Harvard researcher Piotr Naskrecki was just doing his job when he ran into the one of the world’s largest spiders in Guyana and killed it. The Internet didn’t see it that way.

When Naskrecki, an entomologist and photographer for Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, blogged about the event two weeks ago, he and the spider—a Goliath birdeater he described as “puppy sized” and said made “the sound of little hooves in the night”—went viral. It also sparked an onslaught of rage.

How could he have killed this innocent arthropod, commenters asked, referring not to the practical difficulties of subduing an invertebrate that weighs more than an iPhone 6 (AAPL), but to the perceived injustice of the execution.

“You had to MURDER the poor thing so YOU could benefit? Pathetic.” said Lizbeth Hull on Naskrecki’s Facebook (FB)page.

“Did you kill this amazing animal because you have to own it?” asked Ian Freedman.

One person sent an e-mail saying that a member of Naskrecki’s family should be killed for what he did.

Why did the scientist kill his specimen? Because, he says, that’s what he is supposed to do: put dead versions of rare insects into museums so they can be studied.

“We usually bring these substances that are designed to put them down very gently,” he says, referring to the chemical compounds he uses to neutralize absurdly large arachnids. It’s almost like swatting at a spider you spot in your home, he says. (If you were to swat spiders with a baseball bat.)

Perhaps the spider’s puppyish size inspired in the commentariat a puppyish affection for the animal, despite it being the physical manifestation of a Halloween nightmare. It weighed 170 grams, its body measured 10 centimeters, and its outstretched legs spanned about a foot from tip to tip. Spiders of the venomous Goliath birdeater breed belong to the same family as tarantulas, are covered with hair, have fangs, and are known to be aggressive. They snack mostly on insects, but also sometimes enjoy a bat, mouse, or snake.

Naskrecki seems overwhelmed with the hate mail and says he stopped looking at blog comments long ago. He anticipated some public interest in the creature: Even before his blog post took off, the scientist had produced for sale an array of products featuring the spider’s image. Spider enthusiasts that aren’t satisfied by a single, searing glance at the photo can visit Naskrecki’s online store, at which $54.99 to $76.99 can buy you a tote bag, apron, mouse pad or mahogany desk organizer featuring its leggy, hairy likeness. Naskrecki says he spends far more to maintain the site than he makes from it, and that its purpose isn’t turning a profit, but encouraging others to celebrate the animals he has dedicated his life to studying.

A fragment of Amelia Earhart's lost aircraft has been identified to a high degree of certainty for the first time ever since her plane vanished over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator.

New research strongly suggests that a piece of aluminum aircraft debris recovered in 1991 from Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, does belong to Earhart’s twin-engined Lockheed Electra.

According to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 77 years ago, the aluminum sheet is a patch of metal installed on the Electra during the aviator’s eight-day stay in Miami, which was the fourth stop on her attempt to circumnavigate the globe.

The patch replaced a navigational window: A Miami Herald photo shows the Electra departing for San Juan, Puerto Rico on the morning of Tuesday, June 1, 1937 with a shiny patch of metal where the window had been.

“The Miami Patch was an expedient field repair," Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, told Discovery News. "Its complex fingerprint of dimensions, proportions, materials and rivet patterns was as unique to Earhart’s Electra as a fingerprint is to an individual."

TIGHAR researchers went to Wichita Air Services in Newton, Kans., and compared the dimensions and features of the Artifact 2-2-V-1, as the metal sheet found on Nikumaroro was called, with the structural components of a Lockheed Electra being restored to airworthy condition.

The rivet pattern and other features on the 19-inch-wide by 23-inch-long Nikumaroro artifact matched the patch and lined up with the structural components of the Lockheed Electra. TIGHAR detailed the finding in a report on its website.

“This is the first time an artifact found on Nikumaroro has been shown to have a direct link to Amelia Earhart,” Gillespie said.

The breakthrough would prove that, contrary to what was generally believed, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, did not crash in the Pacific Ocean, running out of fuel somewhere near their target destination of Howland Island.

Instead, they made a forced landing on Nikumaroro' smooth, flat coral reef. The two became castaways and eventually died on the atoll, which is some 350 miles southeast of Howland Island.

Shoshana B. Roberts — who walked around New York City for 10 hours while being filmed by a hidden camera so that she could record the harassment she received from men on the street — is already getting rape threats.

Roberts's video, which after a day online has already racked up more than 1 million views, documents the over 100 catcalls, whistles, and other forms of harassment she received over the course of the day. One persistent character walked alongside her for five minutes and wouldn't leave her alone:

The video was produced by Hollaback, an organization dedicated to stamping out street harassment and intimidation. Last night, Hollaback tweeted:

The threats are still coming today. These, for instance, were posted while I was writing this article:

"The rape threats indicate that we are hitting a nerve," Hollaback director Emily May told Newsday. "We want to do more than just hit a nerve though, we want New Yorkers to realize — once and for all — that street harassment isn't OK, and that as a city we refuse to tolerate it."

