When your computer stores data, it has to pause while the information moves from one piece of hardware to another. But that may soon stop being the case, as scientists from MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design uncovered a new manufacturing trick that should let them build computers that don’t have those

What internet users Down Under say online will no longer be kept on the down low. On Thursday, Australia’s Parliament passed the Assistance and Access Bill. The legislation will force tech companies to help Australian authorities decrypt users’ online communications — and it could represent a major blow to data privacy elsewhere in the world.

The promise of quantum computing brings with it some mind-blowing potential, but it also carries a new set of risks, scientists are warning. Specifically, the enormous power of the tech could be used to crack the best cyber security we currently have in place.   A new report on the “progress and prospects” of quantum

There are a few things we should demand from a decent power supply. Not least, it shouldn’t require oven-like temperatures to function. That’s just a given. For decades, fluoride has sat on the sidelines as a potential competitor for lithium-ion batteries. If not for its need to bake at more than 150 degrees Celsius (300

Britain’s Parliament has just given the world an unprecedented look at the ruthless tactics of Facebook’s executive team. On Wednesday, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee published leaked emails from the Silicon Valley tech giant’s leadership team that had been obtained by Six4Three, an app developer that’s locked in a legal battle with Facebook

A year ago today, Tesla’s big battery in South Australia began dispatching power to the state’s grid, one day ahead of schedule. By most accounts, the world’s largest lithium-ion battery has been a remarkable success. But there are some concerns that have so far escaped scrutiny.   The big battery (or the Hornsdale Power Reserve,

Bill Gates sees nuclear energy as a potential solution to lowering carbon-dioxide emissions around the world, and he has spent the past decade funding new ways to produce the energy in a safe, affordable way.   About 10 years ago, Gates cofounded a company called TerraPower to build new kinds of nuclear reactors. TerraPower is

It happens all the time. You’re online, checking out products, maybe looking for a holiday, or researching home loans, when all of a sudden there’s a pop-up. “Live help is available! Chat now with a member of our friendly customer support team!” It’s easy to dismiss these chat dialogues, but it’s also easy to take

The price of Bitcoin has dropped by 75 percent in the past year, so anyone who invested heavily at the peak will have lost a lot of money. And now there’s more bad news for crypto-currency investors to worry about: they may not legally own the digital assets they have purchased.   My colleagues and

Humans are going places. NASA’s newest plan is to launch crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s, and we’ll need the most advanced and reliable space technology to help get us there safe and sound.   That’s where HAL 9000 – the villainous, insane killbot from 2001: A Space Odyssey – comes in. Believe it

A set of wings with wires for engines has established a landmark in aviation, becoming the first object to breeze through the air on the cusp of its own, self-generated ionic wind.   At first glance, it looks like the kind of aircraft even the pioneering Wright brothers would have rejected as too ludicrous to fly.

For a brief moment earlier this year, a small spot in China blazed with such heat, the Sun would have been staring down at Earth feeling mightily jealous. Scientists announced this week that the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor in Hefei has finally achieved a temperature exceeding 100 million degrees Celsius, setting a new

If you’re eagerly awaiting the next generation of personal transport, we’ve got some good and bad news. The good news is you can now order your very own hoverbike for delivery in the first half of 2019; the bad news is it’ll cost you an estimated US$150,000.   The Hoverbike S3 is manufactured by Californian

We’re facing a deadly Catch 22. As the world grows hotter, people crank up the air con. As they crank the air con, the world grows hotter. And so on. And so on. If it seems like there’s no escape from this gloomy, no-win situation, take heart: a new technology developed by scientists from the

On Friday, Apple announced that two of its products – the iPhone X and the 13-inch MacBook Pro (non Touch Bar) – have known hardware issues. Bloomberg first reported on these issues after being posted on Apple’s support pages on Friday.   Apple said that on some iPhone X devices, display screens are experiencing touch issues. Those issues include:

