Should the U.S. government use tax dollars to fund scientists fusing human stem cells into early animal embryos in order to create “chimeras” that are part human and part pig? Or part mouse? The U.S. National Institutes of Health says the answer is yes. The…

The technology for unleashing drones may be ready, but the government says it needs more data.

It’s widely believed that Russian hackers were behind the recent attack on the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail servers. While the consequences of the attack for this year’s presidential election remain to be seen, it’s not hard to imagine how hackers…

Chinese mobile giant Xiaomi has revealed its first virtual-reality headset, and like the rest of the company’s products, it’s built to appeal to a wide audience. The Mi VR Play uses 4.7- to 5.7-inch smartphones as its screen and computer, which keeps manufacturing…

Last month, some people tweeting about Pokémon Go became unwitting subjects in an experiment that could presage a worrying new kind of online attack. Industry researchers trained machine-learning software to write tweets like a human to reply to some people…

In Zhenan Bao’s lab at Stanford, researchers are ­inventing materials for touch-sensitive prosthetics.

It might be the least spectacular show to ever grace a Las Vegas stage. Several hundred people packed into a casino ballroom Thursday to see seven powerful, wardrobe-sized computers lit up with blinking LEDs. Invisibly, each machine spent hours trying to…

The first machine-based search of online hacker marketplaces identifies over 300 significant cyberthreats every week.

A new $8 billion electricity transmission system is now complete, but it’s already nearing maximum capacity.

This week’s most thought-provoking papers from the Physics arXiv.

The coal industry in the United States has been in a long, steady decline for decades. But since 2012, with the availability of cheap natural gas and the ramping up of environmental regulations to control emissions from coal-fired power plants, that decline…

Broadband coöperatives are cropping up throughout rural America, bringing high-speed Internet to places that would otherwise be without. Telecom and cable companies don’t like delivering Internet infrastructure to the sticks. Sadly for residents of remote…

A gene therapy will be offered for sale in Europe with a money-back guarantee, according to GlaxoSmithKline, the company commercializing it. The treatment, called Strimvelis, is the first outright cure for a rare disorder to emerge from gene therapy, and…

About halfway through a particularly tense game of Go held in Seoul, South Korea, between Lee Sedol, one of the best players of all time, and AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence created by Google, the AI program made a mysterious move that demonstrated an…

The proverb “absence makes the heart grow fonder” describes the feeling of greater affection between friends and lovers who are kept apart. It is a phrase that, in on one form or another, can be traced back for millennia—the Roman poet Sextus is credited…

The U.S. tech giants are keen to provide Web connections—but can a new scheme from the social network help it recover from its Free Basics blunder?

Deriving financial insights from satellite images isn’t a new idea, but TellusLabs is putting a twist on it. The Boston startup analyzes satellite imagery from NASA as well as weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and seasonal…

A small black device about the size of a pizza box could be the future of financial trading. Australian company Metamako’s network switch is able to route incoming information through to trading servers in just four nanoseconds, and can lower the time it…

China’s epic solar binge accelerated in the first six months of 2016, as the country added more than 20 gigawatts of new solar installations. That’s nearly three times as much as the same period last year, and is more than the total installed capacity of…