IdeaFeed

What's the Latest Development? Physicists at the University of Innsbruck have taken an essential step toward creating quantum computers, which may prove vastly more powerful than today's chip-based technology. By creating a network that interfaces between a single ion and a single proton, in a ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Microscopic superconducting particles known as quantum dots could one day be taken in pill form or injected by doctors to aid in medical procedures like electronic medical imaging, according to a new study which confirms the futuristic tool's relative safety. After ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Science fiction writer Elizabeth Moon argues that implanting a computer chip beneath everyone's skin at birth would make the world better off. While participating in a discussion over whether future wars will have more or fewer victims, Moon put forward the idea ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? A new device developed at MIT can inject drugs into the body without using a needle, improving patient compliance and cutting down on the large number of accidental pricks doctors and nurses give themselves every year. The technology uses a jet-injection system ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Already famous for San Francisco's cable cars, California is set to receive a new set of cable trucks, reducing carbon emission and fuel use along highway routes used to haul freight between the port of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Called eHighway, the system will ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Having successfully launched the world's first private space vehicle, the company SpaceX has secured a $1.6 billion NASA contract and will one day carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Other space ventures are close on its heels. The company ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? As the world's first privately-built space capsule hurtles toward the International Space Station, Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX is responsible for the feat, is the talk of the nation. After its successful launch, the Dragon capsule is scheduled to dock with the ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? How to feed humanity's growing population is an environmental concern larger than global warming, says Jon Foley, head of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment. Global agriculture already puts more pressure on planetary resources than any other ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Last month, a team of researchers found dark matter mysteriously absent in the region around our sun. Having mapped more than 400 stars, spanning a region roughly 26,000 light years in diameter, the European Southern Observatory identified a quantity of material ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Plans to engineer the Earth's climate, so as to reduce the amount of sunshine that reaches the planet's surface and prevent the consequences of global warming, are proving extremely controversial. The European project IMPLICC, or Implications and Risks of Novel ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? China's economy is much more than state-built housing and widgets made with cheap labor, or at least it could be. Mobile technology has been booming in China--analysts say the one billionth Chinese mobile customer recently switched on his or her new cellphone--and ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Some analysts close to Silicon Valley say the dream has run its course and that innovation is now a euphemism for the proliferation of social media websites with ever-smaller niches. Others, such as Todd Hoff, disagree. The High Scalability blogger believes the ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes argues that the persistence of our online profiles after our physical death makes us immortal in a very meaningful sense. If our fear of death is not limited to the extinction of our physical being, but extends to include our ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? Using a new Web and smartphone app, the tech start up Bableverse wants to enable real-time translation of all the world's languages. The app was used in Japan during the tsunami crisis to allow English-speaking journalists to help uni-lingual locals cope with the ... Read More

What's the Latest Development? With Facebook's shares trading well below their initial value one day after the company went public, just who is to "blame" for what has gone "wrong"? Some say the company's banker, Morgan Stanley, diluted the potency of the stock by allowing a whopping 421.2 ... Read More