Scientists have long known that a diamond's trip from deep below Earth's surface must be quick indeed: Lab tests show that at conditions found in the crust, the gems would burn up in a matter of days, if not hours. New experiments reveal the chemical secret behind such rapid ascent.
Cato Institutes Julian Sanchez does the math on online copyright infringement and finds no urgency in rushing to curb online copyright infringement.
The skull of a 260-million-year-old cousin of dinosaurs not only reveals it was probably an omnivore, but also provides a crucial clue about the distribution of the animals eons before dinos walked the Earth. Laelaps blogger Brian Switek explains.
The fruit fly has the ability to coordinate its compound eye and brain functions for navigation by using natural sunlight, according to a new study. Other insects with similar eyes and similar flight patterns likely have the same capability.
The race to perfect the next-generation user interface is on. Some believe the holy grail lies primarily in voice control. For others, facial recognition is a key component. One of the more interesting possibilities we saw at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, however, was 3-D gesture control and recognition.
Jay Leno tells us all about flogging his newest toy.
Congress may take works out of the public domain and grant them copyright status, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday. The top court was ruling on a petition by a group of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, publishers and film archivists who urged the justices to reverse an appellate court that ruled against the group, which has relied on artistic works in the public domain for their livelihoods.
Motorola Xoom owners will be some of the first to receive Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) on tablets, kicking off wider distribution of the highly upgraded version of the platform.
Audio sequencers typically work the same way. Most of these tools, favored by DJs and electronic musicians, organize sound on a grid with time on the horizontal axis and notes on the vertical axis. Gliss ($3, iPhone or iPad) bends that tried-and-true convention. The resulting app feels altogether new, despite elements that will feel familiar to anybody who?s taken a crack at making music on a computer.
It's bad enough that the Navy's newest ship has had wicked problems with corrosion, missed out on the latest naval wartime missions and is generally something of a Frankenstein's monster. Now the Pentagon's top weapons tester has found problems with its abilities to find and withstand mines -- which is a big problem for a ship that's supposed to be the Navy's minehunter of the future.
Japan?s Fukushima disaster last spring hit the nuclear industry like, well, an atom bomb. Get your questions about the future of nuclear power in a live chat with Wired's Spencer Reiss and PBS's "Frontline" team today at 11 a.m. ET. Enter your questions in this post.
Wikipedia is our collective memory. So what do we do when we have amnesia for a day? Here are 5 tips that may help.
This week, "call your Congressperson" is not just a cliche. It?s one of the most important things you can do to make your voice heard.
We've blacked out the headlines on our website today as part of a global internet protest against two radical anti-piracy bills pending in Congress. Here's why.
Three British businessmen are bringing back the three-wheel, 4.2-hp Peel with an eco-friendly electric version.
Hundreds, if not thousands of websites are expected to go dark or alter themselves Wednesday to protest proposed U.S. anti-piracy legislation that many believe goes too far fighting online copyright and trademark infringement. But what's all the fuss about? Here's an explainer of the basics of the bills, the protests and how you make your voice heard.
Capt. James Cook discovers the Hawaiian Islands on his way to hunt for the Northwest Passage. He fails to find the latter, and probably wishes he missed finding the first one, too.
The team behind says that multiplayer and online interactivity will play integral roles in many of its upcoming games.
The Army wants soldiers of the future to be all they can be -- onscreen and off. As the military's enthusiasm for virtual reality training continues to grow, the Army's got a new plan to make the training systems even more immersive: The Army plans to give every soldier a digital doppelganger -- a custom avatar they can use for years, and in myriad virtual training programs, from urban combat practice to cultural prep.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Microsoft's System Center 2012 is available today as a Release Candidate, the last milestone before a final release. Along with Hyper-V and Windows Server, the upgraded System Center forms the key building blocks for Microsoft's private cloud strategy, providing management tools for desktops, mobile devices, both physical and virtual servers, and a mix of resources across private data centers and public clouds such as Windows Azure.
After three decades of waiting, a roughly three-foot-long archosaur has been named as a new species. The animal had slender legs, a short skull and rows of flat teeth -- a creature paleontologists called ?the house cat" of the Jurassic period. Laelaps blogger Brian Switek reports.
Composer Alexis Kirke aims to turn his hallucinations into sound live in front of an audience, accompanied by a flute. The audiovisual composition, called , uses an iPad camera app designed to help express hallucinatory disturbances.
In 2008, Steve Jobs famously panned Amazon's Kindle: "The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don?t read any more." Now that Amazon is one of Apple's top competitors, Apple knows that despite its problems, publishing and education are still worth taking seriously.
Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has resigned from the company?s board of directors and from all other positions with the company, effective Tuesday, according to a press release issued Tuesday.
Opposites attract. It's a convincing adage, but in the social world it couldn't be further from the truth. Our quest for similarity shapes our social world, constraining the reach of our personal network. Frontal Cortex blogger Jonah Lehrer explains why.
An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days.
It's one thing to hear about the powerful new 3-D tools coming to CSS, but it's a very different thing to actually see them used creatively in the wild. Developer Steven Wittens recently did just that when he redesigned his Acko.net website. Wittens turned to the 3-D features in CSS 3 -- with a little JavaScript help -- to create a visually stunning 3-D page header.
The subject of personally-owned mobile devices like tablets and smartphones being used on the corporate network is a hot one.
