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Cuba: Internet delivered weekly, by hand.

The Paquete is an alternative to the web in a country where, according to some estimates, fewer than 5% of homes are connected.

It consists of a terabyte of data bringing together the latest music, Hollywood movies, TV series, mobile phone apps, magazines and even a classifieds section similar to Gumtree or Craigslist.

Every week, unidentified curators compile a selection of content and deliver it via a complex network of hundreds of distributors who, much like old-fashioned newspaper delivery boys, bring the Paquete to the door of its subscribers.

It’s all carried out outside any legal framework in Cuba – and with seemingly little regard for international copyright law.

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From 0 to 5,000 Planets in Exactly 20 Years

Twenty years ago today, an invisible object circling an obscure star in the constellation Pegasus overturned everything astronomers knew about planets around other stars. No, the fallout was even bigger than that. The indirect detection of 51 Pegasi b—the first planet ever found around a star similar to the sun—revealed that they had never really known anything to begin with.

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iPhone 6S as a digital scale

We thought through the problem again: we needed an object that was conductive, had finger-like capacitance, formed a single finger-like touch point, was a household item, and could hold items to be weighed…

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The Future of News Is Not An Article

Creating news for the current and future media landscape means considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate upon itself; documents should have ways of reacting to new reporting or information; and we should consider the consumption behavior of our users as one that takes place at all cadences, not simply as a daily update.

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Giant squid babies.

“The fisherman who caught it and the aquarium staff didn’t know they were looking at a giant squid baby,” Wada, a cephalopod expert at the Institute of Natural and Environmental Sciences at the University of Hyogo in Japan, told me.

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The oldest galaxies in the universe

More than 12 billion years ago, a sea of stars fell into orbit around a baby black hole, and became a galaxy, one of the first.

The formation of this galaxy, and others like it, was a momentous event in cosmic evolution. This galaxy and its brethren helped to clear hydrogen gas left over from the Big Bang, making our universe transparent to light.

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Metaphors are us

Humans used to be unique in lots of ways. We were the only species who made tools, murdered each other, passed on culture. And each of those supposed defining features has now been demonstrated in other species. We’re not so special after all. But there are still ways that humans appear to stand alone. One of those is hugely important: the human capacity to think symbolically. Metaphors, similes, parables, figures of speech—they exert enormous power over us. We kill for symbols, die for them. Yet symbols generate one of the most magnificent human inventions: art.

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You shouldn’t kill baby Hitler

I have often felt that most of historical Hitler’s difficulty stems from a life spent constantly fending off assassination attempts from the future, an effort that doubtless left him paranoid and exhausted. Do I have proof for this? Well, no, obviously, but it seems right, doesn’t it?