I bought a Nook Simple Touch a couple weeks ago, just in time for a vacation reading binge. I can’t improve much on John Abell’s review for Wired, The Nook Nails It, as I agree with everything he says there. This is the best reading machine I’ve come across so far: It’s light, easy to […]

For Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, the clock is not just the ultimate prestige timepiece. It’s a symbol of the power of long-term thinking. His hope is that building it will change the way humanity thinks about time, encouraging our distant descendants to take a longer view than we have.

When the final space shuttle mission launches later this year, two iPhone 4s will be on board. The iPhones will be running an experimental app called SpaceLab for iOS, designed by Odyssey Space Research. Once the space shuttle Atlantis docks with the International Space Station, crew members will us

When you have a bunch of smart people with a broad enough charter, you will always get something good out of it. It’s one of the best investments you could possibly make—but only if you chose to value it in terms of successes. If you chose to evaluate it in terms of how many times […]

1945: Arthur C. Clarke begins privately circulating copies of a paper that proposes using space satellites for global communications. It was a bold suggestion for 1945, as the war was just winding down and most people were undoubtedly more concerned about the necessities of life than they were with

Decades after its birth, the laser is still irresistibly cool. How many other fifty-somethings can you say that about? Even though lasers are as common as dirt now, appearing in everything from DVD players to supermarket scanners to computer mice, there’s still a certain appeal to a beam of coherent

SEATTLE — Rusty Oliver sets things on fire. During our visit to his workspace, the aptly-named Hazardfactory, he demonstrated how two long propane-filled tubes can act as a kind of fiery audio EQ meter. He created a fierce ball of flame in the middle of a hoop-shaped sculpture he calls “The Singular

SAN FRANCISCO — Trust us. We’re not going to screw up Skype. That was the message Microsoft delivered Tuesday, hours after formally announcing that it was buying the internet telephony pioneer for a staggering $8.5 billion — staggering because it’s more than the Redmond giant has ever paid for anyth

SEATTLE — It’s hard to explain Archie McPhee. Instead, let’s start with some of the things you can buy here: Cthulhu water bottles. Bacon-flavored toothpaste. Devil duckies. Fire-spitting wind-up nuns. Band-Aids that look like bacon strips. Bacon-flavored gumballs. A plastic narwhal — complete with

Like multicore computer chips, Android smartphones, and Starbucks coffee, LCD TVs are getting cheaper—and bigger—all the time. Inevitably, your brother-in-law’s new 55-inch TV cost less than the 48-inch model you bought two years ago. Why? Science! See, flat-panel displays are made by machines that

My phone is about as integrated into my life as my left temporal lobe. I’m not going running without it. That’s why the H2O Audio Amphibx Fit Armband ($60) is a boon for technophile exercise-junkies like me. Sure, it’s ugly, and its large size dwarfs my skinny arms. But with my phone tucked inside,

Can a smartphone help you train better? Maybe — if you’re the kind of person who gets obsessed over logging every workout, tracking your pace and counting how many miles per week you’ve averaged. And if you’re that kind of person, there’s a host of apps and gadgets that can feed your mania for recor