When Angelica Lim bakes macaroons, she has her own kitchen helper, Naoki. Her assistant is only good at the repetitive tasks, like sifting flour, but he makes the job more fun. Naoki…

Trust used to be a very personal thing: You went on the recommendations of your friends or friends of friends. By finding ways to extend that circle of trust exponentially, technology…

I was slung in my favorite deck chair, drink in hand, having a gawk at the night sky. Andromeda, Pisces ... I trawled the constellations, mind abandoned, still aware in some curve…

View Video Ten million driverless cars are expected to hit the road by 2020, according to a recent Business Insider report. Google and Apple are racing to join the automotive industry.…

In the run-up to NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, a Dutch radio hacker named Huub (@fmcnl) tweeted to the United States military that one of their F-16 fighter jets was mistakenly…

Soon after Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil, 70 feet down, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 27, 1859, he had a problem. He had nowhere to store the dark green liquid, and no good…

During World War II, a radar operator tracks an airplane over Hamburg, guiding searchlights and anti-aircraft guns in relation to a phosphor dot whose position is updated with each…

In 2014, Google fired a shot heard all the way to Detroit. Google’s newest driverless car prototype had no steering wheel and no brakes. The message was clear: Cars of the future…

On most days, we do not wake up anticipating that we may be suddenly thrust into the sky while popcorn shrimp rains down like confetti, as some guy roars from above: “Hey, there,…

Richard K. Miller has been on a long intellectual journey. His ambitions started out modest enough: Growing up in the small farming community of Tranquillity, California, he thought…