A talent search preceding this year’s TED conference turned up enough startlingly smart prodigies to lend an American Idol feel to the event. There was the 15-year-old who invented a better test for pancreatic cancer, the 18-year-old who presented his second nuclear reactor design, and the 13-year-old  who strung flickering light-emitting diodes around his family’s [...]

Losing weight and keeping it off is a common goal—and constant challenge—for millions of Americans. And people spend loads of cash on specialized diet and weight loss programs, meetings, even personal coaches. But could something as easy, accessible and affordable as an online program help people trim down? With the rising rates of people who [...]

Condom use, earlier treatment and increased education have gone a long way to reducing HIV spread in the U.S. Nonetheless, some 4,000 inhabitants of New York City still became infected with HIV in 2009. Injection drug users make up a small portion of the new infections (just over 4 percent in NYC, and about 9 percent [...]

DURBAN, South Africa—I rented a cellphone during my sojourn here to cover the recent climate change negotiations. A local number enabled me to keep in touch with home and office but also, perhaps more importantly, to make appointments on the fly with ever harried international negotiators. The Nokia 2330—which was dubbed, affectionately, my “hellphone” by [...]

Speculation abounds that Apple will introduce its much-anticipated iPad 2.0 at a Wednesday meeting at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Any new tablet computer Apple might unveil will enter the market with much more serious competition that its predecessor. As it did a decade ago when its iPod took the digital music [...]

The answer is: For its next assignment, this Jeopardy! champion will have to work on its bedside manner. If you replied, "What is Watson?" give yourself a round of applause. With last night’s big game show victory under its belt, IBM has its sights set on applying the high-performance computer’s advanced analytics capabilities to the [...]

As hospitals struggle to integrate electronic medical records, some have already instituted electronic drug ordering systems to help reduce prescription errors. But not all so-called computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems are specially tuned to different patient populations. And while some can catch potentially dangerous drug-drug interactions for individuals, only one has been alerting providers [...]

One laptop per child seems a simple slogan, chock full of benefit. What could go wrong when you put the power of the Internet and solar cells into the hands of children in the developing world? After all, not only does it train the global underclass in the tools of modern production, it also unleashes [...]

Octopuses are purportedly  colorblind, but they can discern one thing that we can’t: polarized light. This extra visual realm might give them a leg (er, arm) up on some of the competition. And a team of researchers has created a new way to test just how sensitive cephalopods are to this type of light. Their [...]

This is the second installment of a 2-part guest post by Jim Perkins, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s medical illustration program. His first post detailed why it’s a good idea to calibrate your computer monitor regularly. This next post walks us through the process and explains the mysterious settings known as gamma [...]

This is a guest post by Jim Perkins, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s medical illustration program. I met Jim through the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, but before I met him in person, I was a big fan of his posts to the GNSI’s email discussion list. (For those of you not [...]