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15 Predictions For Tech and Design in 2015
From ACM Opinion

15 Predictions For Tech and Design in 2015

It's our favorite time of year, when frogs from around the world examine the state of technology's future.

In the Future, Your Touchscreens Will Touch You Back
From ACM Opinion

In the Future, Your Touchscreens Will Touch You Back

You comfort your grieving friend online over chat, but you can't reach out and touch their shoulder.

How the Home Telephone Sparked the ­ser-Centered Design Revolution
From ACM Opinion

How the Home Telephone Sparked the ­ser-Centered Design Revolution

Have you ever thought about why doorknobs are positioned at around two-fifths of the door's height, instead of right in the middle? Or why a washing machine is...

Hands-On With Microsoft's ­nbelievable New Holographic Goggles
From ACM Opinion

Hands-On With Microsoft's ­nbelievable New Holographic Goggles

It's the end of October, when the days have already grown short in Redmond, Washington, and gray sheets of rain are just beginning to let up.

9 of the World's Leading Designers Talk About What Matters Now
From ACM Opinion

9 of the World's Leading Designers Talk About What Matters Now

Design is in flux.

Why the Silk Road Trial Matters
From ACM Opinion

Why the Silk Road Trial Matters

Ross Ulbricht is finally getting his day in court, 15 months after plainclothes FBI agents grabbed him in the science fiction section of a San Francisco library...

Linux's Creator Wants Us All to Chill Out About the Leap Second
From ACM Opinion

Linux's Creator Wants Us All to Chill Out About the Leap Second

The leap second is the rare and obscure practice of occasionally adding a second to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) system that most of us use to set our watches...

Why Cheap Cameras and Boring Sensors Make the Best Smart Home Stuff
From ACM Opinion

Why Cheap Cameras and Boring Sensors Make the Best Smart Home Stuff

The twin fixations of CES this year are, to no one's surprise, wearable technology and the internet of things.

The Biggest Security Threats We'll Face in 2015
From ACM Opinion

The Biggest Security Threats We'll Face in 2015

As the clock strikes midnight on the new year, so begins the countdown to a new round of security threats and breaches that doubtless will unfold in 2015. But this...

This Year's 8 Smartest ­i Design Ideas
From ACM News

This Year's 8 Smartest ­i Design Ideas

When your family gathered for the holidays this year, did you take note of the technology everyone was using?

The Best Science Visualizations of the Year
From ACM Opinion

The Best Science Visualizations of the Year

Here at Wired Science, we're big fans of science graphics. And not just the fancy, big-budget ones, but charts and figures and visualizations: the folk art of scientific...

The Last Astronauts to Fly to Hubble Talk About Their Wild Mission
From ACM Opinion

The Last Astronauts to Fly to Hubble Talk About Their Wild Mission

On a sunny afternoon in May, 2009, seven astronauts strapped themselves into the space shuttle Atlantis and rocketed toward the heavens.

Sure, Artificial Intelligence May End Our World, But That Is Not the Main Problem
From ACM Opinion

Sure, Artificial Intelligence May End Our World, But That Is Not the Main Problem

The robots will rise, we're told.

Algorithms Are Great and All, But They Can Also Ruin Lives
From ACM Opinion

Algorithms Are Great and All, But They Can Also Ruin Lives

On April 5, 2011, 41-year-old John Gass received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.

A Sad Fact of Life: It's Actually Smart to Be Mean Online
From ACM Opinion

A Sad Fact of Life: It's Actually Smart to Be Mean Online

I'm generally upbeat on Twitter. Many of my posts are enthusiastic blurts about science or research in which I use way too many exclamation points!!

The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally ­nleashed AI on the World
From ACM Opinion

The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally ­nleashed AI on the World

A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long...

On Death and Ipods: A Requiem
From ACM Opinion

On Death and Ipods: A Requiem

Have you ever loved a car? Maybe it was an old truck you drove for hundreds of thousands of miles, or maybe it was your very first car: where you had your very...

The Man Who Will Build Google's Elusive Quantum Computer
From ACM Opinion

The Man Who Will Build Google's Elusive Quantum Computer

John Martinis is one of the world's foremost experts on quantum computing, a growing field of science that aims to process information at super high speeds using...

Robot Servants Are Going to Make Your Life Easy. Then They'll Ruin It
From ACM Opinion

Robot Servants Are Going to Make Your Life Easy. Then They'll Ruin It

Jibo, the "world's first family robot," hit the media hype machine like a bomb.

How to Save the Net: Keep It Open
From ACM Opinion

How to Save the Net: Keep It Open

For all of its history, the Internet has enjoyed the fruits of an openness principle: the idea that anyone can reach any site online and that information and data...
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