Visa International Inc. is experimenting with credit cards that include a small display screen where customers could view recent transactions, bank balances or local currency exchange rates, said Deborah Arnold, Visa’s vice president of global consumer strategies.

Women who are born in the summer are likely to have fewer children than women born in other months, researchers have suggested.

We all know what wardriving is - discovering wireless networks while driving some sort of ground-based vehicle. Warflying is kind of like that, except you are travelling at about 120 miles per hour and flying about 1500 above ground.

Miniature “buckyballs” have been created for the first time, and hold the promise of new and unusual physical properties for nano-engineers to explore.

Jake Lyall thinks the idea for a new kind of motorized one-wheeled vehicle came to him in a dream. Which makes sense, given that the 37-year-old part-time programmer and Renaissance Fair jouster had never worked for a garage, studied engineering, or even held a welder before he built the RIOT Wheel.

Thanks to a new design of shopping cart, customers of Tesco will soon be able to burn calories while buying the weekly groceries.

Herds of robotic traffic cones could soon be swarming onto a highway, closing down lanes and slowing the traffic.

Microscopic biological computers that could one day operate as a doctor on a cellular level have been unveiled.
Made of biological molecules, the computers are so small a trillion can fit in a drop of water.

Recent research from analyst firm IDC says that the arrival of mobile phones incorporating hard drives will “require a number of further evolutionary steps” before such technology is good for consumers.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office doesn’t require a major overhaul, but it does need to take “decisive steps” to ensure that funding shortages and outdated policies do not hinder innovation, said the National Research Council in a new report released last week.

Thomas Frey, Executive Director of the DaVinci Institute, a Colorado futurist think tank, today announced the formation of a task force to establish Colorado as the world leader in a new technology called Brain Fingerprinting®.

Women tend to choose husbands who look like their fathers - even if they are adopted, reveals a new study.

In the 1990s, food-poisoning outbreaks hammered chains such as Jack-in-the-Box, which sold burgers contaminated with bacteria that killed four children. And of course, the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, plus the dramatic increase in global terrorism ever since, have raised fears that the food supply could be a fat target for […]

With recent developments in digital printing technology, small self-publishing businesses are starting up that are fast filling the void left by conventional publishers and previous tailored publishing ventures. Using low-cost digital printing methods that allow small print runs, known as POD (print-on-demand), it is now possible to publish a book for a fraction of the […]

Thousands of patients with severe burns or long-term wounds that refuse to heal could soon be helped with bandages made from their own skin cells.

Last week, Japanese researchers created a fatherless mouse using only female eggs, and turned the reproduction world on its head. The word on the street was men’s role in baby making might one day be obsolete.

In the movie “Catch Me if You Can”, Leonardo DiCaprio played the part of Frank Abagnale, a true life con man who became one of the world’s foremost forgery experts. In a similar twist, Kevin Mitnick, the world’s best known hacker has turned his con artistry to a skill that helps companies fix […]

Berlin has introduced five talking waste bins which say thank you in three different languages or scream “goal” to help promote a cleaner city.

For an arachnophobe, the sight of a spider making its way up a wall sparks fear. For a materials scientist, however, it can provide inspiration. In the current issue of the journal Smart Materials and Structures, researchers describe just how a spider manages to stick to ceilings in apparent defiance of gravity. The discovery could […]

Though their work is dismissed by most physicists, a determined cadre of scientists is still chasing after what could be an energy jackpot—and their experiments are producing heat and nuclear byproducts that can’t be otherwise explained.

Cloistered in their ultra-modern laboratories a 90-minute drive south of Tokyo, about 900 engineers work on research and development for Japan’s leading mobile phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo.
Among them, researchers in the mobile communications, multimedia and network laboratories dream up applications of the future, not just for fourth-generation mobile telephony (4G), but for 5G as well. […]

According to the New York Times, the iPod was put together starting in 2001 by a hardware designer team led by Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked at the Apple spinoff General Magic, at Philips Electronics and briefly at RealNetworks, led by Rob Glaser, who has developed the Rhapsody music service.

Biologists are crafting libraries of interchangeable DNA parts and assembling them inside microbes to create programmable, living machines.

Perhaps the most underappreciated accelerating transition we are participating in today is the emergence of the Linguistic User Interface or LUI. The LUI is the natural language front end to an increasingly intelligent and profoundly humanizing and malleable Internet.

People tend to develop strong ties to a specific computer, even if it means waiting to use their favourite machine, say researchers.