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Scientists may have just created the most water-resistant artificial material in the world. Many of those who study hydrophobic materials -- water-repellant surfaces in both nature and laboratories -- had found themselves at an impasse with a theoretical limit on the amount of time it takes for wate...
China's massively popular WeChat messaging app has exposed school students to prostitutes through its "People Nearby" feature, which is sometimes used by prostitutes as a form of, shall we say, mobile advertising. A survey among students, conducted in a handful of major Chinese cities, found that th...
Google Earth sometimes makes mistakes: Freeways look like they are upside down or waterfalls flow sideways. For engineers or programmers, these might seem like things to fix. For artists like Clement Valla, however, they're artistic opportunities. Valla's project Postcards from Google Earth, for ins...
NASA's MAVEN mission is under way following Monday's successful launch from Cape Canaveral of a spacecraft that will explore Mars' upper atmosphere and seek answers to questions about the planet's evolution. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, craft is scheduled to travel for 10 mo...
A developing technology using an ultra-thin layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure could start revolutionizing consumer electronics and many other industries in less than five years. Known as "graphene," the material's special strength and conductivity make it an ideal component of ...
The U.S. government once again heads the list of those requesting data from Google, and lately it's been asking for a lot more. Google's Transparency Report, a twice-a-year reminder of how often governments ask for information, says that the U.S. submitted 10,918 requests for 21,683 user accounts du...
IBM plans to open up its Watson cognitive platform, allowing developers to access it in the cloud starting next year. The technology is based on its Watson supercomputer. Participants will build apps incorporating Watson's cognitive computing intelligence. A cognitive computing system is "capable of...
There's a campaign afoot to put a 3D printer in every school in America. MakerBot -- along with education crowdsourcer DonorsChoose.org, America Makes and Autodesk -- on Tuesday announced MakerBot Academy. Individuals and businesses can contribute money to the initiative through DonorsChoose.org. Th...
The European Space Agency has predicted that when its fuel-less, Earth-bound, 2,000-pound research satellite crashes, it will likely crash into the ocean or polar regions. The satellite was expected to crash down some time on Sunday or Monday, according to the agency, which added, "with a very high ...
Few if any countries have been more outspoken, incredulous and chest-thumping over U.S. spying revelations than Brazil. Last summer, after Edward Snowden's leaks had made the rounds, Brazilian lawmakers proposed a law that would require e-businesses to store data in Brazil -- and only Brazil. Then, ...
Around a fifth of the Sun-like stars in the Milky Way are orbited by Earth-sized planets capable of sustaining life, suggests a study of data obtained by NASA's Kepler spacecraft and the W. M. Keck Observatory. Those planets -- between Earth-sized and twice as large -- are orbiting their stars in th...
We've looked at personal tracking products before, including stolen-phone locators and a breadcrumb-tracking, mugging-alarm combo for Google's Android mobile operating system. Where some of these kinds of products have disappointed is that they have needed daily user intervention to make them functi...
Finger-pointing has erupted among contractors responsible for the Obama administration's troubled Healthcare.gov website. CGI Federal, the lead contractor for the project, blamed another contractor, as well as the U.S. federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which it said directed and ...
Jeroen de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Twente, has developed a prototype storage system that might last for up to 1 million years. This might be needed if the planet were devastated by a natural disaster, or as a reference for future intelligent life on Earth -- or for visiting alie...
Facebook has reversed a ban that it implemented earlier this year forbidding the posting of graphic and gruesome content such as videos of decapitations and other atrocities. The social media company apparently made this about-face some time ago, but it only became widely noticed when the BBC report...