One of the things about having a younger brother, if you are a scientifically-minded child, is that you have a guinea pig for many of your experiments. And Chris was a willing or unwilling guinea pig many times. Let me tell you about one of those times. One day, we were down in the basement […]

The NASDAQ stock exchange just posted a record week for initial public offerings, with companies including Zillow and Skullcandy roughly half a billion dollars in three days. Next week, the stock market will see seven separate IPOs.Taking the weeks of July 18 and July 25 together, the NASDAQ expects

DoubleClick cofounder Kevin O’Connor has a new startup, FindTheBest, aimed at helping you compare everything from air purifiers to venture capitalists. Now, with a $6 million funding round from Kleiner Perkins that closed Tuesday, FindTheBest should be in a good position to build out its “data drive

To upgrade its Android keyboard, TouchType Ltd. drew on the combined linguistic intelligence of the entire online universe. “We made a copy of the internet,” chief marketing officer Joe Braidwood told VentureBeat. SwiftKey X, the latest version of the company’s keyboard for Android handsets and tabl

The new nation of South Sudan celebrated its birth with flag-waving, street celebrations and an official liveblog. “FREE at last!” proclaims the website, goss.org, which states it is the official website of the South Sudanese government. Scroll down, and you find regular updates from the streets of

The last American space shuttle, STS-135, lifted off this morning, bringing to a close a remarkable era in U.S. technological dominance. I stayed home and watched the launch on TV, just as I watched the very first shuttle launch on TV in 1981. Both events were deeply tied into the computer era. In 1

If you’re old enough to remember the energy policies of the Carter administration, green enough to have donated to the Nature Conservancy and young enough to get a rush of testosterone from dusting that polo-shirt-wearing jerk in his BMW, Nissan has the car for you. And though its styling walks a fi

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