The worst part is that this isn't surprising

Roberts's video is so offensive because it's so familiar. Any woman who has ever walked anywhere, especially in New York, knows the constant, terrifying din of catcalls following behind her. It's a way men make women feel unsafe walking the streets of their own neighborhoods — and then, when challenged on it, profess innocence: "what, you can't take a compliment?" Women quickly learn that as awful as catcalling is, they can't respond to it. To respond is to risk being harassed more, or followed, or worse. To respond is to risk making the man who is shouting at you on the street, after dark, actually angry.

Similarly, the response to Roberts's video is so offensive because it is, again, so familiar. Rape and death threats have become a standard response to any woman who dares to speak out on the internet about, well, anything. Look at #Gamergate. Look at Emma Watson. And there, too, to respond is to risk making it worse. When geek hero Felicia Day lamented the harassment of women in #Gamergate, her home address and other personal information was posted online. To respond is to risk making the men who are digging through your personal information and threatening to rape or kill you actually angry.

This video wasn't made for women facing harassment. It was made for men who remain blissfully unaware of how women are treated when they walk down the street. But instead of listening, instead of taking the time to realize how women might feel when men yell at them, these commenters — backed by their anonymity and privilege — have threatened to rape Roberts for daring to talk about it.

Let's lay this out in plain terms. Women are forced to feel uncomfortable and scared for walking down the damn street. Then, when one woman takes the time to show just how uncomfortable those interactions are, people threaten to physically assault her. If the video reminded us that women are constantly made to feel unsafe when they leave the house, the response is a reminder that women are constantly made to feel unsafe when they simply turn on their computer.

The problem here isn't just that men are ignorant of how women are treated. The problem is that many know exactly what they're doing to women, and will try to intimidate and silence women who try to fight back.

This week, Amy Poehler’s first book “Yes Please” arrives and it’s chock-full of humorous anecdotes of her days growing up outside of Boston, her pre-“Saturday Night Live” life as a budding sketch comedian and a handful of heartfelt tales about her time spent on “Parks and Recreation.” While it mostly reads as a memoir, the book is also stocked with helpful advice, funny asides written by Seth Meyers and “Parks” creator Mike Schur, and even some haikus.

And because Amy Poehler is Amy Poehler, she nabbed some special talent for the “Yes Please” audiobook. Below you can hear Sir Patrick Stewart read her haikus – we won’t spoil it for you, but just know that hearing Patrick Stewart utter the phrases “Fake boobs are weird, y’all” and “Hey! Shooting poision in your face does not keep you from turning 50” is worth every second of this minute-and-twenty second clip.

As a bonus, listen to Poehler recall being pregnant and rapping with Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live”:

“Yes Please” is out now on Dey Street Books.

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“The famous Google mantra of ‘Don’t be evil’ is not entirely what it seems.” Those words come not from a detractor of the company but from Eric Schmidt, its executive chairman, and Jonathan Rosenberg, an advisor to Larry Page, in their new book, How Google Works.

From the book:

Yes, it genuinely expresses a company value and aspiration that is deeply felt by employees. But “Don’t be evil” is mainly another way to empower employees… Googlers do regularly check their moral compass when making decisions.

Schmidt and Rosenberg cite the example of an engineer who, in a meeting in 2001, objected to a proposed change in the way Google’s advertising system works by banging his fist on the table, yelling, “We can’t do that, it would be evil.” It is a nice anecdote, one that Schmidt clearly likes; he’s rolled it out before in an NPR interview and again at a Financial Times event in London. At that event, Schmidt also repeated the mantra that Google is “for users, not websites,” a line that has been bouncing around Google’s Europe’s policy pronouncements for at least four years.

Users users users

The notion that its users are of paramount importance to Google gets a good airing in How Google Works. On the one hand, this is self-evident: Google’s business, like that of any other consumer-facing firm, rests entirely on its ability to attract hundreds of millions of people to its services, giving advertisers an audience and giving Google valuable data to mine in order to improve its services.

The definition of evil, then, rests on what would be bad for users. Or, to be more precise, on what Google thinks is bad for users. It would also, by extension, be bad for Google. The moral compass and the interests of the business point in the same direction.

On the other hand, what Google conceives of as “evil” is necessarily self-serving. If Google believes that Google provides the best services to internet users, then it is not evil to prod those users to Google’s services, even if such actions come at the expense of other businesses. After all, “We built Google for users, not websites.” Naturellement!

None of these things are evil

Pushing people to use Google+? It’s better for them than the data-gobbling, privacy-infringing Facebook. Harvesting wi-fi data? It was only meant to be “analyzed offline for use in other initiatives”—which must, it follows, be for the good of the user. Google’s aggressive tax planning? Users benefit since more money is ploughed into things like providing internet access to rural areas and “solving death.” What about user privacy? Some people are uncomfortable (paywall) with the volume of data collected by Google. Google would argue that it does nothing evil with the data; it is merely used to improve its services, which is ultimately in the interests of the users.

