[Salon]
Federal court enjoins NDAA: an Obama-appointed judge rules its indefinite detention provisions likely violate the 1st and 5th Amendments.

[Common Dreams]
A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process.

[Rolling Stone]
Is this the most boring election ever?

[Rolling Stone]
How Wall Street killed financial reform: it's bad enough that the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law. Even worse is the way they did it—with a big assist from Congress and the White House.

[The New York Times]
The big revelation of the Obama presidency, for intellectuals, is that his authenticity and irony have not succeeded in making him a transformative figure—that the quality of the president can't be directly deduced from the quality of the man.

[Slate]
The true winner of France's election isn't France's left, it's Europe's far right.

[Salon]
It is possible for citizens to meaningfully oppose this relentless expansion of the Surveillance State. These ongoing efforts by the Obama administration to ensure full government access to all forms of communication reflect that such efforts are desperately needed. But at least thus far, those who continue to expand the National Security and Surveillance State appear to have little fear of any meaningful citizen backlash.

[Slate]
The true winner of France's election isn't France's left, it's Europe's far right.

[c|net]
The FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and the Bureau is asking internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.

[The New York Times]
E.L. Doctorow: To achieve unexceptionalism, the political ideal that would render the United States indistinguishable from the impoverished, traditionally undemocratic, brutal or catatonic countries of the world, do the following...

[The Washington Post]
Let's just say it: the Republicans are the problem.

[Rolling Stone]
The President discusses his job, the opposition and the coming campaign.

[Orion Magazine]
America the Possible: A Manifesto.

[Guardian.co.uk]
CISPA cybersecurity bill opposed by Obama administration.

[CBS]
Recent research from John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research shows that the United States leads developed countries in the share of workers earning low wages. The research also shows that increased wage polarization over the last several decades is one of the reasons for the large share of low wage-work in the U.S.

[NPR]
Made in the USA: an export boom.

[The New York Times]
ALEC: Tax-exempt conservative nonprofit acts as a stealth business lobbyist.

[The Wall Street Journal]
With little public attention, dozens of universities and law-enforcement agencies have been given approval by federal aviation regulators to use unmanned aircraft known as drones.

[The Nation]
Investigation: two years after the BP spill, a hidden health crisis festers.

[The Globe and Mail]
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was signed 30 years ago. Since then, not only has it become a national bedrock, but the Charter has replaced the American Bill of Rights as the constitutional document most emulated by other nations.

[The Wall Street Journal]
Why airport security is broken—and how to fix it. A former head of the Transportation Security Administration, Kip Hawley, on embracing risk.

[The Atlantic]
Call it the post-employee economy: the digital revolution is creating billions of dollars of wealth in a second world without people.

[The New York Times]
U.S. inches toward goal of energy independence.

[The Christian Science Monitor]
Home again in Mexico: Illegal immigration hits net zero.

[Ploughshares]
Ask young fiction writers where they'd most like to be published and they'll answer pretty consistently: The New Yorker, One Story, Tin House, Paris Review, Harper's, The Atlantic. These are also the magazines that fiction writers are likely to read. But ask the same question of poets, and the responses are all over the map. What does this suggest?

[Salon]
Rust Belt chic: declining Midwest cities make a comeback.

[The New York Times]
In the e-reader era, a book a year is slacking.

[Baidu Beat]
What matters to the Chinese people today? Real-time search lists.

[LiveScience]
The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest. The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800—the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012.

[BBC]
Archaeologists working at the Xultun ruins of the Maya civilisation have reported striking finds, including the oldest-known Mayan astronomical tables.

[io9]
Statistics proves once and for all that authors are a product of their times.

[Politico]
April is the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot, but May is proving to be pretty kind for President Barack Obama's reputation as a literary critic.

[The Atlantic Cities]
The invention of jaywalking.

[3 Quarks Daily]
Take the skyway.

[Ideas Illustrated]
Visualizing English word origins.

[Sci Guru]
Highly religious people are less motivated by compassion than are non-believers.

[Guardian.co.uk]
Rabindranath Tagore: the poet at 150. One of the most remarkable poets and thinkers produced by India, or indeed the world.

[Voxy.com]
What are the easiest/hardest languages for an English-speaker to learn?

[The Millions]
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Eight experts on who's greater.

[Harvard Magazine]
Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the evolution of culture.

[BBC]
In defense of obscure words.

[The New Inquiry]
Why we love sociopaths.

[Psychology Today]
Why more nonbelievers are openly identifying.

[Guardian.co.uk]
From Ireland's Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney to Kim Jong-il's exiled former court poet Jang Jin Seong, hundreds of poets from around the world are set to gather on the banks of the Thames this summer in an attempt to recreate the poetic spirit of the ancient Olympic Games.

[The Atlantic]
Six "rules" for dining out.

[ars technica]
The University of Oxford and the Vatican have announced a plan to collaborate in digitizing 1.5 million pages of rare and ancient texts, most dating from the 16th century or earlier. the texts will include pages from Oxford's Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV). The digitized pages will include early printed books—called incunabula—from Rome and the surrounding area; Greek manuscripts including early church texts and works by Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Hippocrates; and Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

[Wired]
The Stanford education experiment could change higher learning forever.

[The Poetry Station]
"Tongue of the Hidden" by Hafez. [video]

[AlterNet]
How the young are indoctrinated to obey: forty years ago there was deep concern that the population was breaking free of apathy and obedience. Since then, many measures have been taken to restore discipline.

[The Economist]
Our great moral decline?

[Gallup]
Most and least religious states in the U.S.