One of the difficulties in developing quantum computers to their full potential – and there are quite a few – is cutting out interference. With technology as delicate as this, any kind of environmental noise or imperfection that affects the careful balance of a quantum computer could cause havoc with its calculations.   To overcome

According to a new study, the energy costs of mining Bitcoin alone could cause a 2-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures within 20 years. Bitcoin might be promising a brave new world of financial freedom, but it’s also responsible for a huge spike in electricity use, so the new study has attempted to put a number

This Halloween, the creepiest event to attend might be a mass online social experiment hosted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is famous for churning out some of the world’s top engineers, programmers, and scientists.   But the university’s Media Laboratory is increasingly known for launching experimental projects in October that are

When you’re high above the clouds at cruising altitude in a giant passenger jet, probably the last thing on your mind is the threat of a mid-air collision with a drone. But at take-off and landing, that danger isn’t so distant. Last year, a drone did in fact collide with an in-flight US Army Black

We’ve all been guilty of ripping our USB Drive out of our computers instead of ejecting them properly, only to receive the judgemental pop up telling us we really shouldn’t have done that. But when everything on the USB works fine next time you plug it in, you can’t help but wonder: does it actually

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is having trouble keeping track of its trash. For the second time in the past year, rocket debris from a SpaceX launch has washed up on shore in North Carolina.   The huge chunk of metal was discovered on an Outer Banks beach in the US state. The rocket component, which was

Facebook has said 30 million accounts were compromised in a major hack. That’s down from the 50 million accounts the social network first estimated, but it’s still not great news.   Though Facebook has taken steps to protect users in light of the attack, the company said hackers had access to millions of people’s personal

It’s the stuff of nightmares: a stuffed animal with a beating heart. After spotting viral posts on social media about users strapping fitness trackers to rolls of toilet paper, Chinese website Abacus tried it with a Xiaomi wristband.   The surprise result: The fitness tracker detected a heartbeat. The toilet paper’s “heart rate” ranged from

Leaked documentation reveals new Macs contain a hidden mechanism designed to make them inoperative if they are independently repaired, reports show. According to technical memos obtained by a number of outlets, any Mac with Apple’s new T2 chip conceals a security feature critics describe as a ‘kill switch’, which effectively bricks the devices if they

Google kept quiet for more than six months about its discovery of a bug that put at risk the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ users, the company said Monday, a delay that could spark a new round of regulatory and political scrutiny.   The decision to not immediately report the software bug

A new font can help lodge information deeper in your brain, researchers say, but it’s not magic – just the science of effort. Psychology and design researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne created a font called Sans Forgetica, which was designed to boost information retention for readers.   It’s based on a theory called “desirable

China secretly inserted surveillance microchips into servers used by major technology companies, including Apple and Amazon.com, in an audacious military operation likely to further inflame trade tensions between the United States and its leading source of electronics components and products, Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thursday morning.   The article – which the companies vigorously denied –

We tap away on our mobile devices all day long. Isn’t it about time they tapped us back? Human-computer interaction researcher Marc Teyssier clearly thinks so. He’s the brains behind MobiLimb, a horrifying finger-like robotic attachment for smartphones and tablets that somehow simultaneously evokes The Addams Family and Black Mirror.   Today, he published a

Facebook announced on Friday that its engineering team had discovered a security issue affecting almost 50 million accounts. Due to a flaw in Facebook’s code, hackers were able to take over an account and use it in the same way you would if you had logged into the account with a password.   The company

Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds.   It works through a combination

Life just got worse for the 50 million people caught up in what may be the biggest hack of Facebook ever. On Friday, the Silicon Valley tech firm revealed that it had detected a security breach in which an as-yet unknown attacker, or attackers, managed to gain access to tens of millions of users’ accounts by exploiting vulnerabilities

A hacker gained access to nearly 50 million Facebook user accounts by exploiting a weakness in the social network’s systems, Facebook said on Friday. News of the cyber attack – which appears to be one of the most significant in Facebook’s history – sent shares of the company down roughly 3 percent in midday trading on Friday,

Four years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels.   The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then. The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit

