Technology, features and articles | Educational Science

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...

Jun 14, 2018

This Supercomputer Can Calculate in 1 Second What Would Take You 6 Billion Years

It's shiny, fast and ultrapowerful. But it's not the latest Alfa Romeo. A physics laboratory in Tennessee just unveiled Summit, likely to be named the world's speediest and smartest supercomputer. Perhaps most exciting for the U.S.? It's faster than China's. The supercomputer — which fills a server room the size...

Oct 16, 2018

Defense Department Password Is Cracked in 9 Seconds. So How Safe Are US Weapons?

The weapons systems being developed by the U.S. Department of Defense are vulnerable to cyberattacks, meaning some evildoer with hacking skills could potentially take control of such weapons without being noticed, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), released Oct. 9. And the DOD seemed...

Nov 4, 2018

What Was the World's 1st Cyberattack?

Back in November 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, son of the famous cryptographer Robert Morris Sr., was a 20-something graduate student at Cornell who wanted to know how big the internet was – that is, how many devices were connected to it. So he wrote a program that would travel from...

Mar 26, 2019

Supercomputers Solve a Mystery Hidden Inside Merging Water Droplets

A team of British physicists and mathematicians used a supercomputer to uncover the hidden truth of how water droplets merge and stick together. If you've ever watched water droplets touch and merge, you might have imagined two little balls of water getting closer and closer together, until their surfaces overlapped...

May 13, 2019

New Supercomputer Will Span Continents, Outrace World's Fastest

The fastest supercomputer in the world will soon be outpaced by a newer, swifter rival. Scientists recently completed the engineering design for the first of two paired supercomputers called the Science Data Processor (SDP). Together, these supercomputers will manage vast quantities of data collected by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA),...

Mar 26, 2021

DARPA takes step toward 'holy grail of encryption'

The U.S. defense department is searching for what could be considered the holy grail of data encryption, which would seal up a loophole that allows hackers to access sensitive information while it's being processed. In modern encryption, a well-defined set of calculations, known as an algorithm, scrambles data so that...