The electric light was a failure. Invented by the British chemist Humphry Davy in the early 1800s, it spent nearly 80 years being passed from one initially hopeful researcher to another, like some not-quite-housebroken puppy. [...]

Is there also an uncanny valley that applies to our level of comfort One day, people won’t have to type queries into a box to search for information. It’ll be delivered to them, via their [...]

The app gives users the option to set a self-destruct timer When it comes to mobile apps and social networks, the devil, increasingly, is in the default settings. Companies have little, if any, incentive to [...]

Advanced cyberwar is different THE decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush’s presidency marked a significant [...]

It seemed like a no-brainer. DMITRI SIEGEL, until last year a marketing executive at Urban Outfitters, thought he had hit on a novel idea to personalize the company’s Web site for frequent customers. He would [...]

Language does not come naturally to machines. Unlike humans, computers cannot easily distinguish between, say, a river bank and a savings bank. Satire and jokes? Algorithms have great trouble with that. Irony? Wordplay? Cultural context? [...]

DO machines speak? If so, do they have a constitutional right to free speech? This may sound like a fanciful question, a matter of philosophy or science fiction. But it’s become a real issue with [...]

The Surface tablet runs a variation of Windows 8 In its most strategically significant push yet into the hardware business, Microsoft on Monday unveiled a tablet computer called Surface that is intended to challenge Apple’s [...]

“Now that,” I said, “would be the real Arab Spring.” A FEW weeks ago, I was in Amman, Jordan, talking with educators, when I met a young American woman with the most remarkable job description. [...]

What about the benefit of transparency, accountability and public discussion? In recent years, the United States has pioneered the use of two innovative weapons, drones and cyberattacks, that by many accounts have devastated Al Qaeda and [...]

A bus just passed by. I think I have a headache. This is the sort of inane information that the most tweet-happy among us rush to share with the rest of the indifferent world. But [...]

“I wish they were in every hardware store in the world.” This month, NASA engineer Eric Stackpole hiked to a spot in Trinity County, east of California’s rough Bigfoot country. Nestled at the base of [...]