Stories by Larry Greenemeier

No Hactivism Here: McAfee Reveals Cyber Espionage That Went Undetected for Years

No Hactivism Here: McAfee Reveals Cyber Espionage That Went Undetected for Years

Computer security company McAfee made quite a splash Wednesday with the release of a study covering five years of cyber attacks against at least 72 different organizations, including 22 government entities in the U.S., Canada, South Korea and elsewhere as well as 13 defense contractors...

Data Gluttony Scuttles Unlimited Mobile Download Plans

All-you-can-eat data downloads seemed like a good way to sell fancy smart phones at first, but now wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are slowing down the buffet line.

Does Computer-Assisted Cancer Screening Help Radiologists? Not Really

To find abnormal tissue in mammograms, radiologists have increasingly relied on computers to spot the potential tumors. In fact, three out of four screening mammograms include computer-assisted detection (CAD) in the U.S., and Medicare pays for the procedure to the tune of $30 million annually...

Pop Star/Physicist Sees "Wonders of the Universe" Here on Earth

Brian Cox's new television miniseries uses our planet as his canvas to explain the origins of light, matter, time and other ethereal concepts

Centennial Anniversary: Bingham Rediscovers the Lost Inca City of Machu Picchu [Slide Show]

Although it may have been discovered by previous explorers, the young Yale lecturer introduced the world to an ancient archaeological masterpiece--for better and worse

Does the Murdoch Hacking Scandal Signify the End of Privacy?

As the media mogul struggles to hold together his empire, an outspoken advocate of transparency argues that privacy must be redefined

Android, Meet iPhone: Mobile Video Becomes Platform-Independent

New approaches will let smart-phone users send video and video chat with any other smart-phone user, regardless of the network or platform

Piece of Mind: Is the Internet Replacing Our Ability to Remember?

Researchers study whether the use of the Internet as a memory aid leads to a lazy mind, or whether memorization is overrated

Pacific Northwest Gets More Fast-Charge Juice for Its Electric Highway

The future of electric vehicles (EVs) in the U.S. balances tenuously these days on a chicken-and-egg quandary. Roadside stations that charge EVs in less than 30 minutes are needed to encourage drivers to buy EVs, yet there must also be enough EVs already on the road to justify the investment in a fast-charging infrastructure...

How Do You Hack Into Someone's Voice Mail?

The scandal that helped shutter Rupert Murdoch's News of the World tabloid and left at least nine News International journalists facing possible criminal charges has brought phone hacking into the spotlight as a means of subversively gathering information for news articles...

New ATM Designed For Semi-Literate and Illiterate Populations

Given the ubiquity of automated teller machines (ATMs) in most Western countries, it may be difficult to envision places in the world where people have never set foot in a bank nor touched an ATM...

Wrinkles Rankle Graphene

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics raised the profile of graphene—a super strong one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern with countless potential commercial applications...

"Microsleep" Software Doubles Battery Life of Connected Gadgets

No matter how fancy mobile gadgets get, they're useless when their batteries run out. With the push toward cloud computing and the always-on wireless culture gaining momentum every day, laptop, tablet and smart phone batteries are being asked to do more despite no real breakthroughs in battery technology hitting the market...

What Happens to Google's Other Social Networking Efforts?

The launch of the Google+ social network casts a shadow over Google's previous efforts in this arena, including Orkut, Wave and Buzz, all of which still have active Web sites.

Social Climber: Google Challenges Facebook for Social Networking Supremacy--Again

Google throws its hat into the social-networking ring, this time with a smoother user interface and a focus on mobile gadgets

Are Violent Video Games Corrupting Children? Supreme Court Says States Cannot Decide

The U.S. Supreme Court's 7-2 ruling Monday (pdf) that California cannot regulate the sale or rental of violent video games to minors is the latest chapter in the long-simmering debate over the impact of aggression in the virtual world on children's behavior in the real world...

Is Karzai's Accusation That Coalition Forces Are Polluting Afghanistan with Nuclear Material Accurate or an Over-Reaction?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's recent comment that U.S. and NATO-led forces use weapons with "nuclear components" may be a reference to depleted-uranium munitions, whose health impact is still being studied...

A Bike That Uses Its Brakes for a Speed Boost (and Other Student Engineer Inventions)

For more than 150 years New York City's Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (more commonly called The Cooper Union) has finished its school years with an annual event  showcasing student projects in the areas of art, architecture and engineering...

Say What? Google Works to Improve YouTube Auto-Captions for the Deaf

Google continues to develop speech-recognition software that can automatically generate captions for all videos posted to YouTube, but challenges remain