Computing

A documentary that helps us glimpse one of modernity's unlikeliest and most enticing of possible ends: the open-source cracking-open of industrial society.

According to sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's how I feel about American pizza delivery. It's all about an obsession with convenience bordering on the quantum, and it's what makes America the best country in the world.

Cupertino opens up the north forty for farming as app-culture's Green Revolution continues apace.

This brilliant hack of a 1980s-vintage Brother knitting machine looks almost as complicated as knitting itself.

An international group of scientists proposes a "knowledge collider" to bring supercomputing to bear on social problems. While crunching the numbers won't be a problem, figuring out what they mean will prove more challenging.

The Norwegian firm Elliptic Labs’ booth at CES next week will feature several implementations of a touchless, gesture-based interface for tablets and mobile devices, according to the company. Unlike the Kinect, Elliptic’s interface, called Ultrasonic Touchless Input, graphs hand movements using echolocation. Bathing the user in a silent ultrasonic torrent, it measures the return time of rebounding sonic impulses to ...

After fifteen years I've finally found the perfect writer's machine in the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air. It fuses together both the best software and hardware of which a writer could ever dream, while boasting all of the slender and effortless portability of a composition journal. It is a writer's terminal in the purest sense: with its excellent battery life, ephemeral weight, satisfying keyboard and instant-on capabilities, the new MacBook Air is perfectly suited to be the nexus into the inner chaos of my own thoughts, feelings, hang-ups, pretensions and emotions as a blank page. So why isn't writing any easier?

Engineering beneficial computer viruses to protect wireless devices, researchers learn to treat time as a network.

A business-machine brand and icon of twentieth-century design jumps into the tablet race.

By studying the search algorithms of ants, researchers are discovering ways of making computer networks faster and smarter.