If you need to buy a lawn rake, you won't find it at Amazon.com. Not anymore. The online store realized a couple of years ago that large, low-cost items are not worth the effort. "Big and...

When the state of U.S. science and technology came under attack last year, the National Nanotechnology Initiative stood out as a program that forged ahead in tight fiscal circumstances and a declining...

"Automobiles are a useless nuisance." Who would say such a thing? The entire American century, its economy, freedom of mobility, military might--all of which are the envy or fear or both of...

"Not enough silicon" is an odd complaint to hear from solar-panel manufacturers, given the abundance of that element in a familiar granular substance called sand. But there you have it....

When you log on in the morning, you expect Philoneist to pop up with the same speed and ease as any other content-provider on the Web. Legislation in the U.S. Senate threatens to tinker with the...

No, it's not Dr. Evil and his quotation-mark fingers, but an advance in computer processing by Intel and UC Santa Barbara that may promise to create a step-change in computing speeds. According to...

How many times have you asked yourself, "When will they invent a pharmaceutical to treat people who suffer from not gambling?" Fret no longer. Researchers at Glasgow's Southern General...

According to Keitai Watch and RFID in Japan, NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile operator, is testing an application to enable RFID-ready mobile handsets to read tags in the retail environment...

The steady stream (no pun intended) of research on global warming the last two weeks is distracting this trend-watcher. Yesterday, Nasa scientists revealed that, in the last two years, Arctic sea ice...

Philoneist checked his Hotmail account yesterday, used only for occasional commercial transactions and professional subscriptions, and found 1100 new messages. Shouldn't it be easier to catch a...

Shooting people with armor-piercing bullets isn't very nice, for a number of reasons. For one, chemists went to all that trouble of creating fibers for bullet-resistant vests, and sharp-tipped...

Technology of the highest order has guided winemakers seeking the perfect bottle (or early on, the perfect clay jug) for more than 7,000 years: Their taste buds. Michael Cleary, senior manager of...

British shadow chancellor George Osborne has called for the UK to invest in maglev train technology, a mode of rail transport that, as the name implies, uses magnets to levitate and pull trains at...

Bill Gates and other ambassadors of the Silicon West travel increasingly to Washington, D.C., to persuade legislators the United States needs to allow more high-skilled temporary workers into the...

Computer batteries deserve the scorn we show them every day. So it is easy to forget that they are the best way to store energy that anyone has mass-produced. It's stunning really. Every...

NASA postponed the launch of the Atlantis Space Shuttle, scheduled for this morning, after engineers discovered a malfunctioning fuel cell. "Proton-Exchange Membrane" fuel cells have powered...

Today's atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels are higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years, about twice the previously confirmed time frame. Eric Wolff, of the British Antarctic Survey, led a...