Communications

Northwestern University researchers have developed a phone add-on that gives physical feedback

Celebrities, journalists and politicians are all likely to receive the coveted Verified badge on Twitter. Presumably, this is due to all of these careers adding value to the platform for the average user, and to distinguish their identities from malicious imposters and parody accounts.

There's another group that adds consistent value to the experience of using Twitter: image creators.

New commercial satellites that promise constant close-ups of Earth are a boon to emergency responders and police but also raise privacy concerns

Private funding for the Arecibo Observatory—the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world—may be a poison pill

The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks

With a $100-million donation, billionaire Yuri Milner plans to revolutionize the astronomical quest to find alien life

Entrepreneur and former physicist Yuri Milner talks about the just-announced $100-million Breakthrough Listen Project to search for extraterrestrial technological civilizations

At 8:52 P.M. Eastern time, July 14, 2015, an all's-well signal from the New Horizons spacecraft finished its 4.5-hour, three-billion-mile trip from near Pluto through the solar system to alert mission control on Earth that it was in working order and had succeeded in gathering data

Even if the decade-old flyby spacecraft could have used higher frequency microwaves to return data, large improvements might not have followed

At just before 7:50 A.M. today, July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto. After a 9.5-year, three-billion-mile voyage, the ship got within about 7,750 miles from the surface

And why security experts warn that this is a terrible idea

We currently have a maximum of about 60 minutes to prepare for tech disruptions on Earth due to coronal mass ejections from the sun, but an improved forecasting system could lengthen that lead time by hours. Maria Temming reports