Everybody knows the world’s got a serious carbon dioxide problem, but an ingenious and potentially cost-effective way of dealing with our surplus CO2 could provide the means of tomorrow’s battery technology.   For years scientists have looked at ways of capturing carbon and storing it underground or even potentially in the ocean. But a new

Hydrogen fuel cells are a greener way to power vehicles. But they have also been cost-prohibitive. Now that’s starting to change – last week, German passengers boarded the world’s first hydrogen-powered trains.   “Sure, buying a hydrogen train is somewhat more expensive than a diesel train,” said Stefan Schrank, a project manager at locomotive company

Hello there, savvy iPhone shopper. Ready for an upgrade? There are a few things you should know before emptying your wallet at the Apple store. It’s an especially confusing moment: Apple will sell no fewer than eight iPhone models in 2018. But they haven’t all gone on sale yet — and there are reasons to hold

You might not be aware, but on 23 March 2016, the internet as we know it almost came crashing down. A huge amount of the software the Internet is built upon crashed when an angry programmer decided to unpublish all his code from a popular Javascript registry called npm.   That doesn’t sound like a

Apple just announced three new iPhones this week: the iPhone XS, the iPhone XS Max, and the iPhone XR. The iPhone XS and XS Max will be available to preorder starting Friday before going on sale a week later, on September 21. The iPhone XR won’t be available until October 26, with preorders opening up

A lot of military technology manages to be both awe-inspiring and vaguely terrifying, and so it is with the Molar Mic – this little microphone and speaker combination actually clips on to the wearer’s back teeth. It’s completely wireless and invisible to anyone else.   Despite its rather precarious position, the little device can pick

When You Wu was growing up in China, officials would shut off water to his community for half a day each week in the name of conservation. The experience contributed to Wu’s interest in water scarcity, which he chose to study more in-depth after moving to the United States 10 years ago.   The Massachusetts

It’s finally in the water. For five years now, The Ocean Cleanup, an organisation founded by 24-year-old Dutch innovator Boyan Slat, has been trying to create a system that can clean plastic out of the world’s oceans.   There’s a mind-boggling amount of plastic in the oceans, and that amount grows every day. At least

Life has been soaking up sunlight and storing it as a fuel source for billions of years. But scientists have just put a new twist on this ancient process that could finally provide us with the efficiency we need to compete with fossil fuels.   A study led by the University of Cambridge in the

Around 20 years ago, two computer scientists proposed a technique for teleporting a special quantum operation between two locations with the goal of making quantum computers more reliable.   Now a team of researchers from Yale University have successfully turned their idea into reality, demonstrating a practical approach to making this incredibly delicate form of

What does your neighbourhood look like? Are there gyms, parks, swimming pools? Or are you surrounded by busy roads, fast food outlets, and convenience stores? The answer looks increasingly important. Obesity is a complex health issue impacted by a range of factors, one of which is the physical, urban environment we live in. Now, scientists

A new form of misinformation is poised to spread through online communities as the 2018 midterm election campaigns heat up. Called “deepfakes” after the pseudonymous online account that popularized the technique – which may have chosen its name because the process uses a technical method called “deep learning” – these fake videos look very realistic.

As the Pentagon reorients toward great-power competition with adversaries like Russia and China, its preparations go beyond learning to ski and practicing to drive across Europe.   US military units rely on wireless networks and radio-frequency communications to talk on the battlefield, sharing intelligence, targeting data, and orders. But concern is growing that rivals like

If you’re watching a movie where an underwater submarine is communicating with an aeroplane, some creative licence is being taken – the sonar waves used by subs can’t reach the air, and radio waves used by planes don’t travel at all well underwater.   That’s always caused problems for communications between underwater and airborne vehicles,

You probably use Wi-Fi on the regular to connect your smartphone, computer, or other electronic device to the glory of the world wide web. But soon, that same technology could also keep you safe in real-life public areas.   According to a peer-reviewed study led by researchers from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, ordinary Wi-Fi can effectively and cheaply