Why should we trust Google when it says none of these these things are “evil”? Because, as Schmidt told an audience member at the London event, “We don’t have the evil room where we go and have evil thoughts.”

In other words, Google simply cannot do evil so long as it believes it is not doing evil. It’s a wonderful image to present to the world—that of a benign, even benevolent corporation striving only for its users, to whom it provides services free. But it also means that Google has effectively redefined what “evil” means. It is whatever Google thinks it means.

Don’t take my word for it. As Eric Schmidt told Wired way back in 2003, “Evil is what Sergey [Brin] says is evil.”

A new movie about race and identity is out in select theaters today. It's called Dear White People, and it's a satire set at a fictitious ivy league college. Or, as the promotional materials say, it's "about being a black face in a white place."

It's 31-year-old Justin Simien's first feature; it won the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent at Sundance, and he has been heralded as a Spike Lee for the millennial generation. (And film critics are digging it. The New York Times A. O. Scott calls it a "clever campus comedy," and adds, "you want to see this movie and you will want to talk about it afterward, even if the conversation feels a little awkward.")

Simien told me in an interview that it's time for movies to show a more complicated, less comfortable, picture of race. "There's as many versions of being black as there are black people," he said. "And we're all having a different experience and sort of being lumped into one giant experience [onscreen], it just isn't good enough anymore."

That idea resonated with African-American students from across the country who gathered in Cambridge, to attend the I, Too, Am Harvard conference last Friday. The gathering focused on black activism in the age of social media. Senior Abi Mariam told me it was sparked by the I, Too, Am Harvard Tumblr that went viral last spring. It featured photographs of Harvard students holding up whiteboards with what Mariam called written on them. "You know, 'I'm blacker than you are' or 'can I touch your hair?' or 'Oh my gosh! You're so pretty for a black girl,' " she said.

Mariam said those little digs make black Harvard students feel unwelcome in a place that's supposed to be home for a few years. Dear White People touches on those very themes, and a screening of the film kicked off the conference. In the movie, fictional Winchester University is home to film student Samantha White and her radio show. In dulcet tones, she schools her white peers on ways to avoid racist microaggressions: no hair touching, your weed dealer doesn't qualify as your 'black friend,' knowing rap lyrics doesn't mean you're black. Things like that.

In truth, Sam is half-white herself, and she has an all-white boyfriend who is not afraid to call her out on her faux 'Black Power' identity. "Your favorite director is Bergman but you tell people it's Spike Lee," he says. "You love Bebop but you've got a thing for Taylor Swift." But the character who emerges as the film's unlikely hero, Lionel Higgins, is a gay sci-fi nerd with an afro who seems uncomfortable with his blackness. That's until racism on campus spurs him to action.

The Harvard crowd at the screening was feeling it. People were laughing and shouting and snapping throughout. (You can hear it yourself on my story that aired on Morning Edition.)

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Tyler James Williams (Everybody Hates Chris) plays Lionel Higgins in Dear White People Roadside Attractions hide caption

itoggle caption Roadside Attractions

Tyler James Williams (Everybody Hates Chris) plays Lionel Higgins in Dear White People

Roadside Attractions

"It just felt like you were watching your life up on screen, it really did," said Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence, a junior at Harvard majoring in History, Literature and African-American Studies. "I really related to a lot of the characters, especially Sam White. I was like, 'Oh my gosh, that's me, this mixed girl who is super militant with her own identity issues."

Simien says he was also Lionel his freshman year at Chapman University, a private college in Southern California. But he graduated as the militant Sam. In a Q and A with the students after the screening, he said he wanted to write characters and situations that were relatable to him. But in an earlier version of the script he took out the blackface party telling himself it was over the top. "I'm doing way too much, I need to pull back a bit," he told the audience. "But, a few months later that happened and I was like, 'Oh, okay. Got it, universe.'"

The universe brought Simien a string of real blackface parties at colleges across the country. Tiffany Loftin was an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz in 2010 and remembers them well. Loftin says it was affirming to see art imitate life at the screening, but she worries Simien might just be preaching to the choir.

"I would love to see a balanced body of white and black people in the theater," said Loftin. "If you have all white people, its problematic because they don't get it; if you have all black people, it's funny and we already get it." And she said, while provocative, the title Dear White People just might scare off folks who need to see it most.

In his question and answer session, Simien responded to that sentiment, saying that the title was provocative on purpose — to create buzz. And he told the Harvard audience they also need to do their part to get people to see it.

"If you are passionate about this and you want to see more complicated, interesting characters of color on the screen, if you want to see yourself represented and reflected in the culture, then you've got to drag your friends to see this movie," he said. "We don't get more of these unless we support it."

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