Spam comprises upward of 80 percent of incoming e-mail, despite monumental efforts by help desks and security software companies to defeat it. The reason spam volumes continue to grow is that such efforts are often misplaced and fail to hit spammers where it hurts...
By doing away with an analog conversion, researchers have transmitted 26 terabits of data per second over a 50-kilometer distance with a single laser. Christopher Intagliata reports
Driverless automobiles lack common sense but are getting better at using mapping, GPS and sensing technologies to hold the road
Editor's Note: The following blog post first appeared May 15 on the World Science Festival's Web site
Underscoring the importance of encryption in our increasingly data-driven digital lives, this year's World Science Festival features its first-ever session on cryptography, entitled "Keeping Secrets: Cryptography in a Connected World." During this discussion expect a well-rounded panel—including mathematician and computer scientist Brian Snow, scientist/journalist Simon Singh, cryptoanalyst Orr Dunkelman and cryptography researcher Tal Rabin—to break down cryptography, addressing its strengths and weaknesses as well as its impact on security and privacy...
Patent no. 7,891,231 B2
A new book about the now ubiquitous theorem traces its road from 18th-century theology to 21st-century robotic cars
In the hours after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and massive tsunami hit Japan in March, essential infrastructure and communication were cut off, leaving many of the disasters' survivors without access to phones, electricity or water...
Through the use of sensors built into your mobile phone (cameras, motion sensors and GPS) and Web services that can aggregate and interpret the assembled information, a new collective capacity is emerging: one in which people like you participate in sensing and analyzing aspects of life that were previously invisible...
Hiding data in MP3s, for example, makes the file size noticeably larger. Now computer scientists have developed a system for hiding data in already large applications. Christopher Intagliata reports...
Microsoft added a key piece to its flagging mobile operating system business Tuesday when the company announced it is buying voice and video communications provider Skype Global for $8.5 billion...
The ambitious, unprecedentedly vast Square Kilometer Array project should open up new realms in astrophysics. But will it live up to its name?
Supercomputers may soon approach the brain's power, but much is unknown about how it works In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated...
World's biggest chip manufacturer unveils radical chip design.
Physicians are using smart phones to diagnose diseases, check blood cell counts and identify pathogens in drinking water
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The last symposium in M.I.T.'s 150-day celebration of its 150th anniversary (who ever said that geeks don't like ritual?) is devoted to the question: "Whatever happened to AI?"Of course, that is a particularly appropriate self-introspection for M.I.T...
At times it seems cloud computing has no more definition than the atmospheric phenomenon after which it is named
Scientific American examines cloud computing, a network-centric approach to delivering information and services
Outsourced computing power and an abundance of data storage has researchers looking online for resources to help them tackle tough problems
Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, paperless for more than a decade, envisions data centers saturated with information and services readily available via the Internet
A robot must protect its own existence.
This mid-20th-century dictate to the robotic clade from science fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov seems cleanly in step with Darwinian theory and the biological world of survival of the fittest...
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