The NSA Leak Is Real, Snowden Documents Confirm →

Motherboard is citing former NSA staffers who are convinced another insider smuggled the weapons out of an air-gapped system, while The Intercept has definitively tied the malware to the NSA. Pretty much a worst-case scenario for the agency.

I certainly may not like how the NSA knowingly chooses to target Americans' data, but I agree without reservation with their mandate for digital intelligence-gathering against foreign actors. I don't want their methods exposed nor their digital nuclear weapons available to those enemies. I respect Snowden's responsible disclosure; this is reprehensible.

What makes governments resistant to coups? →

While social media are sufficiently new, and coups sufficiently infrequent to assess this claim, there's another way to look at the link between coups and access to information. In a series of papers and an ongoing book project, we examine the relationship between political instability and government disclosures of credible economic information — the type of information members of the public might use both to evaluate the performance of the government and to gauge the level of discontent of their fellows.

How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology →

Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms — a fungus and an alga. They are wrong.

Updated Brain Map Identifies Nearly 100 New Regions →

In the late 1800s, a group of German researchers identified other regions of the cortex, each having distinct types of cells packed together in unique ways. In 1907, Korbinian Brodmann published a catalog of 52 brain regions.

On Wednesday, in what many experts are calling a milestone in neuroscience, researchers published a spectacular new map of the brain, detailing nearly 100 previously unknown regions — an unprecedented glimpse into the machinery of the human mind.

Seems like quite an upgrade. Exciting.

How American Politics Went Insane →

Populism, individualism, and a skeptical attitude toward politics are all healthy up to a point, but America has passed that point. Political professionals and parties have many shortcomings to answer for—including, primarily on the Republican side, their self-mutilating embrace of anti-establishment rhetoric—but relentlessly bashing them is no solution. You haven't heard anyone say this, but it's time someone did: Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.

Refugees in Greece need internet so badly that they'll stop a riot to let the WiFi guys work →

Power in the camps is also a constant problem. [...] The team [placed] a sticker on every wire connecting the WiFi access points with the following words in Arabic: "if you remove this, the internet will go down." The hope was that even in a refugee camp, no one wanted to be that guy.