The Immortal Ambitions of Ray Kurzweil: A Review of Transcendent Man
A documentary about Ray Kurzweil's belief that technology could conquer mortality reveals the futurist's emotional life but fails to question his bold claims
Computing2252 articles archived since 1845
Oh, the humanity: Jeopardy! champs aim to take down IBM's Watson computer
As IBM preps for its next big man–machine showdown (and latest high-tech publicity stunt), Scientific American took a brief, informal, unscientific poll on Monday of 26 print and online staffers to determine whether there was a consensus on who would win this week's Jeopardy!...
X-rays blow up secret to van Gogh's fading sunflowers [Video]
The umber tinge accenting the tips of many of Vincent van Gogh's famous sunflowers has vexed conservators and chemists alike, who know that this hue was not what the artist had first daubed on his canvases...
Wireless Heart Monitor Fine-Tunes Cardiac-Failure Treatment
A new implanted electromechanical pressure sensor reduced the number of hospital readmissions for chronic heart-failure patients by 30 percent
Down in the Data Dumps: Researchers Inventory a World of Information
Nature still has the upper hand in terms of information storage and computational capacity, but this will not always be the case
Scaled-Down Success: Programmable Logic Tiles Could Form Basis of Nanoprocessors
Tiny circuits assembled from nanowire transistors may someday challenge traditional microchips for small-scale processing tasks
The YouTube Cure: How Social Media Shapes Medical Practice
Popular demand for an unproved surgical treatment for multiple sclerosis shows the growing power of social media to shape medical practice—for good and ill
What's That Robot Looking At?
Babies will follow the gaze of social robots just as they do with people
Your MRI is calling: FDA approves first medical iPhone app
A medical smart phone app that allows doctors to view and assess medical images has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the first time.
Out with the Old: As Internet Addresses Run Out, the Next-Generation Protocols Step Up
Get ready for IPv6: The explosive global growth of connected devices has nearly depleted the 4.3 billion addresses of Internet protocol version 4
What Is the Best Way to Protect U.S. Critical Infrastructure from a Cyber Attack?
Egypt's Internet shutdown and recent U.S. legislation proposing expanded White House control of critical infrastructure cyber security have conjured images of a government-controlled Internet kill switch...
Satellite TV and Other Low-Tech Solutions Remain Key to Communications and Media in Egypt
Social media gets a lion's share of the credit for enabling Egyptians to organize protests and stay abreast of breaking news, but TV is the dominant media type and Al Jazeera is the most trusted TV news source in Egypt...
Personal Technology in 2011
Video games, smart phones, apps, e-readers--people are fitting digital gadgets into all aspects of their lives
E-book lending services ramping up as e-readers storm the market
Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and other sellers of electronic books and readers have been working to improve upon the experience of getting lost in a good read.
Notions of Motion: Hackers Harness Microsoft's Kinect for Business and Pleasure Applications
Gamers and hackers could control the office as well as games with Microsoft's Kinect
Circuit Breaker? Electric Car Popularity May Depend on Home Energy Management
Never mind electric-vehicle range anxiety, how will power utilities and home systems handle the growing load of a burgeoning fleet of electric cars? A maker of home battery-charging stations partners with networking giant Cisco Systems to enable energy monitoring and management from a single touch-screen device...
An Open Question: Is Open Source Better?
The success of Google's Android software doesn't prove that open is better
How to humanize technology--from the scatological to the sublime
Laura is reporting on the science-oriented sessions from the World Economic Forum in Davos. It could be tempting to conclude that technology dehumanizes us.
Readers Respond to "Can You Hear Me Now?" and Other Articles
Letters to the editor from the October 2010 issue of Scientific American
