Symbolically at least, the MP3 is now officially dead, after the German research institution that helped to develop the famous (and equally infamous) standard announced that all licensing for the file format had been terminated. While any MP3s in your possession will still play fine on any devices that support the audio format – no

An unprecedented ransomware attack spread across the globe on Friday and into the weekend, amounting to what may be the largest online extortion scam the internet has ever seen. So far, the ‘WannaCry’ ransomware worm has infected an estimated 230,000 computers in 150 countries, causing chaos and shutting down hospital systems, transport networks, manufacturing plants,

Confidential details of a top-secret encryption-breaking supercomputer were left completely exposed on an unsecured computer server belonging to New York University (NYU), according to a new report. While it’s not uncommon for even critical-level infrastructure to suffer potentially catastrophic security breaches, what makes this event different is that there was seemingly no foul-play or attempts

Six engineering undergraduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed a portable device that converts text to braille in real-time. Their first prototype was created in a 15-hour hackathon in early 2016. Since that time, the device, called Tactile, has undergone extensive development. Now, it’s the size of a candy bar and completely portable.   The

Disaster struck early in the morning of 24 January 1961, as eight servicemen in a nuclear bomber were patrolling the skies near Goldsboro, North Carolina. They were an insurance policy against a surprise nuclear attack by Russia on the United States – a sobering threat at the time. The on-alert crew might survive the initial

Researchers have developed a new kind of transistor laser that can switch between two stable energy states – electronic and photonic – which could one day enable data transfer 100 times faster than conventional digital devices. The transistor prototype features what’s called bistability – the capability for a single switch to alternate between optical and

Brain surgery is precision business, and one slip can spell doom for affected patients. Even in one of the most skilled jobs in the world, human error can still be a factor. Researchers from the University of Utah are looking to provide less opportunity for those errors to occur. A robot that the team is

An undergraduate at New Jersey Institute of Technology made his own plastic braces using a 3D printer, US$60 of materials, and a healthy dose of ingenuity – and they actually worked. Amos Dudley had braces in middle school, but he didn’t wear a retainer like he was supposed to, so his teeth slowly shifted back.

Researchers have created the world’s first artificial retina using soft synthetic tissue, which they say could be used to develop a new generation of less-invasive bionic eye implants in the future. Made from a combination of water-based hydrogel droplets and light-sensitive proteins, the synthetic retina is designed to mimic the functionality of its biological counterpart

More than a million people are estimated to have been caught out by a Google Docs phishing attack that spread like wildfire this Wednesday –even though Google managed to shut down the vulnerability in less than an hour once it became aware of the scam. Aside from highlighting just how easily and quickly phishing attacks

Neuralink – which is “developing ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers” – is probably a bad idea. If you understand the science behind it, and that’s what you wanted to hear, you can stop reading. But this is an absurdly simple narrative to spin about Neuralink and an unhelpful attitude to have

Scientists are always on the lookout for new materials that can enable improved energy storage and quicker energy transfers, and a new study suggests what could be a dramatically simple approach for achieving those ends: just add water. By adding atomically thin, nanoscale layers of water to an existing material, researchers found it was able

We all know most maps of the world aren’t entirely accurate. For starters, Africa is way bigger than it looks, and Greenland isn’t nearly so vast. But a designer in Japan has created a map that’s so accurate it’s almost as good as a globe, and it’s probably one of the best estimations you’ll see

Sometimes, science is all about the mind-aching big picture. Like the idea that our Universe is just a giant hologram, or that we’ve actually detected gravitational waves from a neutron star collision. Or that we might not actually have as much free will as we think…   Those are really exciting concepts. But then there are