Silicon Valley

On June 17, 1985, a media entrepreneur named John Hendricks took a chance on his dream, and launched what has become the largest nonfiction media company in the world, the Discovery Channel.

Amazingly, that means that the channel will turn 25 years old on Thursday, and several of the network's shows are celebrating the anniversary by running special episodes.

For "MythBusters," one of the network's top-rated shows, that meant the chance to put together an episode touting its five hosts' top 25 favorite moments. Since its debut, there have been 191 "MythBusters" episodes featuring … Read more

MENLO PARK, California--If you've never seen 11 all-purpose robots doing a choreographed flag-waving dance--and really, who has?--Willow Garage was the place to be Wednesday night.

That's because Willow Garage, a developer of robotics hardware and software, threw a party to celebrate the "graduation" of 11 teams (see video below) from around the world, each of which has won the right to take possession for two years of one of Willow Garage's PR2 open-source robots and work on a series of innovative and unique research projects.

The idea is that each team, using the PR2 … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If you're a materials scientist at NASA's Glenn Research Center, or an engineer at the Johnson or Marshall Space Centers studying Space Shuttle flow-control valves, or any one of countless others in the agency needing a supercomputer, there's really just one place to go.

That place is the advanced supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center here, the home of Pleiades, NASA's flagship computer, a monster of a machine that, with a current rating of 973 teraflops--or 973 trillion floating point operations per second--is today ranked the sixth-most powerful supercomputer on Earth.

The … Read more

Want to change the world but only have 99 cents? Armchair Revolutionary is here to help.

Set to launch into beta on Tuesday, Armchair Revolutionary is a Web-based social activism platform designed to harness large-scale crowdsourcing and the boom in social gaming in a bid to support a wide variety of science and technology ventures that could benefit the world at large.

Started by the founders of The Hollywood Hill, said to be the largest social change membership organization in the entertainment-industry, Armchair Revolutionary is meant to bring people's interest in helping support worthwhile causes and the iTunes-era simplicity … Read more

MENLO PARK, Calif.--With America mired in two wars, injured soldiers are constantly returning home with missing limbs. But their path to useful--and attractive--prosthetics could be shorter than ever, thanks to 3D-printing technology.

And it's not just artificial limbs that may be going through a design renaissance: because of the infinite flexibility of digital designs, almost any kind of physical product could find wide new style, aesthetics, and custom models because of the machines, which can quickly, cheaply, and efficiently produce almost anything that can be imagined and crafted in a 3D modeler.

That was the message that industrial … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The Internet of the future is an intelligent network capable of proactively acting on our needs, following us wherever we go, helping provide us with focused health care, and possibly ushering in a new energy paradigm.

This is the vision that James Canton, CEO of San Francisco-based Institute for Global Futures think tank, shared with students in the executive program of Singularity University. His broad-reaching, theoretical talk here Wednesday touched on many of the same elements of the all-encompassing network more or less overlaid on people's consciousnesses in science fiction by the likes of Vernor Vinge. … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The American trucking industry could save as much as $10 billion, or 3.4 billion gallons of diesel fuel, a year if devices being tested in a joint public-private initiative at the world's-largest wind tunnel here are rolled out nationally.

Over the last few weeks, a partnership between the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, the U.S. Air Force, the NASA Ames Research Center, and the conglomerate, Navistar, has been conducting tests on the aerodynamics of tractor-trailer trucks. The findings indicate that new devices could be added onto the nation's thousands of trucks that could increase … Read more

BOULDER CREEK, Calif.--I have seen the world's first microcomputer, and it is not the Altair.

For years, any serious discussions about the earliest microcomputers had to include the Altair 8800, the creation of Albuquerque, N.M.'s Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). That computer, as has been well chronicled, inspired legions of hobbyists, including Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who, upon seeing the Altair on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, began a mad rush to create Microsoft BASIC, their first smash hit and the beginning of their empire.

But it turns out … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--While I'm sure that many of the people in the room were familiar with prediction markets, I wonder how many of them had ever seen an active one up close and personal before.

Providing that sense of deep immersion, of course, was exactly the point of an exercise run Monday during a session of Singularity University's executive program by Melanie Swan, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager. Swan, the principal of MS Futures Group, had tasked small groups of students with coming up with world-changing product ideas and then simultaneously had the students vote in … Read more