Technology
Under What Circumstances Do We Find Robots Trustworthy?
Each year it seems a little less like science fiction to ask your phone for advice about local chinese food or trust your car to get you to a new location.
Computing2318 articles archived since 1845
Technology
Pros and Cons of 5 E-Mail Alternatives
As messaging services eat into e-mail, what are we losing—and gaining?
Space & Physics
Dawn Spacecraft Arrives at Ceres, Becomes First to Orbit a Dwarf Planet
Shortly after 7:30 am Eastern time this morning, a seven-year space voyage at last reached its final destination: NASA's Dawn mission entered orbit around Ceres, a small, icy world orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter...
Technology
What Chappie Says, and Doesn't Say, About Artificial Intelligence
I'm not a scold about scientific accuracy in film. As long as a movie is not built on a fundamentally stupid premise (“Lucy,” the Scarlet Johansson vehicle predicated on the false notion that humans use only 10 percent of their brains, comes to mind), I am happy to let myself be entertained...
Technology
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2015
From autonomous drones to emergent AI to digital genomes, this year’s list from the World Economic Forum offers its latest glimpse of our fast-approaching technological future
Technology
Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2015
What innovations are leaping out of the labs to shape the world in powerful ways? Identifying those compelling innovations is the charge of the Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, one of the World Economic Forum’s network of expert communities that form the Global Agenda Councils, which today released its Top 10 List of Emerging Technologies for [...]..
Computing
How to Restore Trust in American Technology
American tech companies, ensnared by the NSA controversy, must act boldly to restore the world's confidence
Technology
Robot Rescuers Battle It Out
Nimble bots are going head-to-head for a $2-million DARPA prize
Computing
Is Messaging Going to Kill E-mail?
With new rapid-fire ways to communicate, e-mails are on the decline. But they might not be headed for extinction
Technology
Reverse the Odds
Analyze real cancer data by playing a mobile game
Health
How Designers Can Improve Health Care For Everyone
The last place anyone expects to find a designer is in a hospital, clinic or operating room, but those are exactly the spaces where I embed myself.
Technology
Your Life, Your Data: Pushing Back at Government and Corporate Incursions into Personal Privacy [Excerpt]
Digital security specialist Bruce Schneier’s latest book examines the repercussions of—and the appropriate responses to—ubiquitous corporate and governmental harvesting of personal data...
The Sciences
Uber, but for Topological Spaces
So it's cold and rainy, and you're up a little too late trying to figure out why that one pesky assumption is necessary in a theorem. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just order up a space that was path connected but not locally connected?...
Why Julianne Moore and Taylor Swift See That Dress Differently
I don't think that the reason people see the dress differently from each other is an interesting brain process. Rather, it is a mundane differences in how people have viewed the image on their electronic display screens (phones, tablets, laptops, etc)...
Electronics
When Patient and Doc Speak Different Languages, Google Translate Can Help--or Hinder
Sticks and stones may break your bones, but poorly translated words may also hurt you
Hunting Black Holes at the South Pole
Each of the telescopes that the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) are currently working to bring into their black-hole-observing, planet-size array is a special case.
Technology
Net Neutrality Prevails in Contentious FCC Vote
Broadband Internet access will be reclassified as a telecom service under a modified set of rules. Court battles and more Congressional hearings to follow
Build a World-Class Insect Imaging System for under $6,000
Compound Eye has been quiet of late. My silence is for a good cause, though! The past few months have been hectic as I transitioned from freelance photography in Illinois to a new job: Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas in Austin...
Culture
Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Cover [Video]
Sure, I was familiar with the graphic—and I’m not alone. Drop this image (right) on someone’s desk and chances are they’ll reflexively blurt, “Joy Division.” The band’s 1979 Unknown Pleasures album cover leaned entirely on a small mysterious data display, printed in white on black...
Technology
How Will the Fight over Public ISPs and Net Neutrality Play Out?
The FCC will soon vote on the spread of high-speed municipal broadband services and ISPs’ rights to discriminate against certain Web traffic
