Four years ago the Obama administration offered up $19 billion in stimulus funds to help get health care IT (including electronic health records, or EHRs) in the pink—or at least in the black. Better information technology throughout the health care system would save money, improve care and bring the health care industry into the 21st [...]

With excitement building about an announcement due tomorrow from scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider, today’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting talks kicked off with the Higgs, explored some mysterious anomalies with neutrinos and looked forward to some practical applications of spintronics coming soon in information and communication technologies. (You can read all our coverage [...]

What was Alan Turing’s greatest contribution? Here was a man who invented the idea of the modern computer, a man upon whose insights the information technology revolution firmly rests. He was the first to understand that instructions are themselves data, making algorithms capable of the recursive thinking that makes humans unique. (I think that I [...]

Do the laws of physics emerge from the laws of information? Perhaps, according to two World Science Festival events I attended this weekend on the connection between computers and the cosmos. The first examined the insight that all the information about a three-dimensional world can be encoded onto a two-dimensional surface. Taking this notion to [...]

ScientificAmerican.com just ran an article on smartglasses. Not just the famous Google Glass, but a whole crop of smartglasses that are supposedly going to change everything: Big things afoot for the face in Tech Land. I dunno, this technology just doesn’t make sense to me. I could be wrong, along the lines of DEC chief [...]

Christof Koch, a columnist for Scientific American MIND, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and the chief scientific officer for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has the best characterization that I’ve ever seen of futurist Ray Kurzweil’s speculations about the imminent merger of mind with machine and the domination of cyborgs. This [...]