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: [...]

The sheer number of reports indicating Apple plans to launch a mini version of its iPad would lead one to believe that a 7-inch (18-centimeter) Apple tablet is a foregone conclusion. It’s less clear, however, that the company has much to gain in taking on the likes of Samsung and Amazon head-on by shrinking the [...]

No matter how fancy mobile gadgets get, they’re useless when their batteries run out. With the push toward cloud computing and the always-on wireless culture gaining momentum every day, laptop, tablet and smart phone batteries are being asked to do more despite no real breakthroughs in battery technology hitting the market. Consider: Twitter users send [...]

Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), the cloud computing arm of online marketplace Amazon.com, on Friday explained what happened during last week’s service outage, which disrupted many of its customers’ Web sites. AWS, formed by Amazon in 2006 to capitalize on the cloud computing hype, ran into problems on April 21 with a network configuration change [...]

What do Tokyo commuter-rail designers and the slime mold Physarum polycephalum have in common? The two will build strikingly similar networks. A Japan-based research team found that if they placed bits of food (oat flakes) around a central Physarum in the same location as 36 outlying cities around Tokyo, the mold created a network connecting [...]

Okay, so we all had a swell time: the floor starts jiggling like a jello-mold, and those of us who didn’t run outside ran to Twitter, and it was on. Within seconds we were linking to the USGS site, the sites for the impenetrable Richter Scale and the simple, purely descriptive Modified Mercalli Scale (“III. Vibrations similar [...]