TECHNOLOGY tends to cascade into the marketplace in waves. Think of personal computers in the 1980s, the Internet in the 1990s and smartphones in the last five years. Computing may be on the cusp of

It’s relatively easy to collect massive amounts of data on microbes. But the files are so large that it takes days to simply transmit them to other researchers and months to analyze once they are

They can also share information easily with consulting agronomists, crop insurance agents, the Agriculture Department and others. THE world doesn’t necessarily need the gazillion-and-one games that seem available on smartphones. But it could use more

EnergyPoints, a data mining startup, has developed a way to compare whether a wind farm or a desalination plant will do more good–using just one simple number. There are any number of problems facing the

Would you want Microsoft to monitor your emotional state? Microsoft has filed a patent application for a computer system that will allow advertisers to target customers based on their emotions. The patent includes a method

Our ability to produce data is outstripping our ability to understand it On Tuesday, March 19th, Alan Jacobs posted a technology article for The Atlantic titled “Jobs of the Future: A Skeptic’s Response.” In the

Nothing in these bills will actually help deal with them   There’s proposed legislation in the US (sponsored by Lamar Smith) and in Canada (sponsored by Vic Toews) and in the UK that uses various

Catching a Wave, and Measuring It Mr. Gosling is transforming a fleet of robots that move out in the ocean to measure everything from weather to oil slicks, sharply reducing many of the costs of

Now social scientists are trying to mine the vast resources of the Internet More than 60 years ago, in his “Foundation” series, the science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov invented a new science — psychohistory —

A new type of software has been shown to predict revolutions by mining news reports around the world. Retrospectively mining the news for the past 30 years the software indicates points at which the likelihood

“Culturomics” is an emerging field of study into human culture that relies on the collection and analysis of large amounts of data. A previous culturomic research effort used Google’s culturomic tool to examine a dataset

In the last 30 years, more than 90 percent of the reef-building coral responsible for maintaining major marine habitats and providing a natural barrier against hurricanes in the Caribbean has disappeared because of a disease