According to the lede in a recent New Scientist article: Spammers’ own trickery has been used to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking the most common kind of spam, a team of computer…

Recently, the New York Times came out with yet another article about how people consistently pick bad passwords. It’s a hackneyed subject by now, but I shouldn’t complain: I cover this sort of old…

A palm-sized device invented at Cornell that uses water surface tension as an adhesive bond just might make walking on walls possible for humans. The rapid adhesion mechanism could lead to such…

My latest online project: Hackademe! Hack: A clever use of technology, software, or modified items to solve a problem or increase efficiency. Academe: The community of scholars and students engaged…

In a recent post on my personal blog, I talked about television content delivery and pricing. What I didn’t mention in that post, particularly when I talked about the lack of choice, is that there is…

Newsday.com : Paywall Ain't Working The internet is a very powerful tool for education and for research.  At a click of a mouse button I can escape my parochial world-view and embark on a…

New technology developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany may soon help consumers save energy by allowing them to track which devices in their homes are using the…

'Invisibility' has long been a staple of science fiction.  The ability to go unseen has benefits, mostly involving mischief, but there are some ways where being invisible need not involve the…

To start off 2010, we're invited to join a new “Hot Topics” feature, which will periodically focus the bloggers on a particular topic. The first Hot Topic is this: The Upcoming Decade in Science…

I’ve been critical of patents that seem to have been issued for ideas that don’t represent much innovation (most recently, this one, and see more discussion here), extending existing “prior art” only…