteriorate parents’ mental health.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Scientists who studied and published a paper about a very huge fungus some 25 years ago, have dug deeper and found out that they underestimated its size and age.

Bruhn first came across the absolute unit (Armillaria gallica) in the late 1980s, when he was doing an unrelated experiment in the forest of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He roped in two more fungal experts, James Anderson, now at the University of Toronto, and Myron Smith, now at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, who are also co-principal investigators on the new study.

Now, nearly 30 years later, the scientists' latest experiments reveal the true immensity of A. gallica, Bruhn said.

Here are the fungus' impressive stats: It's at least 2,500 years old (although it's likely much older), weighs nearly 882,000 lbs. (400,000 kilograms) and spans about 75 hectares (0.75 square kilometers, or 140 American football fields).

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

There's no doubt that rivers can be powerful forces of nature. So the possibility of rivers causing earthquakes which has been considered in a new research could explain quakes that happen far from tectonic-plate boundaries.

Intraplate earthquakes require three ingredients. First, there must be faults, or weaknesses in the Earth’s crust, far from a plate boundary. Second, stresses must build up at those faults. Finally, an increase in stress above what the crust can sustain triggers an earthquake.

Geologists have a good sense for why the first two ingredients exist on the East Coast; the eastern U.S. has a sordid geologic past.

But what about the third ingredient? What triggers intraplate earthquakes? If they occurred simply from continuous stress buildup along faults, they would occur all up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Yet East Coast earthquakes are concentrated into several “seismic zones,” areas with frequent quakes.

The trigger, at least in one seismic zone in eastern Tennessee, might be a river.

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So much is still unknown about how exactly our universe began but remnants from that moment after the Big Bang are continuously being observed and discovered by astronomers today.

A relic cloud of gas, orphaned after the Big Bang, has been discovered in the distant universe by astronomers using the world's most powerful optical telescope, the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii.

The discovery of such a rare fossil, led by PhD student Fred Robert and Professor Michael Murphy at Swinburne University of Technology, offers new information about how the first galaxies in the universe formed.

We will know more from this discovery after the results of the paper are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Learn more about it on Phys.org.

(Image credit: TNG Collaboration)

There are times when the moral obligation to help others out becomes our primary motive to go out of our way and possibly risk our lives to do what we can to help. That's what a co-worker did to help solve a 30-year-old crime.

The investigators had come once before, in 2013, asking about a delivery truck driver named Timothy Bass. Strangely, they had wanted to know details of his daily routes decades ago.

Now, four years later, a female co-worker — who has not been publicly named — asked why. They told her: Bass was a suspect in the 1989 rape and murder of 18-year-old Mandy Stavik, one of the region’s most infamous unsolved crimes.

She handed over the information the police wanted even though her bosses had previously declined to assist. Later, a detective called back, asking if Bass ever ate food at work. She understood.

Read the rest of the story on The Washington Post.

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I am all for having fun and a good time but I think safety should always come first. If safety and security cannot be guaranteed, I would much rather stay at home or do some other less exhilarating activity than risk my life to add a little excitement to it.

On May 12, 2016, Samantha Broberg—a mother of two and stepmother to two more—boarded the Carnival Liberty in Galveston, Texas with two girlfriends.

Here’s what her family has been able to glean about the 33-year-old’s roughly 12 hours onboard that ship, which has a capacity of over 4,000 passengers and crew, and boasts a rum bar, a tequila bar, and a sports bar, as well as a casino and a Mexican cantina.

Broberg—who at 5’5,” weighed 120 lbs—was served 19 drinks, her husband alleges in an ongoing civil suit (pdf) he brought against Carnival. Just before 2am, after leaving a bar, she climbed onto a deck chair that was pushed up against a railing on the pool deck.

Read about the story on Quartz.

(Image credit: Quartz)

At the start of any society or civilization is the advent of agriculture and the pioneering technologies that make it more convenient and productive.

For agricultural societies, water is a very important resource. Natural disasters would cause a great impact in their lives, with droughts sucking up all the water and floods ruining the crops and possibly taking lives.

So the Hohokam civilization of Arizona built and maintained an intricate system of canals that not only protected them from the floods but also provided a network of irrigation and water supply that benefited them greatly.

From approximately A.D. 450-1400, a Native American group known today as the Hohokam overcame a harsh desert environment along with periodic droughts and floods to settle and farm much of modern Arizona.

They managed this feat by collectively maintaining an extensive infrastructure of canals with collaborative labor.

David Anderson writes about the research and excavations done unveiling a detailed new look at the repair and maintenance of two Hohokam canals near the Salt River.

(Image credit: Arizona Historical Society via Medium)