In an industrial building on the Jersey City waterfront, workers busily printed supersize images for building facades and billboards intended to paper even the most casual viewer with brand awareness. Suspended near the rafters were full-color images of the youth tribes of Gap and giant emblems of National Basketball Association teams; on a far wall […]

Physicists have created blobs of gaseous plasma that can grow, replicate and communicate - fulfilling most of the traditional requirements for biological cells. Without inherited material they cannot be described as alive, but the researchers believe these curious spheres may offer a radical new explanation for how life began.

Most biologists think living cells arose out […]

Airline passengers may soon be able to send and receive text messages in midflight.

Swiss airline technology provider SITA has launched a two-way inflight SMS service, according to a statement from the company.

But instead of their own mobile phones, passengers will have to use the in-seat telephone handset or seatback entertainment console to send and receive […]

A lack of knowledge about the internet means too many parents in the UK have no clue what their children are doing online.

Many worry about what their children have seen, but one in four are unsure where to get safety advice, says a survey.

As a result, cable company Telewest has worked with the charity Childnet […]

It isn’t surprising that New York’s electrical grid malfunctioned during the big blackout of 2003, says one Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor. It’s not that the grid is antiquated; it’s that our demand for energy is insatiable.

While proponents of conservation seek ways to get people to use less energy, Anna Dyson, who teaches architecture at Rensselaer, […]

Most home net users would love to have a link that can handle gigabits of data every second.
But for some folks such high speeds are simply too slow.

Some science experiments can generate so much data that it still takes hours to send the information across the net so it can start to be analysed.

Caltech researchers have made a metallic glass-based foam that is stronger than traditional metal alloys, providing industry with a revolutionary lightweight material.

Although bubbloy (bubble-alloy) is entering a crowded field of metallic foams, it has the advantage of a smooth plastic or glasslike consistency where others are grainy.

If two companies get their way, pretty soon you’ll walk through virtual advertisements in the mall or view television programs the same way Luke Skywalker watched R2D2’s playback of Princess Leia’s distress message in the first Star Wars movie.

The images would float off your TV screen and into thin air, allowing you to interact with […]

A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment.

Craig Wallace and Philo T. Farnsworth are putting the lie to all that.

Wallace, a baby-faced tennis player fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah […]