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Fresh out of Stanford Business School, I started a software company, T/Maker, with my brother Peter. He was the software architect and I was, well, everything else. Our little company was among the first to ship software for the Macintosh, and we developed a positive reputation among the members of the nascent developer community, which led us to expanding our business by publishing software for other independent developers. Two of our developers, Randy Adams and William Parkhurst, went to work for Steve Jobs at his new company, NeXT, and that’s how I ended up head to head with Steve Jobs....

Sometime in the future, technicians will go over the scene of the crime. They’ll uncover some DNA evidence and take it to the lab. And when the cops need to get a picture of the suspect, they won’t have to ask eyewitnesses to give descriptions to a sketch artist – they’ll just ask the technicians to get a mugshot from the DNA. That, at least, is the potential of new research being published today in PLOS Genetics. In that paper, a team of scientists describe how they were able to produce crude 3D models of faces extrapolated from a person’s...

A MURDER has been committed, and all the cops have to go on is a trace of DNA left at the scene. It doesn't match any profile in databases of known criminals, and the trail goes cold. But what if the police could issue a wanted poster based on a realistic "photofit" likeness built from that DNA? Not if, but when, claim researchers who have developed a method for determining how our genes influence facial shape. One day, the technique may even allow us to gaze into the faces of extinct human-like species that interbred with our own ancestors. It's...

One of the co-founders of the Occupy Wall Street movement has called on Barack Obama to resign as president, and “appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America”.

<p>An experimental scramjet-powered, ultrahigh speed strike vehicle is emerging as the Pentagon’s main choice for a new long-range, rapid attack weapon, a senior Pentagon official says.</p> <p>Alan R. Shaffer, principal deputy assistant defense secretary for research and engineering, told a defense industry conference that prototypes and recent tests proved concepts for hypersonic arms, and several systems are part of a high-priority effort by Pentagon weapons developers, despite the era of sharply-diminished defense spending.</p>

Bent over their computers in a World War II-era bunker beneath London’s streets, dozens of young techies have spent Friday racing to understand why Britain’s banking network suddenly seems to have gone offline. The exercise—it is just an exercise—comes complete with sirens and mock newscasts. It’s meant to recruit the next generation of tech talent, and is also meant to help highlight the threat many here see as inevitable: A major cyberattack on the nation’s critical infrastructure. …

The latest report from the top-secret documents that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made off with describes the agency's efforts to infect and monitor PCs much in the way ordinary hackers do. The methods aren't particularly original, but the scale of the operations is huge. Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald reported on the revelations in great detail, but the takeaway is fairly straightforward. The NSA is employing hacking tools that will sound familiar to anyone in the security field: browser exploits, man-in-the-middle attacks and plain old spam....

Interesting discussions and photos of varying rock types encountered on Mars to date.

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The California Department of Motor Vehicles began Tuesday to puzzle through the complex question of how to regulate cars that rely on computers—not people—to drive them. Once the stuff of science fiction, “driverless cars” could be commercially available by decade’s end. Google already has sent its fleet of Priuses and Lexuses, fitted with an array of sensors, hundreds of thousands of miles in California, and major automakers are testing their own models. …

Rechargeable, energy-dense bio-batteries running on sugar might be powering our electronic gadgets in as little as three years, according to a US team of scientists. The battery, created by the group of Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, can convert all the potential chemical energy stored in a sugar into electricity.The prototype is similar in size to a typical AA battery and has an energy storage density of 596 amp hours per kilogram – roughly one order of magnitude greater than a smartphone’s lithium-ion battery. This means that the battery could last at least...

Too Funny!

The 3-D printing technology is evolving so fast that 4-D printing, i.e. the combination of high resolution 3D printers with smart materials that change their shape in response to outside stimuli, is already there. The rising importance and complexity of materials suggests in our view that 3D Systems' (DDD) input costs will rise in the future, putting some pressure on the margins of its key consumables business. We reiterate our view that consensus margin expectations are way too high on 3D Systems and that the stock is a Sell. For those willing to invest in the 3-D printing sector in...

So far the story of Tesla Motors has been about exciting electric luxury cars and an even higher performing stock. Next week it will reveal plans for a much less sexy innovation that is more important to the company's future than either of those things: A huge new lithium battery factory dubbed the "Gigafactory" by Tesla founder Elon Musk. The plant is the key Tesla needs in order to produce an "affordable" long-range electric car in substantial enough numbers to join the ranks of the major automakers. "It's the future of the company," said Craig Irwin, analyst with Wedbush Securities....

Richard Branson has reiterated his plan to fly with his children on the inaugural flight of his long-planned commercial space operation, Virgin Galactic, despite the relatively untested nature of the technology and a departure date which has slipped repeatedly. "Everybody who signs up knows this is the birth of a new space programme and understands the risks that go with that," Branson said in an interview for Weekend magazine at Virgin Galactic's base in the Mojave desert north of Los Angeles. "But every person wants to go on the first flight." While insisting his plan is credible and the first...

f all goes according to plan, North Koreans will soon have free, uncensored Internet provided by satellites the size of toaster ovens. That's part of a project called Outernet, which hopes to launch hundreds of tiny satellites—known as CubeSats—to provide Internet to every person on Earth. Forty percent of the world's people currently don't have access to the Web. In a little more than a year, Outernet plans to have a fleet of 24 satellites operational and testing to pave the way for a globe-spanning network.

Want this article to load more quickly? Read it in space. Hong Kong has the world's fastest Internet. Internet on the moon is 10 times faster. How do our lunar-exploring spaceships get buffer-free video? Lasers. NASA and MIT are shooting "lasers full of Internet" to a ship named LADEE that's exploring the moon's atmosphere. According to NASA, speeds have reached 622 megabits per second (Hong Kong tops out at 63.6). Right now, the agency is using a pulsed laser beam to transmit a pair of HD video signals to and from the moon. The 239,000 miles between the New Mexico...

Dr. Eddie DewaldA millimeter-sized fuel capsule inside its target can, or hohlraum. As it approaches its fifth birthday, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a troubled laser fusion facility in California, has finally produced some results that fusion scientists can get enthusiastic about. In a series of experiments late last year, NIF researchers managed to produce energy yields 10 times greater than produced before and to demonstrate the phenomenon of self-heating that will be crucial if fusion is to reach its ultimate goal of “ignition”—a self-sustaining burning reaction that produces more energy than it consumes.“This is a very significant achievement, and...

“[The company D-Wave] makes a new type of computer called a quantum computer that’s so radical and strange, people are still trying to figure out what it’s for and how to use it…. The supercooled niobium chip at the heart of the D-Wave Two has 512 qubits and therefore could in theory perform 2^512 operations simultaneously. That’s more calculations than there are atoms in the universe, by many orders of magnitude…. Naturally, a lot of people want one. This is the age of Big Data, and we’re burying ourselves in ­­information—search queries, genomes, credit-card purchases, phone records, retail transactions, social...

Monday, January 27, 2007: In order to give a boost to the NASA's new Lunar Cargo Transportation and Landing by Soft Touchdown CATALYST program, the space agency conducted a teleconference in Washington DC, USA. The purpose of a conference of this format was to create more opportunities to trigger commercial cargo transportation capabilities to the moon.