[Financial Times]
Dostoevsky tackled free will, Tolstoy the meaning of life—but is it still possible to write philosophical novels?

[The New Criterion]
On negative reviews of great poets.

[ScienceDaily]
It turns out that when we eat may be as important as what we eat. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found that regular eating times and extending the daily fasting period may override the adverse health effects of a high-fat diet and prevent obesity, diabetes and liver disease in mice.

[Berkeley Lab]
Berkeley Lab scientists generate electricity from viruses.

[The Telegraph]
The first official British European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake is being trained for a mission to land on an asteroid.

[MedicalXpress]
Brain oscillations reveal that our senses do not experience the world continuously.

[PhysOrg]
Nanosheet catalyst discovered to sustainably split hydrogen from water.

[Visual News]
A murmuration of starlings may seem random, but one artist has found the geometric order to this phenomenon of nature in her work.

[ScienceDaily]
A detailed description of development of the first practical artificial leaf—a milestone in the drive for sustainable energy that mimics the process, photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert water and sunlight into energy—appears in the ACS journal Accounts of Chemical Research.

[Scott Roberts]
Scoville scale chart for hot sauce and chile peppers.

[io9]
Some laboratory mice were given specially engineered insuling-producing genes. These genes were then remotely activated using radio waves. This could mean a whole new field of medical procedures in which we turn genes on and off at will.

[ScienceDaily]
Researchers in Spain have found that at least some of the individuals claiming to see the so-called aura of people actually have the neuropsychological phenomenon known as "synesthesia" (specifically, "emotional synesthesia"). This might be a scientific explanation of their alleged ability.

[National Geographic]
According to a new study, HD 10180—a sunlike star in the southern constellation Hydrus—may have as many as nine orbiting planets, besting the eight official planets in our solar system.

[ABC]
If you were disturbed to hear about "pink slime" in your burger, you'll want to know about "meat glue," because a fat, rare-cooked filet mignon may not be what it seems.

[Joi Ito]
Student's brain flatlining during classes?

[Wired.co.uk]
Cattle DNA traced back to single herd of wild ox.

[Double X Science]
Checklist for reading science news.

[LAB!]
Use CSS 3D to make every website into 3D (kind of).

[ScienceDaily]
Physicists from the University of Zurich have discovered a previously unknown particle composed of three quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator.

[ScienceDaily]
Scientists see solution to critical barrier to fusion.

[geek.com]
Prototype wind turbine condenses 1,000 liters of water a day from desert air.

[Nature]
Thousands of scientists from 67 countries have called for an international agreement to close the Arctic high seas to commercial fishing until research reveals more about the freshly exposed waters.

[The New York Review of Books]
The crisis of Big Science.

[The Richard Dawkins Foundation]
Scientists show that manmade nucleic acids can replicate and evolve, ushering in a new era in synthetic biology.

[The Atlantic]
After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups.

[The Telegraph]
What your gut's telling you: why your digestion holds the key to your health.

[BBC]
Doctor Who sonic screwdriver "invented" at Dundee University.

[Medical Xpress]
Distinct "God spot" in the brain does not exist.

[TheScientist]
Brain controls paralyzed muscles: a new system decodes brain signals from the motor cortex of monkeys and translates them into basic arm movements, despite temporary paralysis.

[lifehacker]
Experimenting with your sleep and dreams—there's an app for that!

[University of Cambridge]
Scientists have created a simple new model of the human brain which reproduces the statistics of its complex network organization.

[BBC]
What we currently call breast cancer should be thought of as 10 completely separate diseases, according to an international study which has been described as a landmark.

[BBC]
Researchers at Glasgow University have developed a new process which they say can "print" drugs. They are using 3D printing technology which could in theory lead to people having a "personal pharmacy" dispensing medicines at home.

[Al Jazeera]
Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists. Eyeless shrimp and fish with lesions are becoming common, with BP oil pollution believed to be the likely cause.

[The Washington Post]
Evolution has given humans a huge advantage over most other animals: middle age.

[boingboing]
Lacy, laser-cut seaweed sheets.

[Discover Magazine]
The U.S. Army wants to allow soldiers to communicate just by thinking. The new science of synthetic telepathy could soon make that happen.

[Medical Xpress]
In a new study that used a special type of photography to unveil hidden signs of sun damage, middle schoolers showed evidence of levels of UV exposure that could raise their risk for melanoma later in life.

[Global Consciousness Project]
Meaningful correlations in random data.

[National Geographic]
Drug-resistant bacteria found in 4-million-year-old cave.

[Medical Xpress]
Researchers use brain-injury data to map intelligence in the brain.

[the engineer]
A novel 3D printing method could allow the creation of polymer features at a resolution of just 10nm, opening up the path to a raft of new metamaterials.

[Los Angeles Times]
New revelations in science have shown what a strange and remarkable universe we live in.

[MIT]
Innovative 3-D designs from an MIT team can more than double the solar power generated from a given area.

[LiveScience]
Caffeine turns hard workers into slackers.

[Scientific American]
Neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control are highly vulnerable to even mild stress. When they shut down, primal impulses go unchecked and mental paralysis sets in.

[Digital Journal]
Plastic-eating fungi found in Amazon may solve landfill problems.

[PhysOrg.com]
A team of University of Maryland scientists have discovered that when electric current is run through carbon nanotubes, objects nearby heat up while the nanotubes themselves stay cool, like a toaster that burns bread without getting hot. Understanding this completely unexpected new phenomenon could lead to new ways of building computer processors that can run at higher speeds without overheating.

[The Telegraph]
A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more "working memory," giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally.