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.
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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.
Is there any meaningful correlation between guns and violence? A survey of scientific studies reveals some surprising — not to mention controversial — insights.
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.
A new math curriculum is needed to move us from the knowledge economy to “the computational knowledge economy where high-level math is integral to what everyone does.”
A Norwegian research organization is working on clothing that will monitor the health of its wearers as they work on oil rigs and other places that experience life-threatening cold.
There were two really important elements that I discovered when I was looking at women’s history and the history of the women’s movement in the US. The first thing that […]
The world of Iron Man may be closer to being a reality than we originally thought. A group of design students at the Royal College of Art in London recently created […]
The term “Big Data” naturally conjures up images of Big Users, like the government or Google or Costco. It’s easy to see why big enterprises crunch data to learn, for […]
The Obama administration is considering funding what could amount to the biggest science project of all time. Called the Brain Activity Map, it would change the scale at which the brain is understood.
German designers have created a touch-sensitive floor that can recognize individuals by their weight, track their movements, and display interactive video.
Our robotic emissaries are probing space, not humans. Nonetheless, Neil deGrasse Tyson says he is content with living vicariously through the robots for now.
Did you see that photo of sharks allegedly swimming in a mall in Kuwait? Or the video of the eagle grabbing a baby in Montreal? Both must have been shared […]
A publishing CEO urged his industry peers to bring literary authors and software developers together to create something better than ebooks, which he said were “a boring format that just comes straight out of normal books.”
If you use your laptop or tablet computer late at night, the brightness of the screen could be disrupting your body’s release of melatonin, a key hormone in the body’s clock, or circadian system.
Those who use smartphones and tablets are still expected to pay the tax — which is mandatory for all TV owners — if they’re accessing content normally found on TV.
We typically focus on the positive aspects of online social networks – but what about their negative aspects? As we’re seeing in the investigation into the Boston Bombers, online social […]
Psychologists have observed that children who have a realistic—not inflated—understanding of how they are seen by others tend to be more resilient and less crest-fallen later on.
Advances in human genome sequencing and brain-computer interface will help medical professional diagnose disease earlier and develop new technology for more direct treatments.
Laptops. iPads (or other tablet devices). Chromebooks. Maybe even netbooks or ultrabooks… As more schools and districts move toward 1:1 computing, one of the most common questions is ‘What device […]
MIT scientists have created a way to amplify ordinary video to reveal normally imperceptible movements, such as the pulse of blood underneath the skin. Applications range from patient monitoring to equipment surveillance to lie detection.
We live in an amazing era of technology-driven transformation that’s redefining how we sell, market, communicate, collaborate, innovate, train, and educate—all in an amazingly short period of time. With that […]
Available for sale later this year, the Myo interprets muscle movements in the forearm and transmits them wirelessly to software-enabled devices that can understand them as commands.
Biology labs are now inexpensive and mobile enough to be set up in a garage. The kind of genetic tinkering occurring across the nation mirrors the experiments in computing a generation earlier.
No longer a curse of the low-skilled worker, automation is coming to professions like teaching, medicine and law. But machines could give us more leisure time, if profits are shared evenly.
If you thought the Internet of Things was a big idea, what about an Internet that connects humans with apes, elephants and dolphins? In what has to be one of the most […]
A comment on my most recent blog post reminds me both why I love blogging and why comments on science blogs are such a good thing. The commenter might write […]
American and Japanese researchers have created new “nanoionic” devices which more closely mimic the brain’s own processing abilities and it’s short- and long-term memory banks.
“Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.” –William Deresiewicz Imagine you are a painter […]
More than 1.7 million were sold last year alone, revealing an aging culture’s devotion to tradition and a technological lag behind other developed countries.