With every new silver hair sprouting from my scalp, I can’t help but think of the shortening arc ahead of me. Now in my mid-50s, for the first time I’m no longer looking up, over and beyond. Rather, my trajectory points downward at the approaching horizon. In this frame of mind, I recently found myself at DeathClock.com, the “Internet’s friendly” — if not scientific — “reminder that life is slipping away … second by second.” After I completed the short questionnaire, the Death Clock’s algorithm quickly did the math, concluding: “Your personal day of death is Wednesday, April 23, 2031.”..

Hundreds of "My Little Pony" collectibles cover Steve Lucia's bedroom — plush toys, comic books, trading cards and T-shirts. It is a sea of pink and purple, a shrine to a TV show originally intended for young girls.

But Lucia is a 25-year-old man, an electrician who lives in a Pasadena duplex and has what he calls a "healthy obsession."

"Being in the construction industry, there are guys who sit around and talk about women all day long," Lucia said. "I go home and wrap myself in ponies."

There are thousands of 20-somethings who share Lucia's love of the TV show "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic." Called "bronies" (a mash-up of "bro" and "pony"), they not only collect official paraphernalia from the show but also create their own characters (called cosplay), art and even music...

April was an unusual, if not the cruelest, month for New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who in September will mark two years on the job. On Monday afternoon, April 15, Abramson—who, at 59, is the first woman to serve as top editor in the Times’ 160-year history—had barely begun savoring the four Pulitzer Prizes that her staff had just won (this year’s biggest haul, by far, for any journalistic outlet) when the Boston Marathon bombings occurred. Pulling an all-nighter at one point in the third-floor newsroom of the Times’ Renzo Piano–designed Manhattan skyscraper, she presided over a breathless week of “flooding the zone” (as one of her predecessors, Howell Raines, liked to say), while her reporters and editors managed to avoid the sort of embarrassing errors committed by the Associated Press, CNN, and even the Times Co.–owned Boston Globe.

Then, the night of April 23, Politico—the Washington trade paper that aims to “drive the conversation”—published a story suggesting that Abramson’s young editorship was already a failure...

Feeling outcast and alone in Iraq, Bradley Manning, then a 22-year-old Army private, turned to the Internet for solace in early 2010, wanting to share with the world what he saw as the unconscionable horrors of war, an act that resulted in what military prosecutors called one of the greatest betrayals in the nation’s history...

Wang Xue stood in the middle of his courtyard house, next to a pomegranate tree. It could have been a scene out of a Tang dynasty poem but for the sound of a jackhammer and a layer of construction dust that thinly caked the rows of potted plants and vine-covered awnings.

“The weather is warm, and with that comes construction season,” Mr. Wang, 53, said with a grimace at his home northeast of Tiananmen Square, in the middle of a Beijing neighborhood still filled with hutongs, or traditional Chinese alleyways.

Beijing’s courtyard homes and hutongs have been disappearing rapidly since China opened its economy in the 1980s, robbing the capital of some of its character...

While the extent of aggressive abuse on Twitter has recently hit the headlines – and led the company to issue a statement insisting it hears the complaints – the problems with outright sexism and misogyny are not limited to online blogging or social networks. One commenter on the Guardian, who uses the pseudonym TheIneffableSwede, described her experiences as a player in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG)...

There are a lot of wild stories about Obamacare that make the debate sound like a fact-free zone.

No, the IRS isn’t going to be posting your medical tests all over the Internet. No, people’s premiums aren’t doubling in the crucial swing state of Ohio. And no, the Obamacare “data hub” isn’t like a new version of the NSA, spying on your hemorrhoids instead of your phone calls.

Those are all claims that are muddying the waters as consumers get ready to sign up for Obamacare for the first time in October. On the other hand, not all of the stories that are swirling around the health care law these days are completely far-fetched. And the Obama administration is spinning some rosy scenarios of its own...

Talk about a buzz kill. Pot legalization activists are running into an unexpected and ironic opponent in their efforts to make cannabis legal: Big Marijuana.

Medical marijuana is a billion-dollar industry — legal in 18 states, including California, Nevada, Oregon and Maine — and like any entrenched business, it’s fighting to keep what it has and shut out competitors. Dispensary owners, trade associations and groups representing the industry are deeply concerned — and in some cases actively fighting — ballot initiatives and legislation that could wreck their business model. That pits them against full legalization advocates...

More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote of the “double consciousness” of the black man: “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” President Barack Obama’s extemporaneous remarks in the press room last week about the Trayvon Martin case and the plight of young black men were pitch-perfect in part because they let no one off the hook, not even well-intentioned people who want him to lead what he predicted would be a “stilted” national conversation on race.

But the surprise appearance will have lasting importance if it keeps the President on the hook, too...

The vagaries of human memory are notorious. A friend insists you were at your 15th class reunion when you know it was your 10th. You distinctly remember that another friend was at your wedding, until she reminds you that you didn’t invite her. Or, more seriously, an eyewitness misidentifies the perpetrator of a terrible crime.

Not only are false, or mistaken, memories common in normal life, but researchers have found it relatively easy to generate false memories of words and images in human subjects. But exactly what goes on in the brain when mistaken memories are formed has remained mysterious.

Now scientists at the Riken-M.I.T. Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have created a false memory in a mouse, providing detailed clues to how such memories may form in human brains...