Tech News Center

Plastics became ubiquitous during the 20th century.

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Researchers get plastic to act totally metal

It feels like quantum computers have barely been invented, and scientists are already testing how extensible the current technology is.

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Pushing the speed limits of quantum memory

A typical neuroscience paper (or a typical report on one) is a laundry list of structure:function relationships between brain regions and the mental tasks they perform. The amygdala deals with registering rewards, the hippocampus handles memory, and so on. These relationships have been the result of over a century of work, starting with rare cases of brain injury and building through modern medical imaging, which can detect ever-smaller lesions and associate neural activity with specific cognitive processes

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MRI’s successes put the brain on trial

An unresolved question in astronomy is how the Milky Way reached its current state. One theory is that the Milky Way grew, at least in part, by cannibalizing smaller dwarf galaxies that happened to get too close

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Low-metal star suggests Milky Way grew by gobbling dwarfs

The US Treasury Department today relaxed export regulations against Iran, Sudan, and Cuba, allowing US companies to provide instant messaging, e-mail, and social networking services to those countries. The goal is to ensure that citizens can “exercise their most basic rights,” said Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin. The new policy provides a general license to tech companies

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US eases restrictions on Web services exports to Iran, Cuba

Filed under: Rumors , Odds and ends , iPhone The Daily Telegraph reports that a new Apple patent has surfaced which could potentially allow the iPhone , or another Apple portable, to act as a sort of electronic key.

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Apple patent: use your iPhone as an electronic "iKey"

Lenovo loves its red mousing nipple, Apple digs its aluminum and IBM adores those light pulses. Nearly two full years after we heard this very company touting breakthroughs in science thanks to a nanophotonic switch , in flies a similar technique from Yorktown Heights that could “greatly further energy efficient computing.” As the story goes, gurus at IBM have figured out how to replace electrical signals that communicate via copper wires between computer chips with tiny silicon circuits that chat using pulses of light

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IBM keeps light pulse bandwagon rolling, uses ‘em for chip-to-chip communication

Hoosiers don’t always agree on what constitutes sex: Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute tracks (among other things) the public’s attitude towards sex, and recently published the results of a survey that asked a fairly simple question: would you say you “had sex” if you engaged in activity X? As the title—”Misclassification bias: diversity in conceptualisations about having ‘had sex’”—implies, there’s anything but universal agreement

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Weird Science wonders whether or not it was sex