Tech News

A doorknob that knows whether to lock or unlock based on how it is grasped, a smartphone that silences itself if the user holds a finger to her lips and a chair that adjusts room lighting based on recognizing if a user is reclining or leaning forward are among the many possible applications of Touché, a new sensing technique.

The data-routing techniques that undergird the Internet could increase the efficiency of multicore chips while lowering their power requirements. Today, a typical chip might have six or eight cores, all communicating with each other over a single bundle of wires, called a bus. With a bus, however, only one pair of cores can talk at a time, which would be a serious limitation in chips with hundreds or even thousands of cores, which many electrical engineers envision as the future of computing.

With the Release Preview due in a few weeks, there are still many questions about Windows 8 and Windows RT. They look similar--and share a lot of the same code under the hood--but there...

The weekly roundup of Generation-Y and student news & resources you may have missed.

Microsoft has asked Google to remove more than 500,000 links from its search index in the last month, figures show.

A cybercrime mastermind who hijacked the PCs of more than 30 million people has been jailed for four years.

Pessimists, we’re told, look at a glass containing 50% air and 50% water and see it as half empty. Optimists, in contrast, see it as half full. Engineers, of course, understand the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. - Bob Lewis

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. - Alan Perlis