Red Hat has released the third version of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization RHEV virtualization software package, which includes improvements that would make...
Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent have settled a patent dispute, following a jury verdict last year that would have had Microsoft pay US$70 million for infringement.
A new form of nonvolatile MRAM memory with the promise to eventually replace DRAM is slowly making its way into products, but analysts said it could be a long...
Microsoft has joined the public opposition to SOPA, although like Google and many other opponents, won't black out its site today. Although some people have said Microsoft's opposition is insincere or half-hearted, the company has been quietly working against it behind the scenes at least since November.
Want to turn your outdated TouchPad into an ICS machine? Now you can!
After decades of blockbusters, George Lucas decides to hang it up after his next film to return to making experimental art films.
Key areas of growth in cloud activity will include asset management, security monitoring, cloud service brokering and service stacks.
T-Mobile and Walmart are bragging about new unlimited phone plans--that aren't really unlimited.
LightSquared's proposed mobile data network was set up to fail in tests of interference with GPS that were conducted last November under government auspices, the...
Opponents of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act cheered Wednesday's Web blackout as a turning point in the debate.
For businesses that rely on online transactions, open source shopping carts are a good alternative to proprietary ecommerce software.
Listening to nighttime white noise or the morning radio is old hat, as audio innovator Quintron showcases a house that makes music out of weather patterns.
Alienware's X51 gives gamers hearty performance in a small package.
As thousands of websites and blogs went dark Wednesday to voice their opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, some U.S. lawmakers have...
ARM hopes for a serious impact on the server market starting in 2014 when its 64-bit processor design reaches the market, CEO Warren East said.
Alcatel-Lucent is now offering a router with technology from Arbor Networks that defends against distributed denial-of-service attacks, the two companies said on...
Linux users could be locked out of ARM-based Windows 8 devices, and the news may not be much better for Linux on x86-based PCs.
The update gives U.S. users faster browsing and useful Data Manager tool, among other features.
Microsoft has been quietly working against the Stop Online Piracy Act behind the scenes for months.
Nissan brings its Scratch Shield paint used on cars to iPhone cases that can self-heal scratches within an hour.
Projecteer Eric Calisto brings up a few new ideas to battling piracy via Kickstarter, with various (ironic) non-digital methods you can use in the real world.
Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched a managed NoSQL database service that lets users easily launch a database and scale it up or down as needed.
The hackers used stolen login details for a teller and a call center agent to transfer about $6.7 million into multiple bank accounts.
Robert Butyka, a 26-year old Romanian man accused of hacking into multiple NASA servers, received a three-year suspended prison sentence on Tuesday after...
CA Technologies has updated its CA Clarity Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software with a new user interface, one that the company hopes will appeal to a...
The Stop Online Piracy Act still has a lot of support in the House of Representatives, with 29 co-sponsors backing the measure.
Two activist groups, one liberal and one conservative, have joined together in a campaign to defeat U.S. lawmakers supporting two controversial copyright...
Business intelligence and analytics have again become the top technology priority for CIOs, replacing cloud computing, according to a survey of 2,335 CIOs...
A survey found that 44.5 percent of people who bought a smartphone in December chose an iPhone, almost twice as many as in October.
BioWare says it'll release a Mass Effect 3 demo for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 (including Kinect support) next month.
There are workarounds, some simple and some complex, to access Wikipedia, and other alternative sites are available.
Vulnerability research firm Secunia announced that, effective from the beginning of the year, software vendors will have a six-month deadline to fix...
The feature allows you to hear music your friend is listening to at the exact same point, essentially allowing your friend to play DJ.
The SOPA blackout on sites like Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Google will have little lasting impact unless the awareness is converted to action so the message is heard in Congress.
The Smithsonian is preparing to debut "The Art of Video Games" in March, and the games-as-art exhibition could be coming to a city near you!
Mozilla, the open-source organization responsible for Firefox, joined other major technology companies today to protest anti-piracy legislation SOPA.
Samsung Electronics appears to be backtracking from earlier reports that said it was merging its own bada mobile platform with the Intel-backed Tizen operating...
A Russian man and his son face various fraud charges after U.S. authorities unsealed a nine-count indictment dating from 2007 on Tuesday, according to federal...
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) saw fourth quarter net profit drop 22.5 percent year on year, continuing the previous quarter's decline as the chip...
Wikipedia and some other Internet companies blacked out their websites in one way or the other early Wednesday in protest against controversial legislation in...
U.S. authorities acted irresponsibly when they last month labeled Alibaba Group's e-commerce sites as "notorious markets" for selling pirated and counterfeit...
BI (business intelligence) vendor Tableau Software on Wednesday announced the availability of Tableau 7.0, a release that boosts speed and scale as well as...
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) have been making headlines, but what are they, exactly? Here are the facts.
Apparently fed up with delays, Oracle said it is willing to drop its claims of patent infringement against Google if the court will hear its copyright complaints...
Clearwire will test its LTE network in two U.S. cities and China Mobile will build test networks in select Chinese cities early this year to foster development...
Hewlett-Packard has added chief strategy officer to former Microsoft veteran Bill Veghte's titles, the company announced Tuesday.
Although it isn't perfect, this guide from Google is a great resource tool for employee education on internet privacy.
A design decision made by Oracle architects long ago may have painted some of Oracle's largest customers into a corner.
As our physical and digital worlds become more networked, cyber thieves will use time-tested techniques to pull off scams.