bigthinkeditor

A new cell phone app developed by Microsoft researchers uses overlapping snapshots to build a photo-realistic 3-D model that can be spun around and viewed from any angle.

Researcher at Rice University, Krishna Palem has found that “pruning” away the little-used circuits on microchips can double the energy efficiency and computing speed of the chips.

Credit card and technology companies have talked about mobile wallets—mobile phones that work as credit cards—for well over a decade. But now the pieces are starting to fall into place.

Robert Lemos tells the story of Biogen Idec, a biotechnology firm that moved its business into the cloud and learned lessons about flexibility, finance and data security along the way.

When the universe came into being a mere 13.75 billion years ago, its origin may have been so weird, due to expanding dimensions, that we can’t even imagine what it would have been like.

An experiment carried out more than 50 years ago has revealed that volcanoes may have played a crucial role in the formation of the first organic building blocks of life on Earth.

Federal ethanol mandates that encourage its production are a major reason why food prices worldwide have reached record levels in the past several months, say some economists.

In the next two decades, nearly two-thirds of humanity will be living in cities. So how will urban centers across the world manage the increasing pressure being put on their water resources?

According to a new study, the next generation of space lasers could test for the existence of dimensions beyond the three we experience, perhaps solving some of physics’ thorny problems.

First we created positrons, electrons’ antimatter counterparts. Now, the newly-discovered antihelium-4 could tell us whether there are vast pockets of antimatter in our universe.

Advances in biotechnology, rather than feeding the world, are making matters worse by fueling the production of inefficient products like animal feed and food-competing biofuels.

Earth’s magnetic field has typically been understood to shield the planet from solar wind, but recent observations of Mars and Venus have sparked a debate over the supposed shield.

Experts hesitate to predict where Fukushima’s radiation will go because its travel patterns are as mercurial as the weather and as complicated as the food chains along which they move.

Professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia University, Brian Greene specializes in superstring theory and explains how he has come to see our universe as one among many.

The New York Times paywall is costing the newspaper $40-$50 million to design and construct, Bloomberg has reported. And it can be defeated through four lines of Javascript.

While 100 million users is an impressive milestone for LinkedIn, though its active users are below this number. As it prepares for a public offering, growth in users will be important.

The Newspaper Guild has called on bloggers to form an ‘electronic picket line’ around the Huffington Post and boycott further posts until the HP changes its business model.

In Canada, older, affluent well-educated people merely follow the social media conversation on blogs, Facebook and Twitter that is created by young, upwardly mobile immigrants.

It’s no longer enough just to influence people, social media strategists now strive to poke the influencers. Key objectives include: “activate my key opinion leaders”.

A 21st-century education must surely look different. We must address new knowledge (technology & digital media) and new challenges (globalization & community fragmentation).

The days of interrupting people while they are being entertained in order to blast out your marketing messages are over. Today, we need to actually “engage” with audiences.

To truly enable a Digital Society, People have to be the focus of the services offered. People that want access to their world anywhere, at any time from any device.

Legislation that papers over creepy online advertisements might make the problem less visible, but it won’t make our privacy foundations solid.

Humanities courses are starting to be deeply influenced by a new array of powerful digital tools and vast online archives. Undergraduates are experiencing Shakespeare in 3-D!

To stay relevant in the job market, older job applicants need to prove that they embrace rather than shun technology. What better way to do this than on Twitter or Facebook, asks TheLadders.com founder Mark Cenedella. 

The doubling of computer processing speed every 18 months, known as Moore’s Law, is just one manifestation of the greater trend that all technological change occurs at an exponential rate. 

In today’s economic order the U.S. needs strong allies. Cultivating relationships in Latin America is essential if Washington wants to continue to exercise leadership in the region.

As political upheaval spreads across North Africa and into the Persian Gulf, 2011 may turn out to be as momentous as 1971, the year when the nature of the region’s petro-states first took shape.

Chernobyl and Three Mile Island did not stop nuclear power growth. Will the Japan nuclear crisis at Fukushima delay or end the ‘nuclear renaissance’? Governments are reassessing their plans.

After 2008’s banking crisis, the recession in 2009, perhaps the next phase of global economic turmoil will come from public finances. The problem is especially acute in top-heavy Europe.