Wave of the Future: Manage Your Smart Home with a Single Gesture
Our homes will get a lot smarter in the coming years, allowing us to use a smartphone to manage an integrated system of appliances and other electronics from any room—a …
Read more »
Move Over, Siri The Next Generation of Virtual Assistants Is Almost Here
Virtual voice-controlled assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Google Now are magical. You can say things such as “Will I need an umbrella in Dallas this weekend?” or “What flights …
Read more »
Tricorder XPRIZE Competition Heats Up
On the classic TV series Star Trek, Dr. McCoy made his job look easy. Diagnosing a patient was a simple matter of whipping out a device called a tricorder and …
Read more »
Why We’re All Beta Testers Now
I taught a class a few years ago at Columbia Business School called “What Makes a Hit a Hit—and a Flop a Flop.” As a grizzled 25-year veteran of tech …
Read more »
Starbucks to Offer Wireless Caffeine for Smartphones
“Wireless” will come to signify much more than the untethering of handsets from phone and Ethernet cables in the near future. Wireless charging spots for mobile gadgets are popping up …
Read more »
How to Disappear from the Web
If you’ve ever been the victim of identity theft, or a stalker, or you just value your privacy, Tech Talker has the tools to help you ditch the digital age …
Read more »
20 Vintage Gadgets from Scientific American Readers [Slide Show]
Those who responded to our call for images of obscure, obsolete devices did not disappoint. Here are our favorites Advertisement
Read more »
Fowl Language: AI Decodes the Nuances of Chicken “Speech”
Chickens are loquacious creatures, and Kevin Mitchell would know. He oversees the care of about a million of them on Wilcox Farms properties in Washington State and Oregon. Mitchell says …
Read more »
How a Sensor-Filled World Will Change Human Consciousness
Here’s a fun experiment: Try counting the electronic sensors surrounding you right now. There are cameras and microphones in your computer. GPS sensors and gyroscopes in your smartphone. Accelerometers in …
Read more »
Computing after Moore’s Law
Fifty years ago this month Gordon Moore published a historic paper with an amusingly casual title: “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” The document was Moore’s first articulation of a …
Read more »