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OK, so the NSA is spying on you. Is Orwell’s nightmare coming true?

In his new book, How to Create a Mind, engineer and futurist Ray Kurzweil puts forth a theory of the brain that is meant to demonstrate how engineers could build a computer that would mimic the mind.

1. Living on the Edge: 2,000 Black Holes At the center of the Milky Way galaxy there is a supermassive black hole that everything else has formed around. But it’s […]

Why do we expect a C student to have a shot of understanding the next concept when they have gaps on a more basic one? 

Our global society has entered a period of accelerated change, and these changes are reshaping entire industries, economic models and institutions. Our blind spot comes from the fact that we […]

1. The Bill Gates Condom The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will award a $100,000 grant to the person who invents a next-generation condom that “significantly preserves or enhances pleasure, in […]

The benefits of tourism in New York City (or any city) are not only financial. Tourists are anti-beacons: wherever they flock, residents like me immediately know where not to go. […]

Researchers at Harvard Medical School, Boston, have successfully connected the minds of humans and rats such that the movement of the rats’ tails can be controlled by human thought. 

We are currently in the midst of one the biggest software and hardware revolutions we’ve ever witnessed. With processing power, storage, and bandwidth increasing exponentially, smart phones and smart tablets […]

In the midst of Spain’s financial crises, a record number of its citizens are turning to Bitcoin, an online virtual currency used to exchange goods and services using complex computer software.

Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with the credit system […]

As the threat of a cyber war with the Chinese becomes more imminent, it’s fascinating to consider how much the early stage of this cyber war actually resembles the Cold War […]

We are going to create synthetic neocortexes in order to extend our own neocortexes. 

If computers are to interact with humans as other humans do, they will have to learn to be funny, or at least think they are funny. Computer scientists are teaching machines to tell jokes.

Recently General Motors announced that they’re building a new, $258 million enterprise data center in Moring, Michigan. With it, they are going from 23 outsourced data centers around the world […]

Just as religion informed the dawn of civilized man, so too do these 21st century stories act as a shield – protecting our sanity from an overwhelming sensation of entropic change. We are trying to find the signal in the noise. But increasingly, the noise is becoming louder and louder. It’s like this treadmill we’re running on has reached a speed we can’t keep up with. Today’s prowess Kairos is being pushed into yesterday’s fleeting Chronos. It’s a collision of dizzying proportions… everything happens now.

MIT, Harvard and Stanford universities have all begun offering massive open online courses for free, but the larger ramifications on our national education may be adverse, say experts.

The computational theory of the mind, which has come to dominate academic and popular circles, is increasingly inadequate to explain human behavior given what we know about animals.

Pondering the worrisome prospect that all your quantified self data might not be private. 

America’s nuclear waste is all dressed up in dry cask storage, with nowhere to go. In 1987, the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was designated as a “deep geologic dispersal” site for […]

Using a technique known as optogenetics, neuroscientists have gained an unparalleled window into how individual neural networks work in the brain by borrowing jellyfish protein.

The breakthrough innovation development of the year so far is the White House’s upcoming plan to map the entire human brain. By essentially enabling us to reverse-engineer the human brain, the Brain […]

Researchers at HP Labs have created a new kind of three-dimensional display that projects hologram-like videos without the need of external hardware such as special glasses.

New crowdsourcing techniques can be used in amazingly constructive ways. Alternatively, these same techniques may be used as tools that exploit human labor and utilize it for evil purposes.   

Futurist and soon-to-be director of engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil has made a habit of making predictions about future technology as accurate as they are bold. Now he wants to live longer. 

The Beam is a remote presence device that bridges the gap between in-person attendance and videoconferencing. It was one of the hits at this year’s South by Southwest trade show.

Ramez Naam looks at the power of innovation to overcome natural resource and environmental challenges.

Modern technology has done nothing to make humans more humble. Quite the contrary. So secure are we in our confidence of our superiority to ancient cultures that discoveries like the […]

Is there any meaningful correlation between guns and violence? A survey of scientific studies reveals some surprising — not to mention controversial — insights. 

Is the pursuit of happiness, which we Americans will celebrate later this week, a worthy goal? Many have said no, on the grounds that happiness comes only to those who […]