Communications

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

Virtual currencies such as bitcoin rely on this digital public ledger system to guard against fraud, an approach that could likewise secure the coming Internet of things

We live a mere 93 million miles from an enormous fusion reactor. It’s easy to overlook this, after all the Sun is only about halfway through its long slog of converting protons into helium nuclei deep inside its core.

The common fear is that intelligent machines will turn against humans. But who will save the robots from one another, and from us, one academic asks

DJ Patil talks about how to get more out of public and private information while protecting that data from abuse

Visual notes from the Science of Learning panel at South by Southwest EDU (SXSWedu)

The world’s undersea network of transoceanic cables serves as the cardiovascular system for data coursing through the Internet and other communications, but not without a lot of human help

It's been a long time coming, but this week NASA's Mars Opportunity rover completed the first-ever Martian marathon. After landing on the Red Planet in January 2004 on a mission originally planned to only last 90 days, Opportunity has instead endured for more than a decade, and has taken eleven years and two months to [...]

A scientist known as the "Captain of Moonshots" talked at SXSW this week about Google X's biggest flops and lessons learned

In this excerpt from his new book, The Innovators, Walter Isaacson explores the origin of new technologies and the nature of new ideas

Brainlike computer chips, smart pharmacology and other advances offer great promise but also raise serious questions that we must deal with now

If you’re like me, you’ve always wanted Ernst Haeckel in your house. Well, not literally Ernst Haeckel, the great 19th century biologist (although that would be cool, in alive form).