Computing, features and articles | Educational Science

Oct 2, 2016

Why Did Yahoo Take So Long to Disclose Security Breach?

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. In late September, Yahoo announced that at least 500 million user accounts had been compromised. The data stolen included users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and...

Oct 20, 2016

Are You Ready for a Computer That Reads Your Mind?

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The first computers cost millions of dollars and were locked inside rooms equipped with special electrical circuits and air conditioning. The only people who could use them had been...

Dec 16, 2016

IBM's Watson Turns Its Computer Brain to NASA Research

IBM's question-answering whiz, the Watson computer system, famously beat former winners on Jeopardy in 2011 — and now it's digging into aerospace research and data to help NASA answer questions on the frontier of spaceflight science and make crucial decisions in the moment during air travel. More than 60 years...

Mar 15, 2017

Mind-Controlled Cats?! 6 Incredible Spy Technologies That Are Real

Bond, James Bond (Image credit: Stokkete/Shutterstock)Killer umbrellas, stick-on fingerprints and lock-picking cellphones — James Bond and his nemeses certainly used their share of bizarre spy gadgets over the years. But many of the most far-out devices seen in old movies have been made obsolete by incredible leaps in today's consumer...

Mar 21, 2017

Vintage Apple-1 Computer Could Fetch $300,000 at Auction

Nostalgic for the days when Apple was just a computer startup and not the Silicon Valley giant it is today? If so, you could own a piece of the tech company's history when one of the original Apple-1 computers goes up for auction. The device, which will go on sale...

Mar 23, 2017

King George's Letters Betray Madness, Computer Finds

Hundreds of letters written by King George III, the so-called Mad King, support the modern diagnosis that he suffered from mental illness during his later years, a new study found. Using computer analysis, researchers investigated letters written by George during his 60-year reign over Great Britain and Ireland, from 1760...

Apr 26, 2017

High-Tech Crime Steals the Show in 'Outlaw Tech'

The Wild West of the American frontier was well-known as a lawless place; with small outposts and homesteads separated by acres of rolling prairie, outlaw behavior was difficult for law enforcers to track and prevent. And in recent decades, the lawlessness of that historic period emerged in a new frontier,...

May 1, 2017

New 2D Materials Could Conduct Electricity Near the Speed of Light

A novel material called CGT could be used to manufacture super-fast computer memory storage devices with the thickness of a single atom, according to Jing Xia of the University of California, Irvine. Super-thin memory storage is just one of the potential applications arising from a series of three papers published...

Jun 2, 2017

Save $51 on This All-Inclusive Raspberry Pi Starter Kit [Deal]

The Raspberry Pi 3 is a versatile, credit card-sized PC that can be used as the foundation for a variety of projects, from a retro 16-bit gaming console to a media streaming PC for your living room. For the DIY crowd, NeeGo offers its Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit...

Jul 14, 2017

Computerized Fabric Could Transform Any Piece of Clothing Into a Fitness Tracker

Counting your steps used to be an activity restricted to OCD sufferers, but with the advent of smart phones and fitness trackers, it's easy to keep track of precisely how many strides you take in a week, or a day, or an hour. New technology out of Harvard promises to...

Jul 19, 2017

New 3D Computer Chip Uses Nanotech to Boost Processing Power

A new type of 3D computer chip that combines two cutting-edge nanotechnologies could dramatically increase the speed and energy efficiency of processors, a new study said. Today's chips separate memory (which stores data) and logic circuits (which process data), and data is shuttled back and forth between these two components...

Jul 24, 2017

Old NASA Computers, Tapes Found in Dead Man's Basement

Two huge, Apollo-era NASA computers and more than 300 data-recording tapes were found in the Pittsburgh basement of a dead engineer in late 2015, according to media reports. In November 2015, a scrap dealer was invited to clean out the basement of the recently deceased IBM engineer, who did some...

Sep 19, 2017

Brain-Computer Interface Allows Users to Compose Music With Only Their Thoughts

Imagine being locked in with a neurodegenerative disease like late-stage ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) or being completely paralyzed by a traumatic spinal cord injury. You could still think and dream and feel emotions, but you wouldn't be able to express them. For decades, researchers have been experimenting with brain-computer interfaces,...

Oct 19, 2017

Say What? Computer Game Improves Hearing in Noisy Situations

Want to follow conversations better in a noisy restaurant or bar? There soon may be an app for that. Researchers in Boston have developed a computer game that trains the brain to better understand words in noisy situations. After playing the game a few hours per week for two months,...

Nov 17, 2017

6 Tips for Buying a Laptop

Whether you're writing a term paper, teaching a class, organizing a research project or just surfing the web, you need the right laptop to suit your needs and budget. At first glance, the laptop shopping process may seem confusing. There are hundreds of different models available in several sizes, with...