A former WikiLeaks spokesman says he destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished documents that had been submitted to the secret-spilling site last year.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that the documents were “shredded over the past few days in order to ensure that the sources are not compromised.” He asserted that the documents were destroyed because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could not guarantee safe handling of the documents.

According to the German publication, the destroyed documents were seized by Domscheit-Berg and others when they defected from WikiLeaks...

Take a piece of paper. Crumple it. Before you sink a three-pointer in the corner wastebasket, consider that you’ve just created an object of extraordinary mathematical and structural complexity, filled with mysteries that physicists are just starting to unfold.

“Crush a piece of typing paper into the size of a golf ball, and suddenly it becomes a very stiff object. The thing to realize is that it’s 90 percent air, and it’s not that you designed architectural motifs to make it stiff. It did it itself,” said physicist Narayan Menon of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It became a rigid o...