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SANTA BARBARA-"Maybe we're just too dumb," Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried. Since his lecture, I've been learning about a theory that seems to confirm Gross's worry. It is so ridiculously hard that it could be the subject of an Onion parody. But at the same time, I've been watching how physicists are trying to power through their intimidation, because the theory promises a new way of understanding what space and time really are, at a deep level.

Forgetting that cloak of invisibility - how about a device that hides you in the very fabric of time? New research published in Nature reveals that scientists have successfully hidden an object in both space and time - even if for only for 40 picoseconds. Rather than bending light around the object, their technique creates a temporal hole in light beams where an event can be hidden.

Remember how Google's Project Glass wowed basically everyone who attended the recently concluded Google I/O? Well, someone was inspired by Project Glass and decided to do something about it using his own hands. Will Powell decided to cobble together an application which is capable of delivering translated subtitles in real time, and in the YouTube video that you see above, it allowed Will to carry out a conversation with his sister, Elizabeth, with the former speaking in English while the latter's tongue wagging to the nuances of the Spanish language.

Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard. Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It's more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen.  For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements. This isn't a game system that roughly maps your hand movements.  The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market - at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter. This is like day one of the mouse.  Except, no one needs an instruction manual for their hands.

"Academia.edu, a social network for scholars, is unveiling a new feature today that its founder Richard Price hopes will help address part of the "credit gap" for research. Academia.edu allows users to upload and share their research papers, and the site is launching its Analytics Dashboard for Scientists today that Price says will let scholars see the "real-time impact" of their work. Academic publishing has long been a black-box in terms of both who's reading and who's citing. Publishing in journals may be expected (required, even), but the delays in the publishing process can make it challenging to ascertain how much influence work has. "It typically takes about 3 to 5 years for citations to actually appear back in the process," argues Price, pointing to the lengthy time between researching, writing, peer-reviewing, and publishing."

It has taken more than a decade, but PayPal - the coaster of the Internet that has had a downhill ride with the wind at its back pretty much since acquisition - is finally under serious threat. It may not be showing up in PayPal's numbers yet. Indeed, by the time you start to see these things on the balance sheet, the damage is irreversible. The question is whether it can still be reversed now. I'm arguing no for three big reasons. The first is the decreasing relevance of eBay. PayPal was never founded to be merely the payment arm of eBay, but eBay was so dominant in ecommerce at the time and the need for digital payments on the platform was so great that that became the bulk of the business.

It may be difficult to imagine a world where human beings are even more connected than we are now. Yet the reality is that when it comes to connectivity, we're barely scratching the surface in terms of where we'll be in the future. Read more: http://techland.time.com/2012/02/21/the-connected-human-how-the-world-is-about-to-get-even-smaller/#ixzz1nATDjr5q

"A brain-to-brain interface (BTBI) enabled a real-time transfer of behaviorally meaningful sensorimotor information between the brains of two rats. In this BTBI, an "encoder" rat performed sensorimotor tasks that required it to select from two choices of tactile or visual stimuli. While the encoder rat performed the task, samples of its cortical activity were transmitted to matching cortical areas of a "decoder" rat using intracortical microstimulation (ICMS). The decoder rat learned to make similar behavioral selections, guided solely by the information provided by the encoder rat's brain. These results demonstrated that a complex system was formed by coupling the animals' brains, suggesting that BTBIs can enable dyads or networks of animal's brains to exchange, process, and store information and, hence, serve as the basis for studies of novel types of social interaction and for biological computing devices."

It's been the case for every SQL database in practical use since E. F. Codd first came up with the concept: Records either exist or they don't. When you run a SELECT statement, you're querying the current state of the data. A state is either true or false.

Could computers become cleverer than humans and take over the world? Or is that just the stuff of science fiction? Philosophers and scientists at Britain's Cambridge University think the question deserves serious study. A proposed Center for the Study of Existential Risk will bring together experts to consider the ways in which super intelligent technology, including artificial intelligence, could "threaten our own existence," the institution said Sunday. "In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology," Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price said.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia - Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code. But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between - all at the same time.

"These are the top 10 countries to request user data from tech companies in 2012. Guess who's leading the pack? In other national security news, The Atlantic reports "defenders of Edward Snowden's leaks got a bit trickier Wednesday afternoon, with revelations about his embarrassing past. Turns out, Snowden was once a teenager and, worse, that time period was encapsulated online.""

"It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery."

"Businesses invest billions of dollars annually in market research studies developing and testing new ideas by asking consumers questions they simply can't answer. Asking consumers what they want, or why they do what they do, is like asking the political affiliation of a tuna fish sandwich. That's because neuroscience is now telling us that consumers, i.e., humans, make the vast majority of their decisions unconsciously. Steve Jobs didn't believe in market research. When a reporter once asked him how much research he conducted to develop the iPad, he quipped, "None. It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want." And according to some measures, the iPad became the most successful consumer product launch ever and Apple went on to become the most valuable company of all-time."

"If you're running a WordPress site, now would be a good time to ensure you are using very strong passwords and to make sure your username is not "admin." According to reports from HostGator and CloudFlare, there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to find the password for the 'admin' account that every WordPress site sets up by default."

Well, it was only a matter of time: first, there were robot swarms on the ground. Then, there were robot swarms in the air. And now, we've got robot swarms taking over a swimming pool. Run for the hills! Or really, you'll probably be fine running for any sort of dry land if you want to escape this swarm of robotic boats. But why would you want to do that? It's not like they're part of some sort of DARPA project that will one day take over the world or something. Nope, definitely nothing like that.

It's impossible to grasp the consequences or outcomes of new technology, especially when that technology is developed by a twenty-something hacker. That much was already clear in January 2010, when Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington that Facebook isn't just a place to connect with your friends. It was a place to be more public than ever before. "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time," he said. "But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

Reuters photographer Carlos Barria spent time documenting Mongolian neo-Nazi group Tsagaan Khass, one of several ultra-nationalist groups that have expanded in the country. The 100-plus members of Tsagaan Khass have recently shifted their focus from activities such as attacks on women it accuses of consorting with foreign men to environmental issues. The group is rebranding itself now as an environmentalist organization fighting pollution by foreign-owned mines, seeking legitimacy as it sends Swastika-wearing members to check mining permits

Android applications downloaded by as many as 185 million users can expose end users' online banking and social networking credentials, e-mail and instant-messaging contents because the programs use inadequate encryption protections, computer scientists have found. The researchers identified 41 applications in Google's Play Market that leaked sensitive data as it traveled between handsets running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android and webservers for banks and other online services. By connecting the devices to a local area network that used a variety of well-known exploits, some of them available online, the scientists were able to defeat the secure sockets layer and transport layer security protocols implemented by the apps. Their research paper didn't identify the programs, except to say they have been downloaded from 39.5 million and 185 million times, based on Google statistics.