A company founded by an ex-CIA operative says it has created software that could predict the future. Predata ‘scrapes’ data from sites like Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube and compares chatter to past patterns. It can then provide predictions of political unrest and terror attacks, according to founder James Shinn. The team said their system spotted a “clear spike” in the Read More

Metal foam tough enough to turn an armour-piercing bullet into dust could be used to create the next generation of body and vehicle protection. A team at North Carolina State University discovered that an inch-thick layer of composite metal foams (CMFs) can stop a bullet. The indentation on the back of the foam is just 8mm – significantly less than Read More

Last week my husband accused me — nicely, in the way that spouses do — of having gone on a little shopping spree in Torrance, California, at a retailer called Smart & Final. My defense: I’ve never been in a Smart & Final, and we live in North Carolina, more than 2,500 miles away from Torrance. I denied the accusation Read More

Moving is stressful. Really stressful. Actually, it’s a nightmare. I recently survived the move from Washington to San Francisco with the help of technology. Here are the apps and services that I found to help get me across the country and make my new city feel like home. Don’t have time to pack it? Get your stuff shipped with Shyp. Simply open the Read More

How’s this for a flight plan to get a drone delivery service financially aloft? Carry cargo that’s of live-saving importance, fly long-range fixed-wing aircraft in uncongested skies, and score a government as your first client. That’s the atypical approach being taken by Zipline, a Bay Area startup that has raised $18 million in funding from the likes of Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Microsoft co-founder Paul Read More

South Korean grandmaster Lee Se-Dol plays against AlphaGo during the Google DeepMind Challenge Match in Seoul on March 9, 2016 A Google-developed supercomputer stunned South Korean Go grandmaster Lee Se-Dol by taking the first game of a five-match showdown between man and machine in Seoul on Wednesday. After about 3-1/2 hours of play, Lee, one of the greatest players of Read More

As the world grapples with climate change, we urgently need to find ways of reducing our CO₂ emissions. Sectors which rely heavily on fossil fuels, such as energy and aviation, are commonly held to be the worst offenders. But what most people don’t realise is that there’s another culprit, hiding in plain sight; on the streets of our cities, and Read More

There are few things more frustrating than a slow-loading web page. For companies, what’s even worse is what comes after: users abandoning their site in droves. Amazon, for example, estimates that every 100-millisecond delay cuts its profits by 1 percent. To help combat this problem, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University have developed Read More

Damaging cyberattacks on a global scale continue to surface every day. Some nations are better prepared than others to deal with online threats from criminals, terrorists and rogue nations. Data-mining experts from the University of Maryland and Virginia Tech recently co-authored a book that ranked the vulnerability of 44 nations to cyberattacks. Lead author V.S. Subrahmanian discussed this research on Read More

The watches are making exams a ‘nightmare to administer’, according to one deputy head Smartwatches that allow pupils and students to cheat in exams are being openly sold on Amazon. An advert for one such watch, which has 4GB of memory, was offered on the website for £44.95. “This watch is specifically designed for cheating in exams with a special Read More