According to research, a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds - but how prepared are you for what comes next? Last Tuesday after work, I headed to a bar in Kings Cross with a couple of colleagues, slung my rucksack on the table next to us, and spent a pleasant hour brainstorming feature ideas. When I got up to leave, the rucksack was gone - complete with my laptop, notebook and a copy of The Secret..
German researchers working on giving Nintendo hero adaptive learning artificial intelligence to become a 'living and conversing agent' There are gamers who can complete Super Mario Bros in less than five minutes, and gamers who still struggle with the finer elements of mushrooms, pipes and coins. But how would Mario fare playing his own games? Thanks to a team of cognitive modelling researchers ..
A dip in the search behemoth's market share has encouraged some commentators to compare it to Bill Gate's company The news that Google's share of the websearch market in the US has suddenly dropped is interesting. According to an independent analytics firm, StatCounter, last month Google's market share dropped to 75.2%, compared with 79.3% a year earlier. That is its lowest share since 2008, whe..
The popularity of messanger apps is fuelling plenty of innovation on how to keep private chats secure Thanks to Facebook's $19bn acquisition of WhatsApp in October, messaging appa are one of Silicon Valley's hottest sectors - or biggest bubbles, if you're a sceptic A recent $62m funding round for Yik Yak, an app for chatting anonymously to people nearby that only launched in November 2013, can b..
Online news site's partnership follows an earlier deal with rival weChat, and follows rumours of a similar alliance with Snapchat Online news site BuzzFeed's initial growth may have been fuelled by social networks Facebook and Twitter, but its next frontier is likely to be messaging apps like its latest partner, Viber. BuzzFeed has launched a "public chat" channel within the app, which is owned ..
As our knowledge of surgical and diagnostic techniques has increased with time, so has the success rate of organ transplants. However, the number of patients who require organ transplants exceeds the number of organs available, particularily if the patient has a rare blood type or belongs to an ethnic minority where organ donations are even lower than normal. For example, although black people a..
Google's smartglasses have 'graduated' from the comapny's development lab placed under the control of the father of the iPod Google Glass can return - but it must clear four big hurdles first Love it or loathe it, Google Glass has been one of the most interesting developments in wearable technology in the past four years. I finally got the chance to wear a set for a whole week late last year : b..
Developer promises to also focus on 'post-smartphone technologies' including smart-watches, Leap Motion, Google Glass and other wearable tech US startup Syntellia has raised $3m to continue developing its text-input technology, following critical acclaim for its Fleksy app for iPhone and iPad Venture capital firms Highland Capital Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Middleland Capital..
Nearly every country in the developed world, and more and more in the developing world, provide free primary and secondary education. Such education is generally uncontroversial and accepted as necessary by both liberals and conservatives around the world. In the case of university education, however, there is a great deal of disparity between countries' education policies. In many states studen..
In this debate "testing" should be defined as all testing on animals including, medical research, cosmetic, toxicology testing, and psychological research invloving animal subjects. Most existing bans on animal research, when they have been implemented, have involved some form of disciplinary action by a professional body and the possibility of criminal prosecution Medical research is the hardes..
Company 'still committed' to wearable technology, but says Glass team leave Google X and become separate division Google is to stop producing its wearable technology Google Glass in its present form, but is still committed to the idea of smart glasses, the company has said The technology, which delivers news, messages and calls directly to a user's field of view, has been on sale in the UK since..
Rapere, designed to scan the sky for nearby drones and hover overhead to drop a tangle-line into their motors, will be aimed at people with privacy concerns Rapere will tangle up other drones' rotors according to its developers The skies may be increasingly busy with consumer drones in the coming years, but if one group of developers has its way, some of them will be plummeting to earth unexpect..
Study finds that people on Facebook and Twitter do not experience more stress than non-users, but are more aware of stressful events in friends' lives Social media users are not more stressed than those who do not use such platforms, a new study concludes Social media users can relax: a new survey has found that people on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter do not experience more stress than ..
The alternative currency has been plagued by hacks, ponzi schemes and increasingly professional thefts since 2011, explains Alex Hern Sometimes it seems like not a week goes by without news of some bitcoin service getting hacked and losing everything Thankfully, such attacks are rarer than that. But given the size of the bitcoin economy, they are still far, far more common than they have any rig..
Companies that borrowed real money to buy servers for mining the cryptocurrency may be selling reserves to repay loans The price of one bitcoin has plunged by more than a quarter in just two days, prompting fears that the currency is in the midst of its fourth major crash On Tuesday morning, the currency was being traded at $267 a coin on Bitstamp, the largest individual exchange. However, by la..