From media and communications to banking, an increasing number of our daily activities is performed online. While this transformation has raised the curtain on exciting new frontiers, it also opens doors to security threats undreamed of by previous generations. In Scientific American’s newest eBook, Cyber Hacking: Wars in Virtual Space, we peer behind the scenes [...]

Dear Jesse, I have a pretty serious porn/Internet addiction. Yeah, yeah, every other guy says they’re addicted, but for me it has impeded school, sleep, eating, and socializing. I’ve failed classes because of it and lost friends. Last semester, I probably spent more time online than I did sleeping. Often, I would go multiple days [...]

I don’t believe in God—at least, not any version I’ve encountered so far—but I do believe in free will. Free will, which I define as our capacity to recognize and act on choices, is what makes life meaningful. I can’t be sure that free will exists, so my belief is, I suppose, a faith. And [...]

Last week, I spent a pleasant hour over lunch talking to my 60-year-old aunt and her 80-something husband about "this Twitter thing" and how one defines a blog. They had heard that social media had played a role in the protests in Egypt and wanted to learn more. Good students, they nodded and asked questions [...]

A speculative but intriguing discussion that sometimes crops up when talking to people engaged in exoplanetary science goes like this; let’s suppose that we find an unmistakably terrestrial style planet around a relatively nearby star (less than about 30 light years away), perhaps even around one of the Alpha Centauri members, a touch over four [...]

Apple introduces the latest “i”-gadget; Samsung takes the reins as the world’s leading smartphone provider; Blackberry mounts an all-or-nothing comeback. Just a typical day of tech headlines, right? Dig deeper, however, and you have to wonder what impact all of these new multimedia devices will have on the networks that give them life. Short answer: [...]

In March 2010, police in South Korea arrested a husband and wife in a tragically ironic case that gained international notoriety—the couple let their three-month-old daughter, Sarang, starve to death in their apartment while they spent up to 12 hours a day nurturing a virtual daughter as part of 3-D fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing [...]

The cyber attacks against several South Korean television stations, banks and insurance firms on Wednesday may not have been crippling or widespread, but their timing further fuels concerns over who is launching such attacks, what constitutes “cyber warfare” and how should countries react to such online aggression. The malicious software—or malware—used in the attack interferes [...]

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 [...]

LAS VEGAS—The emergence of mobile devices and the apps that make them tick has opened opportunities for entrepreneurs not seen since the height of the Internet bubble nearly 15 years ago. A panel discussion here on Tuesday at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) spotlighted four startups—i.am+, Bump Technologies, ZocDoc and Rockmelt—banking on the [...]

LAS VEGAS—In a sign of how wireless technologies have moved to the fore in consumer electronics, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs kicked off the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here Monday night with a keynote spotlighting the impact of superfast processors on mobile apps, gaming and even ultra high-definition television (Ultra HDTV). Smart phones, tablets and [...]

In a sign of just how important content and mobility have become to gadget lovers, network providers and device makers will take center stage at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week in Las Vegas. For the first time since 1997 Microsoft won’t deliver a keynote touting its latest version of Windows. Chipmaker [...]

Last week, I and some 200 other attendees of the Global Trends 2030: U.S. Leadership in a Post-Western World conference got a thought-provoking look at the current “megatrends” leading to four possible futures for the world some 10 to 15 years from now. Cutting across all of them is the disruptive influence of emerging technologies—which [...]

Storm-ravaged New Jersey could set off a tempest of its own on Election Day if the state lets constituents vote via e-mail and fax, cautioned a group of legal, technology and election experts during a press conference on Monday. These experts are challenging N.J. Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno’s executive order issued late last week that [...]

With a little instruction and education, hundreds if not thousands of volunteers armed with smart phones, computers and Internet access can act as the eyes, ears and hands of scientists worldwide. That idea is the hallmark of the growing citizen-science movement, which is already recruiting Facebook users to virtually “infect” their friends with a simulated [...]

As you’ve no doubt read, Apple CEO Steve Jobs is stepping down from the company he co-founded three decades ago. Tim Cook will take over the reigns for the long-term, and has served as COO since 200. For those who don’t follow Apple nerdery obsessively like I do, This Is My Next has a profile [...]

If you like to surf porn on the Internet, you’ve got company. In a 2008 survey of college students, 90 percent of males and 60 percent of females had been there, done that. The practice is only half as common among people in their 40s, but still hardly rare, and the habits of youth are [...]

So I’m putting together this post on great evolution cartoons that focus on the water-to-land transition and I remember this Gary Larson cartoon from the Far Side that depicts three fish in the water staring longingly at their baseball lying on the shore, a few feet from the water’s edge. The caption reads, “Great moments [...]

Pinterest is surely a rising star. For those of you not in the know, it’s the online equivalent of a bulletin board – a slicker, cleaner way to put together collages of your favorite styles, photographs, design ideas, or dino art. But lately, Pinterest’s terms of service have been garnering a lot of criticism for [...]