Most people are familiar with optical lasers through their experience with laser pointers. But what about a laser made from sound waves? What makes optical laser light different from a light bulb or the sun is that all the light waves emerging from it are moving in the same direction and are pretty much in

Sometimes, while waiting for quantum computers to become a thing, or complaining that your stupid laptop keeps dying on 5 percent battery, it’s easy to forget just how far technology has come over the past 50 years. Sure, we can all list off a whole bunch of innovations that have changed the way the world

Millions of cryptocurrency investors have been scammed out of massive sums of real money. In 2018, losses from cryptocurrency-related crimes amounted to US$1.7 billion. The criminals use both old-fashioned and new-technology tactics to swindle their marks in schemes based on digital currencies exchanged through online databases called blockchains. From researching blockchain, cryptocurrency and cybercrime, I

Scientists have reworked the DNA of Escherichia coli to help us understand apparent redundancies in its genetic code. At four million base pairs in size, they now have the results of the most ambitious attempt at a completely synthetic form of life. For all its immense variation, life on Earth all shares a common language in its

San Francisco on Tuesday became the first city in the United States to ban the use of facial-recognition software by city agencies and the police, dealing a swift symbolic blow to a key technology rapidly being deployed by law enforcement nationwide. The 8-to-1 vote by the city’s Board of Supervisors will forbid public agencies from

Global messaging app WhatsApp, which boasts over 1 billion users, was targeted by hackers last month in a breach that saw mobile devices attacked through the voice-calling functionality of the app. The security flaw potentially gave hackers access to private messages, location data and other personal user information. While WhatsApp hasn’t specifically stated who or how many

A new ‘biological glue’ developed by Chinese researchers could one day stop hearts and arteries from uncontrollably bleeding. Placed on an open wound and activated through UV light, this life-saving sealant rapidly morphs into a non-toxic hydrogel, capable of withstanding both slippery surfaces and the pulsing of heart tissue. The adhesive sealant hasn’t been tested

Scientists have measured the accuracy of two-qubit operations for the first time in silicon, bringing the world a big step closer to reliable quantum computing. The great promise of quantum computers is that they will enable a vastly more powerful and faster way of making calculations than the computing power we’ve had until now. The

Numbers figure pretty high up on the list of what a computer can do well. While humans often struggle to split a restaurant bill, a modern computer can make millions of calculations in a mere second. Humans, however, have an innate and intuitive number sense that helped us, among other things, to build computers in

In a perfect world, plastic would never be on a one-way trip into landfill – it’s a vision we’ve strived to realise for decades. Unfortunately, some plastics just don’t recycle as easily as others, limiting how well we can reuse them in new products. But a new kind of plastic might help change all that.

It’s been 33 years since the Chernobyl nuclear power plant tragically blew apart in a meltdown, spreading nuclear fallout across the land. A lot has changed, but the surroundings still contain some of the most radioactive patches of soil on the planet. Last month, researchers from the University of Bristol mapped that radioactivity in a

A perplexing riddle affecting dozens of families in the Cleveland area has finally been solved, but not before weeks of wreaking havoc on people who – bizarre as it sounds – were unable to open their car and garage doors. In late April, residents of the town of North Olmsted, Ohio began finding that their

A man in Taiwan found that his AirPod was still functional after he had accidentally swallowed it, according to a report from the Daily Mail. Ben Hsu reportedly fell asleep while wearing Apple’s wireless earbuds and found that he was missing one headphone when he woke up. He then used Apple’s tracking feature to find

Personal gadgets known as “hearables,” which communicate with the neural signals passing through our ears in order to monitor and interact with our brains, are on their way. Hearables could help us focus on specific conversations, like smart hearing aids, or monitor our brain activity to treat tinnitus. That’s according to Poppy Crum, the Stanford University neuroscientist and chief scientist

All the way back in 1999, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science was celebrating its 35th year of research, it gave itself an unusual birthday present: a large lead container, shaped like a paper bag, sculpted by legendary architect Frank Gehry. It was sealed away behind a cryptographic puzzle, specifically designed

The widespread adoption of pasteurisation and refrigeration means we’re now used to a shelf life of two to three weeks for milk, but scientists working at Australian company Naturo just announced they’ve extended that to more than 60 days. Allegedly, Naturo’s technique doesn’t involve the heat treatment that comes with pasteurisation, and apparently “retains its

Armed with CRISPR gene-editing technology, scientists are trying to move away from performing experiments on common model organisms, like fruit flies and zebrafish, which have long defined biological research – by crafting new ones at the genetic level. But scientists who are gene hacking new animals for their research are running into logistical problems, according

Mark Zuckerberg has a new mantra: “The future is private”. It’s an extraordinary statement, given the messenger. Facebook has been mired in one privacy scandal or another almost its entire life, and the past two years have been a nonstop rollercoaster of red-hot crises. But the 34-year-old billionaire is leaning hard into a so-called pivot

The spoken word is a powerful tool, but not all of us have the ability to use it, either due to biology or circumstances. In such cases, technology can bridge the gap – and now that gap is looking shorter than ever, with a new algorithm that turns messages meant for your muscles into legible

Even if death metal isn’t a perfect fit for you as far as music genres go, you have to admire the AI smarts behind Relentless Doppelganger – a non-stop, 24/7 YouTube livestream churning out heavy death metal generated completely by algorithms. And this is by no means a one-off trick by Dadabots, the neural network